On Mastodon

[pseudomonas]

I think Mastodon will wind up being far far far easier for the Troll Factory to astroturf, once it's big enough for them to bother with in earnest.

There's no-one with overview of the network (by design) so it'd be almost impossible to use network analysis methods to discover inauthentic accounts systematically promoting whatever narrative. It's basically an open door. Especially given that the troll factory can easily create their own nodes in as large numbers as they wish.

Also, I assume some nodes are going to be run by people who have skewed attitudes towards what (non-illegal-in-their-jurisdiction) hate speech etc they allow? I don't know what happens when Node A allows something, Node B blocks Node A, Node C doesn't, and I'm watching two-thirds of a conversation from Node B (between someone from Node B  and someone from Node C which I can view, and someone from Node A which I can't)?

ISTM that there's a high chance nodes who want to avoid weirdness of that sort end up choosing between "We're going to block any node that hasn't blocked node A" vs "We'll block hatespeech on our own nodes but we're not going to cut off entire nodes just because they're run by two volunteers, one of whom is ill, and haven't got the resources to moderate adequately." At which point the network is basically bifurcated. Repeat for various values of Node A with varying levels of awfulness. Obviously morally a node which is actively cheerleading nazis is worse than a node that just run by someone without the resources to moderate away the nazis, but from the outside they look the same. For some nodes, that will be an important difference; for others it won't.

Is there even a way to find out if [prospective node] has a way of funding (or recruiting volunteers for) a moderation/abuse reports team that will scale with their userbase? I get the idea that a lot of mastodon nodes are one or two people who have access to a server and who (at least at the time they set the thing up) had a bit of spare time.

But even if they have the resources to deal with obvious abuse, detecting coordinated inauthentic activity is a different kind of problem. It's vast numbers of accounts who look like perfectly normal, reasonable people to get readers, and every so often, boost the visibility of a political argument that they want to become part of mainstream discourse in whatever their target society is.

Twitter's team to deal with coordinated (troll-factory scale!) inauthentic activity is pretty huge and also pretty well paid (their field overlaps with mine so I see their job ads from time to time; they're hiring pretty senior AI expertise). The fact that they're not doing anything like an adequate job isn't to say that things wouldn't be far far far worse if they weren't trying.

But Mastodon has no theoretical mechanism to detect that, no team whose job it is to stop that, and no money whatsoever going into it. And it's not just that I think most nodes aren't going to be good at it, I think most nodes are not even going to try. So all you need to do if you're the troll factory, is get your accounts onto nodes that aren't trying, but which other nodes are still federating. Next election, in the bag.

[ETA: I'm not saying that Mastodon doesn't have any points where it's better than Twitter or whatever comparator. I'm saying that its federated nature makes it peculiarly vulnerable to certain attacks, and I can't see how these vulnerabilities can easily be mitigated]

Comments

[pseudomonas]

with regard to 4; users don't in general *know* that they're being exposed to inauthentic content; so they're not (in general) going to be able to judge which places are better able to keep it from them.