I've been thinking a lot about social norms for online discourse....
I've also started writing up some thoughts. I'm trying multiple shorter blog posts that will (hopefully....) combine into something substantive.
Here's the first, a gentle warm up....
All thoughts welcome!
https://write.as/ulrikehahn/online-social-media-toxicity-and-scale
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I’d like to conduct some polls on social norms here…..First up: blocking
Do you think it’s ok to block people
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Does the acceptability of blocking depend on who is doing the blocking?
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@UlrikeHahn It's a really interesting problem. Not something I've researched myself so just a vague thought, but I wonder if this could be where AI could be actually useful. I mean: for situations where you have inhumanly many responses that would take too many emotional and cognitive resources to properly assess yourself anyway. So you could set up a filter to do various things - sort/filter by suspected bot or troll activity; by hostility or ad hominems; maybe other theory-driven features?
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@UlrikeHahn A person could subjectively insulate themselves from criticism that way, but maybe that's not the problem - other people observing the responses would be able to see, e.g., debunking. But if someone is getting professionally trolled for instance, they have some justification for not psychologically engaging with what the troll-filter judges.
And the more observers also use such filters, so there's no audience at all, then the benefits of disinfo/trolling go down in the network.
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@TEG for what it's worth, I don't feel I personally have been trolled on Mastodon (though I certainly have elsewhere). My most unpleasant/disturbing interactions here have been with people who I believe were acting in good faith and were ultimately just very invested in their particular positions.
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@UlrikeHahn very interesting thoughts, thanks for sharing them. I'm curious to read the future posts. On FaceBook, as a scientist, I sometimes wrote explanatory posts of which I knew that they were contrary to the more general opinion. I always tried to write these in a very polite form, trying to explain things in a neutral way, and also trying to write in a way that reduces interpretations. 1/2
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@UlrikeHahn 2/2 And I found that regularly when I expected a large number of negative comments, I was rather getting polite, curiosity driven replies. :-)
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Does the acceptability of blocking depend on who is being blocked
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@UlrikeHahn I think people should generally be able to block for whatever reason. But I do think it's a good practice to warn people before blocking them.
Once blocked there's no opportunity to apologise or explain.
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@UlrikeHahn I assume you’ll have a poll on muting as well as blocking, because I think the ability to mute without blocking makes a huge difference in expected social norms on the Fediverse.
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@drahardja yes, indeed!
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@UlrikeHahn I'm interested to hear why and how people think elected representatives should behave differently, in case it is that standing for election means you sign up to accept a certain level of abuse!
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@jbenjamint I added that because I've encountered people complaining about MPs blocking people in the past.
Note that even if a person just thinks the threshold for when blocking is appropriate is different (e.g., 'only in case of abuse' for MP, say, but 'fine whenever' for anyone else) the option to tick would be 'are different'
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@UlrikeHahn I think it's a great question to ask. I'm genuinely not sure whether political reps are entitled to block preemptively or whether they instead "owe constituents an ear". Being a fence-sitter, I voted option a.
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@UlrikeHahn @jbenjamint
I think a private citizen is ok to block any account for any reason
It’s different with elected representatives who are using this platform to communicate with electorate, especially if it’s a primary means
I don’t think people should be abusive, of course. But being abusive should not permanently bar them from contacting their representatives
And scared/desperate people who absolutely do need help sometimes use abusive language.
I don’t have a solution here, I just don’t think block/mute are the right answer in this specific case,
Even if it’s eg an obvious spambot account as we would need to deal with people recovering from having their accounts taken over by spam bots
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@johno @UlrikeHahn the issue I see for elected reps is the most motivated to respond or tag them publicly are often not their supporters. Open replies offers a great 'attack surface' for political opponents.
While those who want to raise issues with their reps in good faith may be content to do so directly or privately?
But then, we see posts like "I'm tagging you in this post because you've not responded to any of my emails".
Not easy!
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@jbenjamint @UlrikeHahn
definitley not easy - I just realised my first sentance "private citizen block anyone" is also problematic. I should add accounts shouldnt b e able to block instance admins or moderators. Because we need those guys to be able to investigate and deal with abusive accounts
re: replying to elected people's posts, maybe the ability to post with replies disbled addresses that, without impacting people's ability to reach out to those reps seperatley
But I expect anything we propose becomes fairly easy for someone to abuse, because thats what people on social media do
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@UlrikeHahn @jbenjamint
Interesting question indeed.
The Fedi has not (yet) attained the (pseudo-) institutional status that Twitter did, and the few political representatives/officials I have encountered here do not often treat it as an official means of communication. Hence they deserve the same right to protect themselves as anyone else.
An official social media account is often managed for an elected official or political executive by a PR team, who can - indeed, who expect to - deal with harsh or abusive communication.
Institutional accounts here are often run by well-meaning individuals who may well not be prepared for the stress it involves.
It may well be the case that the Fedi needs a norm of "institutional servers" and avatars - that is, the (hypothetical) MEP Indrani Ahmed has an official account at parliament.EU but a personal account elsewhere. social.network.europa.EU seems to be one such server.
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@UlrikeHahn
I automatically block people who use AI generators to "write", "search info" (chat GPT), or generate images (it is not art) because I do not support theft fron fellow artists and writers, inaccurate information, or using "tools" that only benefit billionares while they destroy this planet by needing tons of resources to work.
Don't know where that belongs in this poll. (:
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@hiisikoloart
The main difference I'm trying to get at is whether you think blocking people is a) fine for whatever whimsical reason strikes you and doesn't even really need a justification, or b) whether you think it's not so that you need a worthwhile reason in order to block.
if b) then it's 'other' if one of those reasons is AI use...
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@UlrikeHahn
I feel like everyone has a reason to block someone, even if they are conciously thinking of it.
It may be annoyance, too much political things, pictured they share are too provocative or not their style, etc. but I think everyday people can block others to curate their feed.
More public figures and companies though should have a concrete reason to do it, not just asthetics or randomly seeing them without interraction causing their clash.
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@hiisikoloart yes, that is what the second poll (does it matter who is doing the blocking) is trying to get at
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@UlrikeHahn from your article, I'm pretty sure it's the case, but just to be 100%: by "blocking" you mean the action by an individual account, right, not instance-level actions?
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@tfardet yes, I guess so! it would be hard to be on the fediverse and object to defederation....
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@UlrikeHahn well, there certainly are opinions as to when defederation is fine or not, depending on who does it, against whom, and why 😉
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@tfardet indeed, and maybe I should have more clearly separated them out (it crossed my mind). Certainly if you think "should block only if abusive" at the individual level, it would seem inconsistent to be gung about blocking at the instance level.
Is it equally or less inconsistent to be gung ho at the individual level but think good reasons are required at the general level? And are those general level reasons exclusively about the fact that server level actions involve actions for (possibly numerous) people beyond oneself?
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@UlrikeHahn I treat feeds like my living room. I decide who gets in.
Elected representatives should pay attention to the opinions of constituents. I also want my representatives to be clever enough to recognize when they're being gamed, targetted by organized campaigns, and that accepting onling credentials as proof of identity is naive.
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@Corb_The_Lesser
"I treat feeds like my living room. I decide who gets in."
I'm not sure that answers the question ;-)
https://fediscience.org/@UlrikeHahn/113763204296812451
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@UlrikeHahn I block or mute if I don't want to see posts from someone. Everyone should do the same.
It's naive to assume the authenticity of the ID's attached to social media posts. Requiring politicians to avoid blocking likely encourages them to ignore the entire platform, especially if they are abused by organized swarming.
If politicians participate in social media, I'd encourage them to assess the content of each post on its merits, without reference to the name attached to it.
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@UlrikeHahn my general rule: everyone just has one chance to post something that I don't want to read.
If we don't have any shared history, one stupid reply is sufficient to land on my blocklist.
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@UlrikeHahn
There's this book, Log Off by Katherine Cross (https://www.littlepuss.net/shop/p/pre-order-log-off-why-posting-and-politics-almost-never-mix-by-katherine-cross) that goes down in this thing and shows that the model itself (everyone talks to everyone) creates issues.
I've been thinking that maybe limiting replies with some kind of exponential backoff (the more people replied, the longer you have to wait for a new one) might reduce the effect of enduring conversation and incite people to post new content. Another possibility is anonymous posts: instead of talking about people and posting for clout, it's all about the content. This however means less familiarity and "humanity".
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@rakoo thanks for this Rakoo! I hadn't come across that book and have pre-ordered it!
re content vs. people: that's also one way a forum might be better than micro-logging
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@rakoo Rakoo, just coming back to report that I’ve now read Cross’s book. Thanks again for pointing it out, it was well worth my time! For one, it’s analysis of Bluesky I found helpful in identifying reasons for why Mastodon was not going to be the next Twitter.
More importantly, the way she talks about affordances is exactly what I have in mind. What differs is the target: she makes a great case that social media cannot be tools for meaningful action. My interest is in whether they can be tools for meaningful discourse.
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@UlrikeHahn
Wow you're so fast, it's nice you liked it ! I was interested in it specifically for the organizing part and what do we do with these tools, but I understand your point of view and analyzing the discourse part is also important !
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