research-article

Exploring content moderation in the decentralised web: the pleroma case

Authors:

Anaobi Ishaku Hassan,

Aravindh Raman,

Ignacio Castro,

Emiliano De Cristofaro,

Nishanth Sastry,

Gareth TysonAuthors Info & Claims

CoNEXT '21: Proceedings of the 17th International Conference on emerging Networking EXperiments and Technologies

Pages 328 - 335

https://doi.org/10.1145/3485983.3494838

Published: 03 December 2021 Publication History

Abstract

Decentralising the Web is a desirable but challenging goal. One particular challenge is achieving decentralised content moderation in the face of various adversaries (e.g. trolls). To overcome this challenge, many Decentralised Web (DW) implementations rely on federation policies. Administrators use these policies to create rules that ban or modify content that matches specific rules. This, however, can have unintended consequences for many users. In this paper, we present the first study of federation policies on the DW, their in-the-wild usage, and their impact on users. We identify how these policies may negatively impact "innocent" users and outline possible solutions to avoid this problem in the future.

Supplementary Material

MP4 File (S9-3-3494838-presentation - ishaku anaobi.mp4)

Presentation Video

Download
11.11 MB

References

[1]

ActivityPub. 2018. https://www.w3.org/TR/activitypub/.

[2]

Fabrício Benevenuto, Tiago Rodrigues, Meeyoung Cha, and Virgílio Almeida. 2009. Characterizing User Behavior in Online Social Networks. In IMC.

[3]

Mathew Binny, Dutt Ritam, Goyal Pawan, and Mukherjee Animesh. 2018. Spread of hate speech in online social media. In arXiv.

[4]

Corel. 2021. Toxic Comments - Talk Documentation. https://docs.coralproject.net/talk/toxic-comments/.

[5]

Thomas Davidson, Dana Warmsley, Michael Macy, and Ingmar Weber. 2017. Automated hate speech detection and the problem of offensive language. In ICWSM.

[6]

Lucas Dixon, John Li, Jeffrey Sorensen, Nithum Thain, and Lucy Vasserman. 2018. Measuring and Mitigating Unintended Bias in Text Classification. In AIES 2018.

[7]

Trinh Viet Doan, Tat Dat Pham, Markus Oberprieler, and Vaibhav Bajpai. 2020. Measuring Decentralized Video Streaming: A Case Study of DTube. In IFIP Networking 2020.

[8]

Megan Farokhmanesh. 2017. A beginner's guide to Mastodon, the hot new open-source Twitter clone. https://www.theverge.com/2017/4/7/15183128/mastodon-open-source-twitter-clone-how-to-use.

[9]

Paula Fortuna, Juan Soler-Company, and Leo Wanner. 2020. Toxic, hateful, offensive or abusive? What are we really classifying? An empirical analysis of hate speech datasets. In LREC.

[10]

Barbara Guidi, Marco Conti, Andrea Passarella, and Laura Ricci. 2018. Managing social contents in Decentralized Online Social Networks: A survey. Online Social Networks and Media (2018).

[11]

Alon Halevy, Cristian Canton-Ferrer, Hao Ma, Umut Ozertem, Patrick Pantel, Marzieh Saeidi, Fabrizio Silvestri, and Ves Stoyanov. 2020. Preserving integrity in online social networks. In arXiv.

[12]

Sebastian Kaune, Konstantin Pussep, Christof Leng, Aleksandra Kovacevic, Gareth Tyson, and Ralf Steinmetz. 2009. Modelling the internet delay space based on geographical locations. In Euromicro International Conference on Parallel, Distributed and Network-based Processing.

Digital Library

[13]

Lucio La Cava, Sergio Greco, and Andrea Tagarelli. 2021. Understanding the growth of the Fediverse through the lens of Mastodon. In Applied Network Science, Vol. 6.

[14]

Binny Mathew, Anurag Illendula, Punyajoy Saha, Soumya Sarkar, Pawan Goyal, and Animesh Mukherjee. 2020. Hate begets hate: A temporal study of hate speech. Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction 4, CSCW2 (2020).

Digital Library

[15]

Giuliano Mega, Alberto Montresor, and Gian Pietro Picco. 2011. Efficient dissemination in decentralized social networks. IEEE International Conference on Peer-to-Peer Computing.

[16]

John Pavlopoulos, Nithum Thain, Lucas Dixon, and Ion Androutsopoulos. 2019. Offensive language identification and categorization with perspective and bert.

[17]

Perspective. 2021. https://www.perspectiveapi.com/how-it-works/.

[18]

Perspective. 2021. https://developers.perspectiveapi.com/s/about-the-api-modelcards.

[19]

Perspective. 2021. https://www.perspectiveapi.com/how-it-works/.

[20]

Perspective. 2021. https://developers.perspectiveapi.com/s/about-the-api-modelcards.

[21]

Ashwin Rajadesingan, Paul Resnick, and Ceren Budak. 2020. Quick, community-specific learning: How distinctive toxicity norms are maintained in political subreddits. In ICWSM.

[22]

Aravindh Raman, Sagar Joglekar, Emiliano De Cristofaro, Nishanth Sastry, and Gareth Tyson. 2019. Challenges in the Decentralised Web: The Mastodon Case. In ACM IMC.

[23]

Manoel Horta Ribeiro, Pedro Calais, Yuri Santos, Virgílio Almeida, and Wagner Meira Jr. 2018. Characterizing and detecting hateful users on twitter. In ICWSM.

[24]

Manoel Horta Ribeiro, Shagun Jhaver, Savvas Zannettou, Jeremy Blackburn, Gianluca Stringhini, Emiliano De Cristofaro, and Robert West. 2021. Do Platform Migrations Compromise Content Moderation? Evidence from r/The_Donald and r/Incels. Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction 5, CSCW2 (2021).

[25]

Erik Rye, Jeremy Blackburn, and Robert Beverly. 2020. Reading In-Between the Lines: An Analysis of Dissenter. In ACM IMC.

[26]

The Conversation AI Github Organization. 2019. https://github.com/conversationai/.

[27]

The Copia Institute. 2021. https://www.tsf.foundation/blog/decentralized-social-media-platform-mastodon-deals-with-an-influx-of-gab.

[28]

Savvas Zannettou. 2021. "I Won the Election!": An Empirical Analysis of Soft Moderation Interventions on Twitter. In ICWSM.

[29]

Savvas Zannettou, Barry Bradlyn, Emiliano De Cristofaro, Haewoon Kwak, Michael Sirivianos, Gianluca Stringini, and Jeremy Blackburn. 2018. What is Gab: A bastion of free speech or an alt-right echo chamber?. In Companion Proceedings of the The Web Conference 2018.

Digital Library

[30]

Matteo Zignani, Sabrina Galto, and Gian Paolo Rossi. 2018. Follow the "Mastodon": Structure and evolution of a decentralized online social media. In ICWSM.

[31]

Matteo Zignani, Christian Quadri, Sabrina Gaito, Hocine Cherifi, and Gian Paolo Rossi. 2019. The Footprints of a 'Mastodon': How a Decentralized Architecture Influences Online Social Relationships. In INFOCOM 2019.

[32]

Matteo Zignani, Christian Quadri, Alessia Galdeman, Sabrina Gaito, and Gian Paolo Rossi. 2019. Mastodon content warnings: Inappropriate contents in a microblogging platform. In ICWSM 2019.

Cited By

Novak Domijan T(2024)PleromaSistematična analiza decentraliziranih družbenih medijev10.18690/um.feri.3.2024.16(263-284)Online publication date: 13-May-2024
https://doi.org/10.18690/um.feri.3.2024.16
Zhang ZZhao JWang GJohnston SChalhoub GRoss TLiu DTinsman CZhao RVan Kleek MShadbolt N(2024)Trouble in Paradise? Understanding Mastodon Admin's Motivations, Experiences, and Challenges Running Decentralised Social MediaProceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction10.1145/36870598:CSCW2(1-24)Online publication date: 8-Nov-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3687059
Shi RCheng RHan BCheng YChen S(2024)A Closer Look into IPFS: Accessibility, Content, and PerformanceProceedings of the ACM on Measurement and Analysis of Computing Systems10.1145/36560158:2(1-31)Online publication date: 29-May-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3656015
Show More Cited By

Index Terms

Exploring content moderation in the decentralised web: the pleroma case
1. Information systems
  1. World Wide Web
2. Networks
  1. Network performance evaluation
    1. Network measurement

Recommendations

Content Moderation and the Formation of Online Communities: A Theoretical Framework
WWW '24: Proceedings of the ACM Web Conference 2024

We study the impact of content moderation policies in online communities. In our theoretical model, a platform chooses a content moderation policy and individuals choose whether or not to participate in the community according to the fraction of user ...
User Attitudes to Content Moderation in Web Search
CSCW

Internet users highly rely on and trust web search engines, such as Google, to find relevant information online. However, scholars have documented numerous biases and inaccuracies in search outputs. To improve the quality of search results, search ...
Identifying and Addressing Design and Policy Challenges in Online Content Moderation
CHI EA '20: Extended Abstracts of the 2020 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems

My doctoral research identifies and addresses the design and policy challenges of content moderation on the levels of smaller communities and larger platforms, using a combination of interviews and surveys. My prior work studies voice-based communities ...

Comments

Please enable JavaScript to view thecomments powered by Disqus.

Information & Contributors

Information

Published In

cover image ACM Conferences

CoNEXT '21: Proceedings of the 17th International Conference on emerging Networking EXperiments and Technologies

December 2021

507 pages

ISBN:9781450390989

DOI:10.1145/3485983

General Chairs:
Georg Carle
Technical University of Munich, Germany
,
Jörg Ott
Technical University of Munich, Germany

Copyright © 2021 ACM.

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than the author(s) must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected].

Sponsors

SIGCOMM: ACM Special Interest Group on Data Communication

Publisher

Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 03 December 2021

Permissions

Request permissions for this article.

Request Permissions

Check for updates

Author Tags

Qualifiers

Research-article

Funding Sources

Conference

CoNEXT '21

Sponsor:

SIGCOMM

CoNEXT '21: The 17th International Conference on emerging Networking EXperiments and Technologies

December 7 - 10, 2021

Virtual Event, Germany

Acceptance Rates

Overall Acceptance Rate 198 of 789 submissions, 25%

Upcoming Conference

Contributors

Other Metrics

View Article Metrics

Bibliometrics & Citations

Bibliometrics

Article Metrics

15
Total Citations
View Citations
439
Total Downloads

Downloads (Last 12 months)111
Downloads (Last 6 weeks)15

Reflects downloads up to 19 Nov 2024

Other Metrics

View Author Metrics

Citations

Cited By

Novak Domijan T(2024)PleromaSistematična analiza decentraliziranih družbenih medijev10.18690/um.feri.3.2024.16(263-284)Online publication date: 13-May-2024
https://doi.org/10.18690/um.feri.3.2024.16
Zhang ZZhao JWang GJohnston SChalhoub GRoss TLiu DTinsman CZhao RVan Kleek MShadbolt N(2024)Trouble in Paradise? Understanding Mastodon Admin's Motivations, Experiences, and Challenges Running Decentralised Social MediaProceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction10.1145/36870598:CSCW2(1-24)Online publication date: 8-Nov-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3687059
Shi RCheng RHan BCheng YChen S(2024)A Closer Look into IPFS: Accessibility, Content, and PerformanceProceedings of the ACM on Measurement and Analysis of Computing Systems10.1145/36560158:2(1-31)Online publication date: 29-May-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3656015
Balduf LSokoto SAscigil OTyson GScheuermann BKorczyński MCastro IKról MVallina-Rodríguez NSuarez-Tángil GLevin DPelsser C(2024)Looking AT the Blue Skies of BlueskyProceedings of the 2024 ACM on Internet Measurement Conference10.1145/3646547.3688407(76-91)Online publication date: 4-Nov-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3646547.3688407
Bono CLa Cava LLuceri LPierri F(2024)An Exploration of Decentralized Moderation on MastodonProceedings of the 16th ACM Web Science Conference10.1145/3614419.3644016(53-58)Online publication date: 21-May-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3614419.3644016
Trautwein DWei YPsaras YSchubotz MCastro IGipp BTyson G(2024)IPFS in the Fast Lane: Accelerating Record Storage with Optimistic ProvideIEEE INFOCOM 2024 - IEEE Conference on Computer Communications10.1109/INFOCOM52122.2024.10621404(1920-1929)Online publication date: 20-May-2024
https://doi.org/10.1109/INFOCOM52122.2024.10621404
He JZia HCastro IRaman ASastry NTyson GMontpetit MLeivadeas AUhlig SJaved M(2023)Flocking to Mastodon: Tracking the Great Twitter MigrationProceedings of the 2023 ACM on Internet Measurement Conference10.1145/3618257.3624819(111-123)Online publication date: 24-Oct-2023
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3618257.3624819
Zuo WRaman AMondragÓN RTyson G(2023)A First Look at User-Controlled Moderation on Web3 Social Media: The Case of Memo.cashProceedings of the 3rd International Workshop on Open Challenges in Online Social Networks10.1145/3599696.3612901(29-37)Online publication date: 4-Sep-2023
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3599696.3612901
Zuo WRaman AMondragón RTyson G(2023)Set in Stone: Analysis of an Immutable Web3 Social Media PlatformProceedings of the ACM Web Conference 202310.1145/3543507.3583510(1865-1874)Online publication date: 30-Apr-2023
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3543507.3583510
Bin Zia HRaman ACastro IHassan Anaobi IDe Cristofaro ESastry NTyson G(2022)Toxicity in the Decentralized Web and the Potential for Model SharingACM SIGMETRICS Performance Evaluation Review10.1145/3547353.353096850:1(15-16)Online publication date: 7-Jul-2022
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3547353.3530968
Show More Cited By

View Options

Login options

Check if you have access through your login credentials or your institution to get full access on this article.

Full Access

Get this Publication

View options

PDF

View or Download as a PDF file.

eReader

View online with eReader.

HTML Format

View this article in HTML Format.

Media

Figures

Other

Tables

View Table of Contents