from ForgottenFlux@lemmy.world to technology@lemmy.world on 26 Feb 2025 18:31
https://lemmy.world/post/26089123
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.
threaded - newest
Re-upload it 100 times over…fuck em
Throw it on peertube/other platforms. haha
First part yes, upload it anywhere and everywhere. Second part no, they’re not required to leave it up and accept any legal liability, so just keep putting up new copies expecting they’ll get removed.
I guess I get it. They would not like to set precedent to allow non-consensual AI generated porn on the platform. Seems reasonable. That said, fuck Donny. The video is hilarious. It’s fine if Bluesky doesn’t host it though.
Only because I find these specific videos to be quite funny, maybe there can be a “satire/criticism of a public figure” exception that could exist
I’ll just explain why that is a horrible idea with three simple letters:
A. O. C.
Fuck. Good point. Guess I’ll just have to come to peace with me being a hypocrite when it comes to what I find acceptable.
Satire is already legal and right wingers have already called for her to be shot or worse and gotten away with it. Pandora’s box isn’t closed, it’s long been open.
I don’t like AOC, but any threat of of call for violence is unacceptable regardless of the target. I don’t care if it’s despicable people like Trump, violence against an individual isn’t the answer. Violence against ideas, however, is fine.
There are politicians that I kind of like, and they should also not be above reproach. Bring all their bad takes into the light and let’s talk about them.
There’s already multiple LoRA of her on civitai.
I am standing on the wire😅 what is the problem with satire and AOC (whatever that is)?
The problem is the combination of AOC and nonconsentual explicit AI content. Overly broad rules might make that fall under satire, which is why caution is advised when devising such rules.
That’s a pretty big loophole. I mean, imagine the same exact video with Kamala Harris and Nancy Pelosi. It takes a significantly different subtext when the subjects are women. But the subtext doesn’t really matter to the morality of the act.
Either involuntary AI generated pornography is wrong or it isn’t. I think it’s wrong. Do Trump and Musk deserve it? Sure, but it’s still wrong. Do I feel bad for them? No, because they deserve it. But it’s still not something I would do, or suggest anyone else do, and if the creator is prosecuted, I’m not going to defend them.
Agree. Laws have to be applied evenly, or else they are not Laws.
~This~ ~comment~ ~is~ ~licensed~ ~under~ ~CC~ ~BY-NC-SA~ ~4.0~
These uh… aren’t laws. They’re community guidelines. I think one does not have to get so anal about preserving the rights of vulnerable people while also maintaining an “even application” because they’re two different situations.
Not even the law is black and white, it’s still tweaked and interpreted by judges and lawyers. It’s obvious that AI-generated pornography of women in political office is completely different from a video of a fascist dictator making out with the feet of another fascist. Get your head checked.
Good thing you put a permissive license on that so the whole of humanity can benefit.
It’s satire, and yeah, I think satire of Harris skipping the primary process through “backroom deals” could be criticized with a similar video.
As long as there’s a point to the video, it’s speech. Make it clear that it’s AI gen satire and I think it’s fine, just don’t make more explicit than necessary to get the point across.
Except you know that sexual exploitation has a different effect on women than men. Trump revels in his playboy reputation. Harris was accused of using sex to get ahead in politics. And you know that conservatives would believe that the video was real while they jerk off to it. Those dipshits still think Michelle Obama was a man.
Trump rapes women. He’s not entitled to the same level of respect as almost anyone. He is entitled to the same laws, on that we agree.
It doesn’t matter what they believe, what matters is that it’s explicitly parody or satire. Idiots will be idiots despite your best efforts to prevent it.
It’s not porn tho…not even a little bit.
It is if you are into feet, lmao
So if I’m into words, are libraries considered porn?
Your analogy doesn’t hold. Words aren’t human body parts.
I’ll admit defeat when I’m defeated.
At least you haven’t been defeeted.
Tarantino nods in agreement
<img alt="Ryan Gosling as Ken, semi-shirtless" src="https://pagesix.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/3/2022/06/ryan-gosling-46.jpg">
Is this considered porn? I am certainly, along with at least hundreds of millions of people, into shirtless Ryan Gosling. Specifically his pecs and abs.
Look, I am taking the piss, but not everything that might turn someone on for one reason or another is porn. The AI video of Trump is clearly satire and meant to disgust. What’s next, we can’t make satirical drawings of him grovelling at Putin’s feet because some people have a humiliation fetish?
Are we about to delve into the legal status of squat cobbler
Well, looks like they put it back up. I think I agree with you though. It might be better for them to restrict this. Frankly republican incels excel at generating this kind of content and this sets the precedent that Bluesky will welcome such AI garbage. I’m not arguing that this stuff shouldn’t be made in good spirit, but for a serious platform to not moderate it out I think invites chaos.
There’s plenty of legal precedent for newsworthiness to supersede some rules in the name of the freedom of the Press. It makes sense that I’m not allowed (at least where I live) to post a non-consensual pictures of someone off the street. But it would not make sense if I was forbidden from posting a picture of the Prime Minister visiting a school for example. That’s newsworthy and therefore the public interest outweighs his right to privacy.
The AI video of Trump/Musk made a bunch of headlines because it was hacked onto a government building. On top of that it’s satire of public figures and – I can’t believe that needs saying – is clearly not meant to provide sexual gratification.
Corpos and bureaucracies would have you believe nuance doesn’t belong in moderation decisions, but that’s a fallacy and an flimsy shield to hide behind to justify making absolutely terrible braindead decisions at best, and political instrumentation of rules at worst. We should celebrate any time when moderators are given latitude to not stick to dumb rules (as long as this latitude is not being used for evil), and shame any company that censors legitimate satire of the elites based on bullshit rules meant to protect the little people.
Exactly.
Content featuring public figures should be given extra lenience, because if we can’t openly criticize our leaders, we aren’t free. So as long as it’s either factually correct or clearly parody/satire/etc, it should be allowed. Defamation and libel rules should have a very high bar for conviction when it comes to public figures.
This was obviously satire, and well done at that. Good on BlueSky for restoring it, I hope they fix whatever process got it pulled.
That’s a really thin line. I have a hard time imagining anyone sticking to this same argument if the satire were directed towards someone they admired in a similar position of power. The prime minister visiting a school is a world away from AI generated content of something that never actually happened. Leaving nuance out of these policies isn’t some corporation pulling wool over our eyes, it’s just really hard to do nuance at scale without bias and commotion.
Yeah I really don’t like that this is probably going to end up being used to argue that deepfake porn of public figures is ok as long as it is “satire”.
I don’t really care about the Trump x Musk one but I know for a fact that this will lead to MAGAs doing the same shit to AOC and any other prominent woman on the democrat side.
And that would be okay
I have a hard time imagining a reasonable person being mad at satire of a politician. Like maybe it’s a cultural divide and I’m not American so I don’t view politics as team sports and my country has a stronger history of political satire than the often pathetically meek American political cartoons, but you can make a satirical deepfake of the politicians I voted in last election if you want.
If the deepfake was not obviously related to current political events or wasn’t obviously fake, the point could be arguable at least as a matter of good taste. As it stands, the satire is obvious, harmless, and topical. It is therefore terrifying that censoring it is even a question. How far the concept of free speech has fallen that it refers to Seig Heiling but a 2s gif of Trump sucking some toes apparently crosses a line.
Holy shit. A reasonable take from someone who clearly leaves the house.
On Lemmy??? Blasphemy!
Hopefully this amplifies the videos exposure. Is it because it is considered explicit that it’s not tolerated like other forms of parody?
It’s probably not AI, and could be considered revenge porn.
yeah it’s basically deepfake porn.
Yeah. I think it was hilarious to “hack” government displays to show this in protest.
I am REALLY uncomfortable with sharing it on a wider basis. Because, at the risk of sounding like DNC leadership, it is opening a huge can of worms. Imagine if instead this was musk posting a deepfake of him and AOC similar to how he offered to rape taylor swift a while back?
oh it WILL happen on both sides. it’s just going to be part of our lives now, and social media is fully justified in removing it from their platforms.
If it’s actual satire, it should be allowed, but to be satire, it needs to criticize something instead of just being offensive. Satire is free speech, the latter is defamation or libel (not a lawyer, so not sure which it is).
Cue up Pulp Fiction conversation about foot massage.
Corpo bootlickers disgust me
Explicit? Hardly. Just two good pals suckin’ toe.
just a lil evolution of the brojob
At least in the US, protest falls under protected speech and has additional legal protections beyond ordinary speech similar to satire. IANAL but this is not a legal matter. It’s clearly an internal policy issue.
This is the problem with any social media being centralized.
BlueSky is just as centralized as Twitter or Facebook.
Once again proving it isn’t really decentralised.
I don’t think anyone claims BlueSky is decentralized, just more fair about moderation. I’d probably be fine with using Twitter if Elon Musk hadn’t completely corrupted it.
How so? Lemmy is technically decentralized and mods remove stuff here…
You can just move to another server and repost it.
With blue sky there is no “another server”
Mod actions propagate though, no? So you’d have to post to a separate community, not just another server. I guess your admin could override a mod, but that’s quite rare.
I was more thinking about mastodon, since it’s the closest competitor to bluesky, but yeah here you would want to post it in a community on another server.
fwiw they restored the post and blamed it on a moderator being too strict in applying a policy regarding non consensual ai porn. It’s objectively good they have policies banning such things but it was completely obvious from context that this was not meant to be pornographic at all
As such, one could easily read it with cynicism as responding to backlash as they only reviewed said moderators actions after this article came out and the associated clamor
Poor moderator probably had a foot fetish
Or more likely a Trump fetish.
<img alt="" src="https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/4d6e3019-af8e-468c-8e76-231c397e8a75.png">
If this was AOC and MTG would the video still be up
Whose toes?
double dutch rudder of toe suck, everybody - every digit gettin some love. equal opportunity
That doesn’t sound like satire, so probably not.
Where can I download a copy? I would upload it again, hate any sort of censorship?
Simple solution to all this crap:
MASTODON.
I do not understand why people use BlueSky We already had the alternative!!! It was here first and many had already created accounts… Then just went back to Twitter
Instead of complaining we need to work on making Masto more welcoming to new users and amplifying the advantages it has over Bluesky
Honestly, that ship has sailed, I think. When Musk first took over Twitter and everyone was bailing, if Mastodon was a viable alternative it could have taken off.
Now that Bluesky has overtaken them, and is seen as the alternative to Twitter, I think the opportunity has been lost.
That’s quite a good point. Here’s a little thought experiment, though: If we woke up tomorrow and Mastodon looked just like Bluesky (but with a different color scheme) and featured 100% two-way integration with Bluesky…
Essentially, if Mastodon became hands down the most user-friendly and engaging option—would that be enough to make a meaningful difference in its adoption curve?
Possibly, although anyone who already has an account on Bluesky would likely stay there, and Bluesky has the upper hand in name recognition, and there is the uphill battle of explaining the concept of federation to people who have little interest in technology.
And that’s if, hypothetically speaking, Mastodon was as easy to use.
It’s not happening. Also, if it’s anything like here, the non stop Linuxposting would probably annoy people.
It was far faster and easier to build up a feed of enjoyable content on BlueSky. My Mastodon feed has sat almost completely empty, and I’ve only been able to find a few news-reposters there.
And I’m tech-savvy. Imagine how it is for other social media users.
Yes, exactly this. Like something might be technically better but unless it’s doing its main job of actually connecting people it’s not going to work.
I wish more FOSS nerds understood this.
I don’t agree that Mastodon is technically better, but it was first so it should have first mover advantage.
I think it largely comes down to marketing. Mastodon is marketed by word of mouth, and BlueSky has an actual marketing team.
By “technically better” I mean it actually delivers on its technical promises of decentralisation, as opposed to bluesky that simply uses decentralisation as a buzzword without being actually open source and without allowing real competition for the main - centralised - instance.
I think mastodon has actual legs in that if bluesky fails to actually open up, it will enshittify and there will be another exodus. Mastodon has technical barriers to that kind problem, so it will still be there to pick up the pieces. The decentralised nature protects the network from enshittifying and means it will tend not to get exoduses like central platforms do. It’s a matter of making that growth count.
If in that time mastodon has worked on its discovery features, it might be finally ready to capture that growth.
If bluesky manages to properly decentralise then I imagine mastodon will not need to pick up the slack and will either join the network or fade into irrelevancy.
Hard to say which way it will go. I don’t hold out a lot of hope for bluesky changing its ways, and who knows when mastodon will improve in this way.
My understanding is that BlueSky is distributed, meaning there’s no single point of failure and nodes are independent. So scaling up should just mean adding more nodes, not having to scale vertically.
Distributed computing is a form of decentralization where the goal is resilience of the platform, not decentralization of control. The goal is very different from the Fediverse, which is to decentralize control, with resilience being a nice side effect.
It also has technical barriers to widespread adoption, hence why BlueSky is winning. I’lf BlueSky fails, people will just go to whatever alternative has a healthy marketing budget and low barrier to entry.
It doesn’t matter how distributed the servers are. You could say any centralised platform is “distributed” if it has at least one redundant server, which plenty of them do. Youtube has servers all over the world. That has nothing to do with enshittification and it’s not the feature I was talking about.
The thing that supposedly set bluesky apart was that they would be using a decentralised protocol that allowed anyone who wanted to to operate their own server with full control over their data. You can actually see some people posting from different domains.
That’s a nice idea and it trades on the rising popularity of the fediverse, but it’s not doing it in an open manner because the software isn’t open and separate instances are locked to 10 users maximum unless the central authority allows them more. That means it’s not meaningfully decentralised, but it’s still trying to capitalise on the concept. It can still be torpedoed by one company’s bad business decisions.
That’s what I was referring to.
And I said mastodon might be able to take in the exodus if they improve, so I guess I agree with your last point.
Well, they have that, they just haven’t opened it up to others yet. A lot of it is open source today.
I’m not saying BlueSky is ideal, just that it has a decentralized design and is currently quite distributed in practice. It’s not like YouTube where it’s largely just a CDN to keep things fast, but the core service is broken up into logical independent pieces instead of a top down system.
They just currently control most of the pieces. But the design is still decentralized.
Right, my point is that they have the ingredients to meaningfully decentralise control, but until they do they are not meaningfully bettee than twitter, and it’s just a branding exercise.
Maybe they’ll fix that, maybe they won’t but until they do I think the fediverse’s resilience proves that platforms will keep turning over until a viable federated system arises, whether that’s bluesky, mastodon or something else.
I can’t even see where you disagree with this. You’re just throwing out details withoit reference to how this affects my point.
I fundamentally disagree that a federated system is the desired end goal.
One of the problems it seems to try to solve is eliminating the risk of a service going down. Just like a centralized service, a federated service lasts only as long as the maintainers want it to last, and I think the risk of important services disappearing is higher when you remove the profit motive to keep it going. Hobbyists’ pockets are only so deep, and they’ll eventually die or lose interest. Yeah, I guess another service will pop up, which perpetuates some portion of the platform, but it doesn’t really preserve the data.
So I see things like Mastodon (and Lemmy) as more complicated alternatives to services like Twitter or BlueSky, but with many of the same downsides. Will the data still be there in 20 years? 50? 100? Idk, probably not. Maybe if you put together a non-profit or something, but even then, I have my doubts.
So in that sense, I don’t really see a technical advantage that the Fediverse has that BlueSky doesn’t. If anything, I’d expect BlueSky to potentially stick around longer, assuming they can find a decent profit model, because money coming in tends to keep the servers running. Maybe they go bad like Reddit, maybe they get bought like Twitter, or maybe they stick it out longer (or maybe they open up to hobbyists). Whatever the case, I highly doubt Mastodon and friends will actually take over when they do disappear. It’ll likely remain a hobbyist project until the next hot thing comes out (Fedi v2?), and never really reach mainstream success.
Maybe I’m wrong. But given how the Reddit and Twitter exoduses have worked out, I don’t think so.
I want to see more projects looking into P2P, so that’s where my interest lies. That way data and platforms can truly live forever, provided new people constantly come around to provide more storage. Communities and posts wouldn’t live anywhere in particular (no single point of failure), but instead get distributed so there’s a very low chance that any given bit of data will be truly lost, kind of like how torrents tend to keep on keeping on as long as someone is seeding (but people would only need to seed a small subset of the total data). I think that’s a much more interesting idea than the Fediverse.
If you can explain the existence of wikipedia under your theory then I’ll listen to you, but like… wow. Profit motive, what a joke. That’s literally what causes enshittification.
They got the ease of use down, largely due to it being a centralized service. You can literally go there, click edit, and submit a change, and you can also make an account if you want credit. It was also largely the first of its kind, so it was easy for people to get passionate about it. I made a bunch of edits in the relative early days (2000s), because I thought it was really cool. I do the same for OpenStreetMaps today, because it has a good amount of info, but it still needs some data entry here and there (I use Organic Maps on mobile).
That said, projects like Wikipedia aren’t very common. It started around the time the dot-com bubble burst, so they had a fair amount of cash to kick things off with, and it got traction before the money ran out. They were able to reuse a lot of what they learned from another commercial project, and the community project ended up eating the original project’s lunch.
I’m not arguing that profit is required for something to succeed, I’m merely arguing that money really helps a project get off the ground, and if there are multiple competing projects, the one with better marketing and a smoother user experience will usually win.
I didn’t say profit guarantees projects live a long time or anything of that nature, I merely said users tend to flock to platforms that have a strong profit motive, probably because they have better marketing and funding for a better UX. First impressions matter a lot when it comes to a commercial product, so they tend to do a good job at that. That’s why BlueSky is more attractive than Mastodon, and why whatever comes next will also likely be more attractive than Mastodon.
It’s just really weird that you turn to profit motive as a benefit when we’re talking about systems that tend to enshittify, and that’s like, the main thing that makes them enshittify.
My argument is about how enshittification destroys platforms, and platforms that don’t do that will retain their growth. Bluesky has all the ingredients to enshittify, mastodon doesn’t.
Yes they need to work on their onboarding, but unlike bluesky, they can keep going at it till it sticks. Centralised platforms get a launch, and a lifecycle, and then they tend to go away.
Quite literally the opposite of what you said. If a platform is central, it can be switched off tomorrow. Nobody can do that to the fediverse as long as the internet exists. The idea that hobbyists are somehow less reliable than fucking corporations is also absurd. Have you met corporations?
This is literally a tortoise-and-the-hare situation.
Why? That’s pretty much the common thread in successful SM apps vs unsuccessful SM apps. The ones w/ profit motive attract investors, which means better marketing and initial rollout, which leads to more users.
I’m not saying it’s good or bad, just that it’s effective.
What’s the benefit you’re trying to get out of platforms?
Mastodon will probably stumble along in some form for a long time, but servers will come and go, meaning content will come and go. The same is true for Lemmy, many of the bigger servers will likely go away in 10-20 years, if not sooner, as the admins get tired of hosting them (it’s pretty expensive). The platform will likely continue to exist, but you’ll probably need to jump between servers every so often.
I guess I don’t see that as hugely different from jumping from Twitter to BlueSky. Twitter had a good run, and maybe BlueSky will have a similar run.
Maybe the entirety of the fediverse won’t die, but significant portions will disappear from time to time as servers drop out and new ones join.
I really don’t see a case for the Fediverse “winning” in any meaningful sense. The reason Wikipedia succeeded is because it has permanence. The Fediverse lacks that, so why wouldn’t people just jump to the flavor of the week instead? You know, the flashy new thing that uses the latest designs and has some interesting gimmick.
I think the Fediverse will always be playing catch-up. Development is relatively slow, and it has proven to be less capable of taking advantage of opportunities than BlueSky. Why? Because BlueSky is swimming in money, whereas Mastodon, Lemmy, et al are hobby projects. Hobby projects work well in some areas where they form a foundation (e.g. Linux), but they don’t work as well at chasing fads. Why isn’t there a popular alternative to Snapchat, TikTok, or other “flavors of the week”? Because FOSS moves slowly, and will never keep up with the fads in SM.
So my issues with the Fediverse are:
I’m not saying it’s bad, I’m just saying it’s an uphill battle with a fair amount of caveats.
Bluesky will never be able to properly decentralize, since the costs are prohibitive and cannot be afforded by normal users. The shared heap concept used is currently somewhere around 10-15 TB storage, which is already pretty expensive to host for a single person, and that’s only the STORAGE for a single host NOW - no redundancy, no backups, no traffic and no worldwide infrastructure to keep the response time down. That’s a huge difference to a Mastodon instance, which can be run from a pretty cheap setup and is afforable for most people.
Also, the way Bluesky implements how user identities are handled makes account migration more a theoretical possibility than a believable “decentralization”. Theoretically Bluesky gives a credible exit strategy, where the shared heap can be copied by another organisation in case of loss of user trust or bankruptcy of the company and everyone can just switch over and carry on without losing a single post, but there are a lot of big if’s in that theory.
Here’s the source, from Christine Lemmer-Webber who worked on ActivityPub: dustycloud.org/…/how-decentralized-is-bluesky/
Oh, I didn’t realise the technical barriers were that steep. In that case I think I’m right to say that Mastodon is technically better for achieving the decentralisation it promises.
That’s a great resource, I’m going to follow them. Plus the link to Spritely was really interesting. Looks like it’s meant to be a successor to ActivityPub, which is quite exciting. From what I’ve seen activity pub is pretty limited in the ways it can enable interaction, like how mastodon posts look so funky on lemmy.
Plus, holy web 1.0, that’s a motherfucking website.
Many FOSS nerds don’t even understand the necessity of a user-friendly GUI…
Some of them will actively advocate for user-unfriendliness to keep out the noobs which… I mean the number of psy-ops in the community has to be non-zero.
Yep, elitism is a huge problem. It’s usually the best for newcomers to refer them to only certain subsections of the wider community (for example Linux Mint forums) who you know to be very friendly and humane. Many other places are a cesspit, and don’t you dare criticize something technical. You’ll get at least 30% answers trying to shut you up.
<rant> In terms of the wider Fediverse, people seem unable to understand how many people won’t even know you can use third-party software with certain services so not finding a native, official “Lemmy” app in the app store is a dealbreaker for them. Hell, our digital education and modern mobile devices are so bad & manipulative at times people don’t even know that “gmail” and “email” are the same… but of course that’ll be blamed on literally everyone else. Can’t be that that FOSS Bros are out of touch or something. Contributing to a social & economical solution is hard, let’s go back to our code cave. </rant>
We do need better onboarding. I wonder if you could make an equivalent of the “discovery” feed that wasn’t abusive to the user
Same discussion in every single post on either Mastodon or Bluesky.
.
The sad truth is that the vast majority of people WANT an algorithm to tell them what they like.
Mastodon requires you to actually have your own opinions going in, and follow material based on that.
Love mastodon but Bluesky has a lot of cool features like starter packs and lists and feeds + the ability to do your own moderation. It’s really customizable that way + there a lot of users… In the end people will go where people are. Besides, mastodon is cool because its still underground and is filled with nerds like the early internet. Do we really want all the normies to join?
<img alt="" src="https://lemmy.ca/pictrs/image/ef9caa0c-1795-4d6a-a834-ca8898e39eec.webm">
I’d expect a little more enthusiasm from our Commander in Chief…
He’s old and tired.
Put it on Facebook! Ol’ Zuck decided all the guardrails pretty much needed to go so. Post and do whatever. Plus, the people who should see it most are those still hanging around on Facebook 🤣
Ugh but then I’d have to use Facebook
That’s because Aaron Rodericks is Jesse Singal loving garbage.
Their moderation has been garbage lately. They’re wrongly banning people for things they didn’t do. It’s just premusk twitter at this point. The real fediverse is a better vet medium and long term
I mean, given that Jack Dorsey founded it as basically the “not Twitter Twitter” after musk bought the main one, I don’t think it’s surprising to see it face basically the same moderation issues in the name of being “even-handed”
Bluesky is BS
WTF bluesky.
More trash
I don’t want to watch this video please
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.
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 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
Sure. Unless you live in a place that have laws and laws enforcement. In that case, it’s “fuck it and get burnt down”.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
Bluesky had better take care that they not act like other cowardly tech media
If they don’t it is only because they are waiting to obtain a higher share of the social media market.
Jumping ship from one corporate owned social media to another corporate owned social media isn’t a smart move. There is nothing about Bluesky that will prevent it from becoming X in the future. People joining now are only adding to the network effect that will make leaving more difficult in a decade or two.
The problem of social media won’t be solved by choosing which dictator’s rule you want to live under. You don’t have the freedom to speak and express yourself if you give someone veto power over what you write.
So you don’t remember Jack Dorsey’s shenanigans ?
No. I don’t
This guy censored the POTUS (Granted it was Trump)
Bluesky will become just the same az elonx…
It already is
It’s been restored after the article published. Moderators removed it as it being “Non-consensual” due to their rules, which they were right to follow…but the exception is that this is “news-worthy” which I agree with.
I seem to be in the minority here, but I am extremely uncomfortable the idea of non-consensual AI porn of anyone. Even people I despise. It’s so unethical that it just disgusts me. I understand why there are exceptions for those in positions of power, but I’d be more than happy to live in a world where there weren’t.
Where do you draw the line for the rich fucks of the world? Realistic CGI? Realistic drawings? Edited photos?
Assuming you’re asking out of genuine curiosity, for me personally, I’d draw the line somewhere along “could this, or any frame of this, be mistaken for a real depiction of these people?” and “if this were a depiction of real children, how hard would the FBI come down on you?”
I understand that that’s not a practical way of creating law or moderating content, but I don’t care because I’m talking about my personal preference/comfort level. Not what I think should be policy. And frankly, I don’t know what should be policy or how to word it all in anti-loopholes lawyer-speak. I just know that this sucking toes thing crosses an ethical line for me and personally I hate it.
Putting it more idealistically: when I imagine living in utopia, non-consensual AI porn of people doesn’t exist in it. So in an effort to get closer to utopia, I disapprove of things that would not exist in an utopia.
That sounds fair, though I could still see an argument to be made for not always protecting the rich fucks the same way. Either way, we know that anything that comes out that’s too incriminating would be declared AI-generated anyway, lol
Though mentioning the utopia… having porn of anyone anywhere might be some people’s idea of a utopia! Haha
This is what I was thinking about myself. Because we’re cool with political caricatures, right?
I guess the problem is that nobody wants to feature in non-consensual AI porn. I mean if you’d want to draw me getting shafted by Musk, that’d be weird, but a highly realistic video of the same event, that would be hard to explain to the missus.
I guess “obviously Elon Musk would never go for a guy like me” would be the wrong answer
Anything bad that happens to a conservative is good. The world will only get better if they are made to repeatedly suffer.
No, we cannot think like that. It is true that fascism cannot be beat peacefully, but we should never want them to suffer. We should always strive to crush their fascist oligarchy with as little suffering ss possible.
“Whoever would be a slayer of monsters must take heed, or they may become the very monsters they slay… For when one peers into the abyss, the abyss peers back into thee” -FN
They don’t believe anything they aren’t experiencing first hand is actually a problem.
As much as I don’t like it, they have clearly made their own personal suffering a prerequisite for any solutions being allowed to move forward
This is true. We should rapidly give them a lead injection, rather than have them suffer.
No, we should, actually. It’s what they want for others and is the only way they might come to an understanding with what’s wrong with them.
Sympathy for the fascists is almost equal to support of them afaic
I agree with you.
However…there’s an argument to be made that the post itself is a form of criticism and falls under the free speech rules where it regards political figures. In many ways, it’s not any different than the drawings of Musk holding Trump’s puppet strings, or Putin and Trump riding a horse together. One is drawn and the other is animated, but they’re the same basic concept.
I understand however that that sets a disturbing precedent for what can and cannot be acceptable. But I don’t know where to draw that line. I just know that it has to be drawn somewhere.
I think…and this is my opinion…political figures are fair game for this, while there should be protections in place for private citizens, since political figures by their very ambition put themselves in the public sphere whereas private individuals do not.
In my opinion, public figures, including celebrities, give a degree of consent implicitly by seeking to be public figures. I dont think that for celebrities that should extend to lewd or objectionable material, but if your behavior has been to seek being a public figure you can’t be upset when people use your likeness in various ways.
For politicians, I would default to “literally everything is protected free speech”, with exceptions relating to things that are definitively false, damaging and unrelated to their public work.
“I have a picture of Elon musk engaging in pedophillia” is all those, and would be justifiably removed. Anything short of that though should be permitted.
In my country the laws about publishing photos etc are different for anyone an “people of public interest”. So yeah imo it should be okay to create cartoons or whatever of politicians without their permission - not porn ofc. Including ai generated stuff, but that one should be marked as such , given how realistic it is now
I agree. I’ve thought about it a lot and I still don’t have any sympathy for them after the harm they’ve caused. I see why it’s news worthy enough they might reverse it, and why it would be political speech.
But also I think they made the right choice to take it down. If blsky wants to be the better platform, it needs to be better. And not having an exception for this is the right thing.
In this case, it’s clearly a form of speech and therefore protected under the 1st amendment.
I also don’t understand such a strong reaction to non-consensual AI porn. I mean, I don’t think it’s in good taste but I also don’t see why it warrants such a strong reaction. It’s not real. If I draw a stick figure with boobs and I put your name on it, do you believe I am committing a crime?
Protected from government censorship. Companies have strong protections allowing for controlling the speech on their platforms.
And if you asked Roberts he’d probably say since companies are people, as long as it’s used to protect conservatives they have protection for controlling their platforms speech as a 1st amendment right.
not claiming private organizations don’t have to the right to regulate speech on their platforms. was responding to statement
which to me implies some sort of state censorship on this type of material
Really, I just wanted to understand the rationale behind the desire to ban this type of material.
On the topic of Judge Roberts, on a similar although different legal issue
If Judge Roberts were to be consistent, and I make no such claims that he will ever be consistent, I believe he would likewise not support banning fake AI porn.
Nobody’s going to mistake that stick figure for the real me, though.
so is that the key differentiating issue here? whether someone can mistake it for a real photo?
what if I’m a really talented artist and make a realistic drawing of you posing in a sexually suggestive way. Should that be criminalized?
if I put a watermark “AI generated” on some of this AI porn, does that make it OK? if the issue is someone mistaking it, then the watermark would remove that doubt.
i’m trying to get a sense for the rationale here. basically- does this issue at its core really have anything to do with AI?
I think the important point in this case is not that the content is acceptable, but that it is newsworthy.
If somebody made the video and posted it, I could see it being permanently taken down. And it was at first, per the letter of their policy.
But the fact that government employees had it playing on government property inside government facilities, to protest some extreme and historical stuff going on, means it should be recorded for the public and for history.
I look at it much the same way as the photos of upside down American flags that various government employees put up. Just posting an upside down flag and saying how America is wrong is an opinion like any other that would get lost in the noise. But when it’s people inside the government intending it as a sign of distress, very much more newsworthy and important to record.
Oh, saving the children are you.
Its a picture of trump sucking elons toes. Conflating that with the idea of “porn” is a bit of an overreach in light of how rare toe fetish people are. I imagine you can find a tiny popyulation of people who consider anything erotic. Wearing cotton. Having a roastbeef sandwhich in your hand. Styling hair a certain way. Being an asian female.
Want to ban all of that too?
Thank you for your thoughtful and considered comment, which definitely did not strawman my rather mild position or blow it out of proportion at all.
Also this wasn’t meant to be a “save the children” argument. Screw that. Can’t I just be uncomfortable with something and express it without people acting like I’m a puritan wanting to ban porn?
You’re the one who used the loaded, connotative “porn” word first bud. To recap, I disagreed with your flippant, facile use of the word in this particular instance. We all know what porn is when we see it, and that wasnt it.
Sometimes when you try to jump the shark you fall short. Now you know.
Are you arguing that toe sucking is not porn / not meant to be sexual in nature? Because I disagree. Honestly I think you’re being pedantic. I also disagree that “we all know what porn is when we see it” because I think the definition of what counts as porn is more nuanced than you think. And clearly since we disagree, it must be. Of course you can just argue that I don’t know what I’m talking about. But I don’t really care. I think it counts as a non-consensual sexual depiction of two people: porn. You don’t.
So. Whatever, honestly?
exactly my point too. You should never have written that first post. See? people can agree.
Oh no think of the children. Poooooooorn
.
Correct. this is indeed the correct decision to remove the thing. BUT i have a feeling that this quick reaction does not compare to the speed of decision for normal people, especially women who get this kind of stuff made about them.
Also, note that I’m not saying it was bad to make the video, or have it run in public on hacked screens.
That is perfectly fine political commentary, by means of civil disobedience.
Just that Bluesky is correct in it’s action to remove it from their service.
I’m not here to discuss how we need to be ethical in response to a fascist takeover. So we gotta play by the rules but they don’t?
Resistance need not be ethical. This isn’t resistance.
exactly, we should drop this approach of taking the high road, until they are gone
Amazed people saying it is correct decision! This is two public figures and doing art or any form of expression material with their image should be protected under freedom of speech.
I don’t believe Bluesky is a part of the government. Legally, they are allowed to censor as they please on their own platform.
This is no different than a really well drawn political cartoon.
Politicians shouldn’t have the power to control the kinds of things you say about politicians.
Yeah guys, fuck bluesky.
Already showing its true colors of “We’ll abuse our power when we want to and only reneg if there’s sufficient backlash.”
Recommend MASTODON, NOT BLUESKY.
If you allow it for people you don’t like, where the bar for others.
Not a fan of the AI video but this kind of thinking is very very stupid. Take that cop out of your head.
Here’s my take on it:
Why is it “very very stupid”?
I’m confused as to why this 404media story neglected to link to the post in question.
to get from this article to the post that it is about, i had to type in the bsky username from the screenshot and scroll through the timeline. to save others the effort:
bsky.app/profile/…/3liwlwvvq6k2s is the post which was removed.
bsky.app/profile/…/3lj3yrzc6is2p is the thread about it being removed and later restored.