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.
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
Part of the issue is that a lot of humans from all sorts of viewpoints are here, and we don’t share the same assumptions about what’s appropriate behavior.
Yeah. There's a fundamental tension between "your application of the policy should be as concrete and objective as possible to ensure consistency in application across multiple agents" and "the formation of the policy is inherently subjective".
People say "this moderation is biased", but what they mean is that they perceive the moderation has failed at the former. (Whether or not that perception is accurate is another story.) I think it's very worth making the tension explicit.
