I'm not going to litigate the specifics of this situation, but there are some critical lessons here for people who are thinking of running a labeler (and to some extent they're the lessons of T&S in general, but they are even more important given the paradigm of composable moderation).
This thread covers the two fundamental things all labelers need to decide on up front and stick to:
1) Who is doing the moderation, what are their biases, and how are those biases mitigated?
2) Are you moderating/labeling objective actions/content, or subjective characteristics?
Each of these two points have a lot (and I mean A LOT) of nuance. (Like everything having to do with T&S!) Let's start with #1: bias mitigation. People who oppose community-driven moderation are now smugly parading around going "of course anyone who wants to be a mod is biased!"
This is the wrong way to look at it. It's not an inherent problem with community moderation: it's an inherent problem with people. Everyone is biased, in a million different ways. We all have our viewpoints of what we think is good vs bad.
Elon Musk thinks the word "cis" is a slur and should be moderated: that's a bias. I think people who create accounts only to advertise things are spammers and should be moderated: bias. You may think associating a wallet name with an account name is doxing and should be moderated: bias. Etc.
T&S, inherently, is a biased process: it involves someone's definitions of what should and shouldn't be actioned. There is no such thing as neutral, unbiased moderation. Anyone who says otherwise is simply asserting societal prejudices that are declared "objective" because of who holds them.
And, crucially, people don't want moderation to be "unbiased", or to fall back solely on externalities such as "is this content legal". Don't believe me? Look at the months-long Discourse on child safety: most of the content many people very loudly want removed is legal under US law.
What people are calling "bias" here, me included (because it's shorter), is actually better termed "viewpoint". Moderation is a function of viewpoint. You choose a viewpoint lens through which to moderate and apply it to your policies and actions.
Never going to forget the time deviantArt said they would be referring to the 1st Amendment for content considerations... then immediately went to remove content that was not only legal under 1A but fine under their own guidelines if you looked closely.
I'm reminded of the time my WoW guild briefly lost its name due to a grumpy mod (who probably was annoyed some of our members had kidnapped the Shrattrah flight master, but still...)
I tried to explain this to my students when I was a teacher. And I’m glad that it’s being acknowledged more often in academia where positionality statements have become more normal. (I first came across them in graduate studies of education stuff about 15 years ago).
May I also suggest:
3) Are you labeling individual posts or entire accounts?
When I first tried Aegis, I'd see a label, look at the account, and in most cases, struggle to find what merited the label. I quit Aegis soon after.
By way of comparison, we get incensed when the criminal justice system fails to decide which *acts* are criminal and instead decides which *persons* are criminal.
Yeah, this is a thing I am kind of mulling over because there *are* times when a full account label is warranted. (And there's a issue logged in the Bsky GitHub repo for addressing the problem to some extent.) I have some ideas but they're like, a quarter baked.
And the solution is going to be a combination of changes to the Bsky system for composable moderation (which is still very in its infancy) and voluntary best practices for labelers, so it will take a while for them to solve.
It's a tough line to walk. If only posts were labeled and someone goes in a wild spree that violates some label criteria every 6 months, after 5 months it'd be hard for anyone to know of this person's habitual behavior.
At a certain point, repeated behavior has to hit account level.
Seems like it would be unusual to find very infrequent behavior that would matter to a large number of users + fit a fair, useful label. IME most accounts are pretty consistent in their negative traits, outside of an internal or external crisis.
Yes, I'm not saying this doesn't happen. MI, soc dynamics, other causes can be associated w bursts.
But do I want an account-level warning that this may theoretically happen again at some point in the future?
Personally—no, not really, unless it's an underlying belief like homophobia.
I have been doing social media trust and safety work since 2002, and I am telling you directly and explicitly, the number of people who go on bursts of absolutely horrible conduct and then retreat for a few weeks to a few months are high enough to justify the existence of whole-account flagging.
In your personal life, what do you think of people who occasionally go on racist rants? Are they racist? Or are they only racist when going on one of their rants?
Your opinion, not mine.
One of the (yet to be fully realized) benefits of the labelling system is finding a labeler that shares your opinion on how to do things and subscribing to them.
Then you get what you want.
I had a similar experience (though it took longer) but prior to that, I had turned off one label because it was applied so profligately, at least among people whose posts I was seeing, as to be uninformative
