Conceptual Issue: How to protect privacy and anonymity, but also not give shelter to nazis?

[marxzuckerburg]

"How could we prevent nazis from occupying the platform? They tend to love resilient platforms where they can't be shutdown." - LJS

"One question I have is how to keep the network from being 'flooded' by agitators (white supremacists, QAnon, etc.). Will there be any moderation at all for messages?" -BM

These are good questions and ones I'm not sure we have an answer to.

We can imagine group moderation mechanisms (some of which discussed here), like flagging posts or accounts as offensive and holding group-wide votes or using some other self-governing mechanism.

In terms of who is posting to @komrades, the public channel, that's another and perhaps trickier question. Is there an app-wide moderation or voting mechanism?

More broadly, though, all the encryption design of the app prevents us from knowing what anyone is saying to anyone else; no record of the messages, or who wrote whom, is stored. There may be some inevitable sacrifice in this. At least, this is what the hardcore privacy folks at r/privacy think, in reply to a question about this. Personally I don't think there's a one-size-fits-all philosophical or technical solution to the question, which is why I think self-governance mechanisms may be the only way to remain flexible enough to threats and attacks. Is that an inner liberal in me? I'm not sure...

[rachellejane]

I would like to say that a voting-based moderation mechanism would be best, rather than leaving things to the discretion of a few individuals.

But the encryption design effectively prevents us from banning people, right? Can you explain a bit about what the technical options would be for keeping bad people and posts off the platform? It makes me consider whether people should need to be approved by others to join in the first place -- maybe operating on invites from existing users? I know that impression of being exclusionary could be alienating, but since I see us as not having any scope for control over what gets posted once a person is on the platform, the solution to me is more of just doing our best to keep bad people off in the first place. How do others feel about this -- and am I missing any technical considerations?

[gary-host-laptop]

What about needing to ask the devs to create a "community", let's say, anarchism-berlin, and within that community admins of it can decide who they want in or out?

[hawc2]

LongJohn Silver's idea might be safest. This is a very difficult needle to thread.

The inability to kick people off the platform will be a serious problem in the long run, and still seems like a necessary option. People change, or pretend to be other than they are, and there's little moderation can do to avoid that sort of trick/mutation. Nefarious uses of the platform will arise at some point, and demand administrative action.

I also don't think the only risk here is "Nazis". How signal deals with this problem may offer a model, but it may also be beyond our control. I know this sounds naive, but in an ideal world, Komrade would be a space where Nazis meet unlikeminded people and learn to stop being Nazis (lol ...)

[rachellejane]

Definitely agree that having small communities responsible for admitting people would make most sense -- although this will in the beginning make it harder to grow the platform. Maybe that can be eased up in the beginning, in terms of allowing users halfway across the world to invite a member that they've vetted (ie: Googled, looked up social media). But in the long term, I think that having someone who knows you more or less IRL would be the safest way to keep Nazis and QAnon types out. Assuming that members have decent senses of judgement about a person, I think this should keep out people who misrepresent their beliefs to get onto the platform. I'm not too worried about ideological changes in a person, once they're admitted, that would go to the extent that anyone's safety would be compromised.

On Mon, Sep 28, 2020 at 4:07 PM Alex Wermer-Colan [email protected] wrote:

LongJohn Silver's idea might be safest. This is a very difficult needle to thread.

The inability to kick people off the platform will be a serious problem in the long run, and still seems like a necessary option. People change, or pretend to be other than they are, and there's little moderation can do to avoid that sort of trick/mutation. Nefarious uses of the platform will arise at some point, and demand administrative action.

I also don't think the only risk here is "Nazis". How signal deals with this problem may offer a model, but it may also be beyond our control. I know this sounds naive, but in an ideal world, Komrade would be a space where Nazis meet unlikeminded people and learn to stop being Nazis (lol ...)

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[marxzuckerburg]

These are all great ideas. I completely agree that the cornerstone of any solution will have to involve smaller communities and their own homespun practices for how to verify and moderate themselves. What do you guys think of the X "vouches for" Y idea group moderation mechanism described in the group chat issue?

As for how a user can join the overall app... I'm more conflicted, since one problem that other alternative social networks have (Matrix, Secure Scuttlebutt, Briar, etc) is that you need an invite to join/start using it, which is a pretty high barrier for folks. That's not necessarily a bad idea at first, since it may end up making platform sexier and more exclusive as it gets going, but we also don't want to turn people off from the whole thing, either.

Seems like we have a number of options laid out:

• (least restricted) User can join app without any invitation, and read and write to @komrades the open/universal channel or feed
• User can join app without any invitation, can read but not write to @komrades; write privileges bestowed upon first time user "vouched for" by an existing user
• User can join app only with an invitation by an existing user
• (most restricted?) User can join app only with an invitation from an existing group

Anything I'm missing?