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.
The neat thing about Bluesky's experiment in composable moderation (which, as everyone who's been following me for ages knows, I am still dubious about the long term likelihood of success of, but this is *not* the reason why) is that you can pick which viewpoint you want to view the site through.
Oh, but that--seems obvious to me? The point of moderation is that you are shaping the community you want, right? It's like bonsai, in a way.
... did--
... do people not think that's what the point is? o.o
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).
