Update: After this article was published, Bluesky restored Kabas’ post and told 404 Media the following: “This was a case of our moderators applying the policy for non-consensual AI content strictly. After re-evaluating the newsworthy context, the moderation team is reinstating those posts.”
Bluesky deleted a viral, AI-generated protest video in which Donald Trump is sucking on Elon Musk’s toes because its moderators said it was “non-consensual explicit material.” The video was broadcast on televisions inside the office Housing and Urban Development earlier this week, and quickly went viral on Bluesky and Twitter.
Independent journalist Marisa Kabas obtained a video from a government employee and posted it on Bluesky, where it went viral. Tuesday night, Bluesky moderators deleted the video because they said it was “non-consensual explicit material.”
Other Bluesky users said that versions of the video they uploaded were also deleted, though it is still possible to find the video on the platform.
Technically speaking, the AI video of Trump sucking Musk’s toes, which had the words “LONG LIVE THE REAL KING” shown on top of it, is a nonconsensual AI-generated video, because Trump and Musk did not agree to it. But social media platform content moderation policies have always had carve outs that allow for the criticism of powerful people, especially the world’s richest man and the literal president of the United States.
For example, we once obtained Facebook’s internal rules about sexual content for content moderators, which included broad carveouts to allow for sexual content that criticized public figures and politicians. The First Amendment, which does not apply to social media companies but is relevant considering that Bluesky told Kabas she could not use the platform to “break the law,” has essentially unlimited protection for criticizing public figures in the way this video is doing.
Content moderation has been one of Bluesky’s growing pains over the last few months. The platform has millions of users but only a few dozen employees, meaning that perfect content moderation is impossible, and a lot of it necessarily needs to be automated. This is going to lead to mistakes. But the video Kabas posted was one of the most popular posts on the platform earlier this week and resulted in a national conversation about the protest. Deleting it—whether accidentally or because its moderation rules are so strict as to not allow for this type of reporting on a protest against the President of the United States—is a problem.
Ah, the rewards of moderation: the best move is not to play. Fuck it is & has always been a better answer. Anarchy of the early internet was better than letting some paternalistic authority decide the right images & words to allow us to see, and decentralization isn’t a bad idea.
Yet the forward-thinking people of today know better and insist that with their brave, new moderation they’ll paternalize better without stopping to acknowledge how horribly broken, arbitrary, & fallible that entire approach is. Instead of learning what we already knew, social media keeps repeating the same dumb mistakes, and people clamor to the newest iteration of it.
You clearly never were the victim back in those days. Neither do you realize this approach doesn’t work on the modern web even in the slightest, unless you want the basics of both enlightenment and therefore science and democracy crumbling down even faster.
Anarchism is never an answer, it’s usually willful ignorance about there being any problems.
Pretty much everyone used anonymous handles, so it was hard to be a victim, and very easy to disregard junk we didn’t like.
I’m sensing strong overtones of a victim complex and excessive catastrophizing. You know they’re images & words on a screen, right?
Enlightenment gives us freedom of expression. It seems uninformed & backward to assume faceless moderators of some private organization are the defenders of enlightenment, freedom, & democracy (especially while arguing against too much freedom).
Centralized moderation & curation algorithms got us filter bubbles & echo chambers personalizing the information people consume, distorting their perceptions. It feeds users information they want to see (often polarizing them with extremist ideas) to keep them engaged on the platform & maintain a steady stream of ad revenue. Rather than defend enlightened principles of society, we observe & can continue to expect moderators to serve their own interests.
Internet anarchy is a pretty good answer to that.
Dude, you do realize I didn’t endorse centralized moderation with a single word, let alone social algorithms or any of the other trash? I’m just not ignorant enough to believe the internet wouldn’t become an utter pile of trash without any kind of moderation of oversight, especially with such an abundance of ways to spread nonsense fully automatically. Want to get a glimpse of how that would look like? Look at Nostr. Given you’re literally starting off with ad hominem any discussion with you is pointless anyway though.
They’re widespread varieties of moderation taken to natural limits. And they highlight the weaknesses of thinking that approach will save us when they’re often blamed for doing the opposite.
Clearly, you disagree with that kind of moderation, so maybe you should “no true Scotsman” this & define precise boundaries of moderation you accept. The only type of moderation I might accept is the minimal necessary for legal compliance & labeling that allows the user to filter content themselves.
Matter of perspective: that “trash” we had before was beautiful. Sifting & picking through it wasn’t much of a problem. Despite the low moderation, the nonsense didn’t really spread & the fringe groups mostly kept to their odd sites when they weren’t being ridiculed.
Also beautiful: beats bluesky & mastodon.
Let’s add hypercritical to the list. I disagree with the alarmism over images & text on a screen, and I disagree with the infantilization of adults. Adults still think and are responsible for exercising judgment in the information they consume. Expressions alone do nothing until people choose to do something.
AnCaps drive me nuts. They want to dismantle democratic institutions while simultaneously licking the boots of unelected institutions.
I guess I don’t really consider AnCaps to be Anarchists because Anarchy is generally leftist philosophy. Traditional anarchy is like small government socialism: empowered local unions and city governments.
You know what’s funny about Stalinism that everyone forgets about?
Its structures were similar to what you describe on the lower level. Districts and factories and such all had their councils (soviet means council), from which representatives were elected to councils of the upper level. They still were pretty despotic most of that period, because crowd rule leads to despotism.
Democracy shouldn’t be made too small and too unavoidable. In some sense an imagined hillbilly village is democratic with that problem.
Point being that this didn’t look much like some people imagine anarchy.
Anyway, ancaps are not particularly attached to the name, and themselves prefer the words “voluntarism” and “agorism” and a few others. But it’s one of the most common names for the ideology.
People against ancaps usually only disagree with them in the way institutions are being dismantled.
In any case looking through the eyes of an ancap you might get valuable insights, and this thought should be obvious for an intelligent person of any school in regards to any other.
This isn’t anarchism, as described. Anarchism, like actual anarchism, is the only likely solution, imo. No gods, no masters, no idols.
A perfect breeding ground for growing localized power structures that aren’t bound to anything holding them back. A power vacuum will always fill itself. To gain control over it as a society (i.e. democracy) is one of the greatest achievements of mankind. We have to keep improving it (by reforming how economical powers can or can not exercise power or grow), not moving to something that’s so obviously disregarding how power structures form and behave in human societies.
Ok, read up a little about anarchism, and come back to the discussion. I can provide a starter primer, if you like.
The only control is the ruling class over the working class. I don’t think that’s a great achievement.
That’s a result of systems like capitalism, not democracy in itself. 🙄 Read up a little about the concept of democracy (and what isn’t part of it) and come back to the discussion.
True democracy, or majoritarianism?
Solution involves answers where to get energy to dig in the gods, masters and idols. They are well-armed and those seeking solutions are not.
You need some kind of moderation for user generated content, even if it’s only to comply with takedowns related to law (and I’m not talking about DMCA).
Well, yes: gotta comply with the law. Legal violations are often quite clear, and removing illegal content is justifiable. Can’t fault anyone for following the law.
It’s the extra moderation that’s problematic. People yearning for their corporate authorities to command the right words & images to appear on a screen & calling that progress feels quite backward like our ancestors fought so hard to gain these freedoms that our spoiled generation will so easily cede away to some nobodies at the slightest often imaginary inconvenience.
I feel like it’s a balancing act and you can’t make everyone happy. I, personally, don’t hang around unmoderated communities because they are often worse: hostile, full of spam and questionable content… so basically /b/. But even 4chan is moderated to an extent shrug
I had to hack an ex’s account once to get the revenge porn they posted of me taken down.
There’s a balance at the end of the day.
Illegal content has always been unprotected & subject to removal by the law. Moderation policies wouldn’t necessarily remove porn presumed to be legal, either, so moderation is still a crapshoot.
Still, that sucks.
You do remember snuff and goatse and csam of the early internet, I hope.
Even with that of course it was better, because that stuff still floats around, and small groups of enjoyers easily find ways to share it over mainstream platforms.
I’m not even talking about big groups of enjoyers, ISIS (rebranded sometimes), Turkey, Azerbaijan, Israel, Myanma’s regime, cartels and everyone share what they want of snuff genre, and it holds long enough.
In text communication their points of view are also less likely to be banned or suppressed than mine.
So yes.
They don’t think so, just use the opportunity to do this stuff in area where immunity against it is not yet established.
There are very few stupid people in positions of power, competition is a bitch.
I’m weirded out when people say they want zero moderation. I really don’t want to see any more beheading or CSAM and moderation can prevent that.
Moderation should be optional .
Say, a message may have any amount of “moderating authority” verdicts, where a user might set up whether they see only messages vetted by authority A, only by authority B, only by A logical-or B, or all messages not blacklisted by authority A, and plenty of other variants, say, we trust authority C unless authority F thinks otherwise, because we trust authority F to know things C is trying to reduce in visibility.
Filtering and censorship are two different tasks. We don’t need censorship to avoid seeing CSAM. Filtering is enough.
This fallacy is very easy to encounter, people justify by their unwillingness to encounter something the need to censor it for everyone as if that were not solvable. They also refuse to see that’s technically solvable. Such a “verdict” from moderation authority, by the way, is as hard to do as an upvote or a downvote.
For a human or even a group of humans it’s hard to pre-moderate every post in a period of time, but that’s solvable too - by putting, yes, an AI classifier before humans and making humans check only uncertain cases (or certain ones someone complained about, or certain ones another good moderation authority flagged the opposite, you get the idea).
I like that subject, I think it’s very important for the Web to have a good future.
I can’t engage in good faith with someone who says this about CSAM.
No it is not. People are not tagging their shit properly when it is illegal.
Right, you can’t.
If someone posts CSAM, police should get their butts to that someone’s place.
What I described doesn’t have anything to do with people tagging what they post. It’s about users choosing the logic of interpreting moderation decisions. But I’ve described it very clearly in the previous comment, so please read it or leave the thread.
I miss the early days of the internet when it was still a wild west.
Something like I hate you myg0t 2 or Pico’s School would have gotten the creators cancelled if released in 2025.
Note on the term canceling. Independent creators cannot, by definition, get canceled. Unless you literally are under a production or publishing contract that gets actually canceled due to something you said or did, you were not canceled. Being unpopular is not getting canceled, neither is receiving public outrage due to being bad or unpopular. Even in a figurative sense, just the fact that the videos were published to YouTube and can still be viewed means they were not canceled. They just fell out of the zeitgeist and aren’t popular anymore, that happens to 99% of entertainment content.
Elon acts like a new Reddit mod drunk on power. He is the guy screaming in the comments that he knows how to run a forum better and seized the chance, and now he cannot fathom why people hate him.
Sure. Unless you live in a place that have laws and laws enforcement. In that case, it’s “fuck it and get burnt down”.
I think there’s a huge difference between fighting bullying or hate speech against minorities. Another thing is making fun of very specific and very public people.