Tŵt Blog

Community Requests for Account Suspensions (3 of 3)

[This document will be published in three parts, such that Part 1 can be referenced in future conversations, Part 2 deals with a very specific set of account concerns, and Part 3 addresses some long form questions posted to the moderators on Tŵt.]

Part 3 of 3 Response to community questions

Several members of toot.wales, as well as users from other Mastodon instances posed several questions and comments around our response to their concerns over one of the accounts that some people felt deserved stronger moderation than they were perceiving. These questions are preserved and answered below.

Community Requests for Account Suspensions (2 of 3)

[This document will be published in three parts, such that Part 1 can be referenced in future conversations, Part 2 deals with a very specific set of account concerns, and Part 3 addresses some long form questions posted to the moderators on Tŵt.]

Part 2 of 3 Regarding specific account suspension requests

As a preamble, I want to remind anyone reading this that I chose to not block Gab before they came online. In the run-up to their launch there was a lot of conversation about defederating them. And within a couple of minutes of them coming online, we had them blocked. But not before they contravened our Community Guidelines. That’s a principle I cannot waver from. I’ve been around the block a few times, I’ve seen my assumptions been wrong more than a few times, and I’ve seen people change over time. I had very little doubt what was going to happen when they came online, but nonetheless the way I operate, the way I work, they would be blocked the second they contravene our stated Guidelines. Anything else – to me – is unfair, hypocritical, and a dangerous precedent. I am not the judge of all things, I am merely the current administrator of an Internet service with a stated code of conduct.

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The first account I want to discuss is from an account that posts what one user-submitted report labelled “religious spam”. Here is one of the three toots for which we received a report:

Everything we do is motivated by the life, teachings and ministry of Jesus We believe that every human life has equal value and that every person should be empowered to reach their God-given potential. To do this, we all need to belong to flourishing communities

These words were reported as “Racist spammer”.

If I were to put my non-moderator hat on, I would silence this content. I would mute this account. I would take a one-click action to never see this person’s thoughts again. I have no interest in it, and I find it disagreeable to me, personally. I do not enjoy being preached at.

And this, to me, is one of the strongest tools Mastodon users have that other services either don’t or have weaker versions of. Mastodon makes no inferences about what “should” be in your feeds. No algorithms deciding to “surface” content for you.

You decide. You own your feed. You own your experience. If you don’t like something, you never have to see it again.

Community Requests for Account Suspensions (1 of 3)

[This document will be published in three parts, such that Part 1 can be referenced in future conversations, Part 2 deals with a very specific set of account concerns, and Part 3 addresses some long form questions posted to the moderators on Tŵt.]

Part 1 of 3: Background and context on Tŵt Cymru moderation goals and policies.

“Tŵt is the community-led microblogging network for Wales and the Welsh, at home and abroad.”

This is the founding statement for Tŵt, an instance of Mastodon. Mastodon is

“a free and open-source self-hosted social networking service. It allows anyone to host their own server node in the network, and its various separately operated user bases are federated across many different servers. Each operating server has its own code of conduct, terms of service, and moderation policies. This differs from centrally hosted social networks by allowing users to choose a specific server which has policies they agree with, or to leave a server that has policies they disagree with, without losing access to Mastodon's social network.”

—https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Mastodon_(software)&oldid=985854334

In recent weeks, one account on the toot.wales instance of Mastodon has received a report submitted by a fellow user of the service, a community member. Reports are a built-in feature of Mastodon that allow individual members to signal to the server operator that a particular toot or account is in contravention of the server policies, and this then establishes an audit trail for actions taken by moderation staff. Due to the federated nature of the content, this report can be “remote” – a report made by a user of a different server that is seeking to stop that content from coming in to that server; or “local”, a report made by an account on the same server as the offending account.

In both cases, the members with moderator privileges are then able to review the report and act upon it, with generally four possible outcomes: do nothing, warn the user, silence the user, suspend the user.

Before I dig into the particular account in question, the report our staff received, and the community responses to our handling of the report, I’d like to lay out some context for why toot.wales exists, why it’s on Mastodon, and why I am enthusiastic about having this sort of problem to deal with.

Tŵt is now updated to Mastodon 3.1 which brings several new features.

Bookmarks

Bookmarking is a new way for you to favourite something without informing the author. It's a great way to make a quick note of a toot you found helpful. You can review your bookmarks in the new “Bookmarks” menu item, https://toot.wales/web/bookmarks

To remove a bookmark, simply open that toot and click the bookmark icon again.

One of the first problems we ran into when trying to market Tŵt as a friendly alternative social media network was people asking “where's the Tŵt app?”

Of course, our answer was “you can download a bunch of apps, your choice! Freedom!”

To which we heard: “Right. Sounds good. So which one is the Tŵt app?”

We're working on two Tŵt-dedicated apps, one for Android one for iOS. They are both forks of popular open source Mastodon apps and we've gathered permission to fork and re-brand with some minor changes to make your Tŵt experience even better.

Both apps will be fully available in Welsh and English language versions.

Keep an eye out for release details, but for now enjoy a sneak peek:

We've added some new sparkle to Tŵt – here's the short version.

Trending Topics

Look down in the lower right of your screen and you'll see up to three trending hashtags. Click on any of them to explore these topics on Tŵt and all our connected networks.  

Toots are, by design, hard to find. Part of the underlying privacy features means there is no full text search. We err on the side of making it possible for you to restrict who can interact with you and your content.

This is part of the larger effort to prevent people finding content they disagree with and piling in to abuse the author, or finding content about them and jumping in to self-promote or steal the thread.