Call me crazy, but I a) think the fediverse probably doesn’t have more ‘toxic content’, harmful and violent content, and child sexual abuse material then other platforms like X, Facebook, Meta, YouTube etc, and b) actively like the fediverse because of that.
But after a few hours carefully drafting and sourcing an edit to make it clear that no, the fediverse isn’t unusual in social media circles for having a lot of toxic content, I realised that the entire ‘fediverse bad’ section was added by 1 editor in 2 days. And the editor has made an awful lot of edits on pages all themed around porn (hundreds of edits on the pages of porn stars), suicide, mass killings, mass shootings, Jews, torture techniques, conspiracy theories, child abuse, various forms of sexual and other exploitation, ‘zoosadism’, and then pages with titles like ‘bad monkey’ that seemed reasonably innocent until I actually clicked on them to see what they were and, well.
I decided to stop using the internet for a while.
I’ve learned my lesson trying to change Wikipedia edits written by people like that - they tend to have a tight social circle of people who can make the internet a very unpleasant place for anyone suggesting maybe claims like ‘an opinion poll indicated that most people in Britain would prefer to live next to a sewage plant than a Muslim’ should maybe not on Wikipedia on the thin evidence of paywalled link from a Geocities page written by, apparently, a putrid cesspit personified.
I thought I’d learned my lesson about trusting Wikipedia.
It just makes me so angry that most people’s main source of information on the fediverse contains a massive chunk written solely by a guy who spends most of his time making minor grammar edits to pages about school shootings, collections of pages about black people who were sexually assaulted and murdered, etc, and that these people control the narrative on Wikipedia by means of ensuring any polite critics’ are overcome with the urge to spend the rest of the day showering and disinfecting everything.
Skimmed through the article and something picked my attention, the numbers given in the “325000 posts analyzed”. The way its given, it makes seem like big numbers, but if you calculate what is the percentage of the numbers given, it’s less than 1%. Can’t check the linked source, but it seems like a classical “lying with statistics”.
And besides, text seems written in a way to give the impression site moderation for smaller sites is too stupid to block bad actors, and that only the paternalism of bigger sites can solve this implied issue.
The entire tone of the article feels… condescending? (not sure the exact feeling). It feels off in the way information is presented, like subtle disdain in the writing voice.
1.) This is part of the background narratives being pushed by the rich and powerful that we need AI and big tech to moderate us when the opposite is true, we need more humans involved in moderation who have a stake in their community.
2.) The prevailing winds in the tech journalism sphere have always been strangely blowing against the Fediverse since the beginning. The simplest possible explanation to me is there is a lot of money in writing off the Fediverse as a cool nerdy space that nonetheless is an unrealistic solution for everybody else and pushing the axiom that a Harvard MBA is needed to translate the Fediverse into a product the public can actually use.
You will NOT notice this same prevailing winds against for profit corporate social networks like Bluesky and Threads… and it is a curious thing isn’t it…
Having everything everyone ever interacts with channeled through the same four fucking websites obviously sucks and doesn’t currently–and likely never can–scale.
Reddit power Mod turning their attention to Wikipedia and abusing its TOS & users of that site as well now too?
Oh you mean like jordanlund?
Ex(?) Reddit power mod, current awful lemmy.world power mod?
It’s pretty toxic toward right-wing pieces of shit that espouse hate toward minorities, women and queer people. As it should be.
it looks like somebody who just saw this post edited wikipedia for the first time to remove that. this is why wikipedia’s wonderful: it’s that easy. i have this quirk where i wanna debate anyone who distrusts wikipedia or claim its rigidity
They did! The change log shows the main section of ‘I found a single paper criticising the fediverse so here’s 600 words on how terrible the concept is’, and also reassured me that I wasn’t just being lazy in not wanting to trawl through the text to edit it to be less awful.
I’m bizarrely excited about it too. You can’t thank anonymous Wikipedia editors, so I’ll throw a vague ‘thank you!’ out into the world and try to pay it forward.
My next battle: figuring out why I can’t edit this post, lol (maybe a mobile problem) and long term, why I didn’t think of ‘just edit it anonymously’.
lmao wait until it’s reverted, argued over, then the editor gets banned.
go on, show me
My ip got banned despite never editing wikipedia, never even reading the talk.
That section is out of line with Wikipedia policies because it only relies upon scholarship that isn’t meta-analysis, which Wikipedia considers primary sourcing (an idiosyncratic borrowing that ought to be called firsthand sourcing instead: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Reliable_sources#Scholarship), making it undue weight.
scholarship that isn’t meta-analysis
I am confused by these words, and do not understand their real meaning. I think I need to read.
A study of studies is a better source than a single study.
The crappiness of this section has been noted
Someone put that on in the last 12 hours, and since then, some anonymous person just deleted the entire section lol.
I legit feel really grateful, I’d been going down a bit of a ‘either every source of information is corrupt and there’s no hope, or I’m losing my mind’ rabbit hole. I haven’t quite pulled the plug on Reddit yet, which may be contributing to that.
I prefer the whole ‘major additions and changes should be introduced in the talk section of a page so it can be discussed by the committee of reasonable good faith adults with lots of spare time and patience’ approach to Wikipedia editing, but in retrospect that may be a wee bit idealistic in current times. So the ‘one person complains and documents, another person flags, and another just deletes the entire thing’ is a process that may be a good compromise between The Way Things Should Be and how to edit Wikipedia with consensus and without being harassed by neo Nazis.
Financial interests pay people to edit.
Mysteriously my ip is banned from editing when I tried to view talk on a suspect edit, even though I have never once edited a page or even accessed that part by this ip. None on former ip’s either.
Ip is on some shady brazillian blacklist so maybe that is it idk, everyone just trusting shady internet players.
I have seen worse stuff on Instagram and Reddit than I have seen on the fediverse… and I use the fediverse far more.
it is impossible for an instance to be “removed” from the Fediverse
That’s just how the internet works.
As with Wikipedia, I saw the same stuff with articles regarding religious topics that were just heavily guarded by a neckbeard atheist who had unreasonable expectations.
Today you learned any idiot can edit Wikipedia and it is mostly done by pro government entities.
“Legal reform has also been proposed, most notably around Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, as well as proposed legal requirements for instance operators to engage in good-faith moderation of instance connections.”
The source for this is a a paper written in January 2024 by someone called Nikhil Mahadeva.
Lets be clear, any Section 230 discussion will never mention the Fediverse. That implies anyone who wants to erode even knows what the Fediverse is.
This article has been a source of so much frustration over the years. I honestly think it should be scrapped and entirely rewritten.
There was a few months where I had to ban server after server every day because someone was really into semi-lolli anime. They were posting it in every anime forum. I asked them why they were non stop posting upskirt or provocative drawings of very young girls and they got angry that I dared ask.
Wikipedia certainly isn’t wrong, the Fediverse is filled with so much political extremism, made worse by the Tankie Developers
[email protected] to see more of how widespread tankies and their extreme bigotry and violent rhetoric spreads across the fediverse
Note this person is a Zionist promoting a community where they encourage Jewish ethnic surpremacy.
That’s not at all true
- Source needed
Is that the same person?
For more info see my my post about previous ban there where Goat got banned on DB0 for going full Zionist himself and somehow DB0 is tankies.
Is this the part you wanted to highlight? Because this seems to be about you being a pro china genocide denier who was down voted for that point. I don’t get how you are getting “full zionist” from this.
No the rest of the thread where Goat goes full Zionist.
I got banned by Goat for reporting that person. That person did not get banned.
Goat banned you for calling out fascism, unheard of.
He was temp-banned for using Zio, which is a term neo-nazis and white supremacists use. I offered him a chance that he wasn’t aware of the word, but he instead doubled down and referred to David Duke as “some guy”
You got banned for specifically using “Zio” – A term coined by David Duke. I asked you to use a different phrase instead, such as zionist, zionazi or anything else, but you insisted on using Zio.
Your ban has expired by now anyway, I don’t dish out perm-bans unless it’s absolutely neccessary
So no?
I don’t think the conclusion you have reached is reasonable. By the logic you are running on every community is every bad thing anyone has ever posted and every ban would be grounds for de-federalization.
Are you telling on yourself? I asked you to stop using Zio because nazis specifically use it.
It’s true, check the various pages of info collected by other users. And he’ll ban you for calling it out.
But he won’t ban the nazis! He was on Voat for a reason.
There are no nazis in my comm and they’re not allowed either. I was banned from Voat
Beware of unearned knowledge.
You “lose” 100% of the battles that you choose not to fight.
Besides, people here are reporting that the content is already gone. Even if it comes back, it likely will bounce around back and forth but not return to this same state, so this was transient.
Even so, it seems not wrong? “toxic or abusive content being common in the Fediverse”, regardless of how precisely that is measured, seems entirely accurate to me. YOU (and I) may choose to block such content, in part by being on an instance that enacts this choice for us, but that does not mean that such does not exist. Head on over to [email protected] to get a taste of what the Fediverse offers. It does exist, and while Lemmy.World defederated from it, so many other instances including Lemm.ee did not. Or Lemmygrad.ml.
It is so easy to forget about what was shoved under the rug, but the Fediverse is more like 4chan than most of us care to admit. Just because there are no Nazis currently standing in your little corner of a Nazi bar does not mean that you can invite your Jewish friends over to walk (safely) through the front door.
The Fediverse can be quite toxic. So much so that I’ve entirely stopped recommending it to people irl. We need to be more acceptable to people if we want to change our image, not just pretend that we are fine.
I’ve just seen your edit and the material added to the Fediverse entry on Wikipedia, your assertions seem well founded although I’m not tied into Wikipedia’s Mod community and the motivations of users therein. You’re definitely right that the Fediverse isn’t exactly a node of objectionable content, frankly I’ve seen none, although admittedly I haven’t plumbed the depths of every single instance. Their assertion should be noted though, that the Fediverse is wide open for abuse despite IMO not already being affected by the same volume as other platforms.
out of approximately 325,000 Fediverse posts analyzed over a two-day period, 112 were detected as instances of known child sexual abuse material (CSAM); 554 were detected as containing sexually explicit media alongside keywords associated with child sexual exploitation; 713 contained media alongside the top twenty CSAM-related hashtags on the Fediverse; and 1,217 contained text relating to distribution of CSAM or child grooming.
By their own numbers, the volume of CSAM was 0.03%, the volume of CSAM posted alongside keywords was 0.17%, the volume of CSAM posted with known associated hashtags was 0.22%, and 0.37% contained text related that kid of content. Less than ideal, you could say, given the nature of the content in question. The real crux of the matter seems to be whether or not it will increase, and whether or not Lemmy’s Mods have the capacity to moderate the content like other platforms IMO, but their claim that “toxic or abusive content being common in the Fediverse” is more than slightly overblown even in considering the material.
I think this kind of critical analysis of the Fediverse could be completely right in every single one of the details and still miss the more important point that corporate social networks are being used in a directly hostile fashion towards vulnerable people RIGHT NOW to a near catastrophic degree of negligence to put things in the most charitable terms possible. Further the people who own those corporations publicly endorse narratives that invisiblize the violence happening to real human beings.
Realize that by getting lost in a baseball stats esque evaluation of the Fediverse that we cede ground already to people who are disengenous. We have to consider the context of the alternative reality of corporate social media to fairly evaluate the Fediverse.
Lol wait till you see any of the Pakistan or India related articles. Its like the Ganges river in text form.
Meaning ?
it’s full of shit and will kill you if you wade in deep enough.
