How will content that is illegal in some jurisdictions and legal in others be handled? Is there a presumed default jurisdiction, like California, or something?
Add a moderation channel per country and let clients apply them depending on location/settings. It's naturally not perfect, but as one can just travel to other countries and get their (potentially less restricted) view or even simpler use a VPN, it's as good as basically any other such censorship measurement.
Also, filters which are optional on the user’s part can’t really be counted as moderation.
> There are also "infrastructure takedowns" for illegal content and network abuse, which we execute at the services layer (ie the relay).
My understanding, here, is that any app has the ability to shut down entire accounts from being able to provide content for that app. And my expectation is that states will have laws that say "operators of an app must ensure that they don't provide illegal material" - at least to the extent of CSAM. So you have state motivation for app-runners to moderate illegal content on their app, and you have app-level mechanisms for shutting down content. And while it can still be hosted on whatever relay was hosting it to start with (if that isn't the one that shut down the content), I would be surprised if sharing that content to another relay didn't give away a ton of information that a person doing illegal activities wouldn't necessarily want published. Put more simply: it's unlikely that if I have to shut down some CSAM coming from your relay, that I can't also turn that relay data over to the authorities. Meaning you have a pretty strong incentive to not actually share your CSAM content to any law-abiding apps.
This Japanese flood casually nears or exceeds 50% of content by volume and is a specifically Japanese phenomenon; it does not generalize into Asian cultures or Sinosphere languages[1] - all the others are easily 1% or less or proportional relative to English. It also isn't happening with Facebook but it is with Mastodon.
To be even more frank, everyone should just set up a Japanese containment server with an isolate IdP, and get Yahoo! Japan or NTT Corp fund it, have it monetized via phone contract or something, and that could solve a huge bulk of problems with microblogging moderation. Then everyone could go back to weeding out those few of actual pedophiles, smugglers and casino spams, occasionally reinstating not-too-radical political activists.
Should "outside" users be eligible for signup with such isolate system is a separate problem, but that will be foreign crime anyway and should not bother the main branch operators that cater to the rest of the world that CAN unite.
1: https://bsky.app/profile/jaz.bsky.social/post/3klwzzdbvi22t
2: worse version of [1]: https://images.ctfassets.net/vfkpgemp7ek3/5kYcWXcFUYSLBAEkrS...
Bluesky itself is US-based.
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https://www.europarl.europa.eu/RegData/etudes/ATAG/2020/6581...
As you can use their guidelines:
European Union (EU), there are several types of social media content that are considered illegal.
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* Incitement to Terrorism: Any content that encourages or promotes terrorist acts, violence, or extremism is prohibited.
* Illegal Hate Speech: Social media posts that spread hate based on race, ethnicity, religion, gender, sexual orientation, or other protected characteristics are not allowed.
* Child Sexual Abuse Material: Sharing, distributing, or creating content related to child sexual abuse is strictly illegal.
* Infringements of Intellectual Property Rights: Posting copyrighted material without proper authorization violates intellectual property rights.
* Consumer Protection Violations: Misleading advertisements, scams, or fraudulent content that harms consumers are prohibited.
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These rules are further strengthened by stricter regulations for four specific types of content, which have been harmonized at the EU level:
* Counter-Terrorism Directive: Addresses terrorist content.
* Child Sexual Abuse and Exploitation Directive: Focuses on combating child sexual abuse material.
* Counter-Racism Framework: Aims to prevent and combat racism and xenophobia.
* Copyright in Digital Single Market Directive: Deals with copyright infringement online1.
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You could ideally put the EU illegal categories in a drop down like old Slashdot Style - but each mod who selects the same selection from the drop down adds a point to the tag - the post is removed upon some thresholds of the points.
This could be different for each reagion - and a post could be flagged with points for each region... so have a region selection, then the illegal tag list sets to that region. A post maybe could be tagged by multiple regions infractions based on where the mod sits?
Also - you can keep metrics for all posts flagged for what infraction types for - plus you can move them to the "if law enforcement needs this post S3 bucket" -- based on whatever time period the laws require.
Coming from Silicon Valley companies, all the federation stuff aren't sincerely-intended ideas to promote free society values. They're an escape hatch. It's a free-speech zone to divert unwanted activists onto—away from the company and its brand, and away from its users—where they can blow off steam quietly. And it's something their PR can point to to deflect accountability for the awful things they will definitely end up doing, in their uncompromising pursuit of market share. ("Oh, we're not really censoring that; it's only censored on the main corporate instance, which is the only one people use").
Federated social media could be used for very bad purposes and it would be impossible to stop. Consider this situation
https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2022/09/myanmar-faceb...
in the centralized case we can point to Facebook as a responsible entity. The thing is Facebook later got kicked out of Myanmar not as accountability for those crimes but because they were insufficiently pliant to the government. In the future a country like that might just run its own Mastodon network where it is all genocide all the time.