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rhaksw

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blog: https://RemovedNews.com

mail: robert at domain of https://www.reveddit.com/about/faq

podcast: https://youtu.be/ndiAl6QEA6k?t=1373

https://twitter.com/rhaksw

https://old.reddit.com/user/rhaksw

October, 2022 Talk: https://shadowmoderation.com/2022-10-transparent-moderation/

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In the tussle between regulators and companies, companies are disadvantaged.

When society once again properly separates governmental powers, it will restore balance, and then companies will no longer need to fear "regulators."

In the US, businesses are supposed to be regulated by Congress. That way, if Congress does something foolish, we can vote them out.

But in the last 100 years or so, "administrative law"– that is, binding regulations created by the Executive branch– has become a huge part of law-making [1]. Widespread use of Administrative Law allows Congress to wash its hands of any real decision making.

It isn't supposed to be this way, and I think we will find our way out of it.

Your statement that companies are disadvantaged only rings true because Executive-branch regulators are not held to account. Lower-level staff generally do not rotate from administration to administration, and so they make tons of binding rules without oversight. Fortunately, SCOTUS recently overturned some of this [2].

The fundamental problem is that the separation of powers, which is where America's strength comes from, has been upended. Power has been collected, by parties on all sides, within the Executive branch. It's supposed to be, Congress writes law, Judiciary interprets law, and the Executive enforces law. The Administrative State, however, combines all three powers into one under the Executive. It gives itself executive agencies that can bind citizens, and its own courts (ALJs) to determine their fate. See [1] for a comprehensive review.

[1] https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/I/bo174366...

[2] https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/23pdf/22-451_7m58.pdf

"Tempo/MacQuake Palace"

Confession: I ran that. Sorry, Apple– that was wrong!

If I recall correctly, I'd grab the latest version from a private Hotline site, then re-host it on my public server backed by a cable modem, whose name you got right. I loved Quake too.

I'm not sure that all was healthy at the time, and I like to imagine I'm over such distractions, but here I am..

The democratic element is in the selection of an executive every 4 years.

That did nothing to help the fishery in this case. The burdens placed upon them came from a lower level bureaucrat, a decision that likely never crossed Trump's desk. That's just one regulation among thousands per year for which there is no accountability.

I think it's more analogous to the overlap between police and prosecutors.

Those both fall under the executive branch. Plus, Chevron deference was about the court's actions, not prosecutors'.

Another difference is that agency rulemaking is not made in a vacuum; there's a pretty elaborate rulemaking process which includes (iirc) notices of proposed rulemaking, mandatory public comment periods spanning months, pre-publication of draft rules to allow the possibility of litigation and so on.

That gives the illusion of a democratic process, but in reality, agency rulemakers are not accountable to the people, whereas Congress is. Keep in mind that the fisheries regulation in question on this case was passed during the Trump administration– so it's not like electing a conservative to head the executive put a stop to excess regulation, which is generally a position that conservatives advocate.

This decision has more to do with the Court owning its own past mistake, where they deferred to executive agencies. But both the judiciary and the legislative enabled the executive to consolidate lawmaking and interpretive power, thus violating the separation (and balance) of powers. Overruling Chevron is a step in the direction of restoring the balance of power. The balance may never be perfect, but at least we can see when we're far off course and make a correction.

Chevron was based on the idea that if statutory text is ambiguous the people in charge of implementing said statute were best positioned to figure out what it meant

Wouldn't it be odd if the police also acted as the judge in your criminal trial? That's the point here, to separate lawmaking and interpretive power from the enforcers. Consolidation of power is dangerous because it doesn't work.

in accordance with the Administrative Procedures Act

This ruling made clear that the Chevron doctrine was not in line with the APA,

"Courts must exercise their independent judgment in deciding whether an agency has acted within its statutory authority, as the APA requires."

https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/23pdf/22-451_7m58.pdf

The Reddits 2 years ago

I'd argue their success comes from making people think they're in an open discussion forum, or at least know when they're moderated, when in fact users get moderated left and right without their knowledge.

And rather than addressing that problem, with this IPO they've heaped on another one.

The Reddits 2 years ago

Interesting, it has a del.icio.us scraper. I still don't understand why that site disappeared, it was great. By my recollection, Yahoo bought it and killed it.

In the case of shadow banning, you haven't kicked them off your property. You're asking them to stay while you earn ad money from their attention.

See the linked tweet for a more lawyerly argument in defense of shadow banning. The question before the court may hinge upon whether or not shadow banning expresses a message.

Thank you for the question. I can think of two reasons:

(1) You wouldn't want someone to secretly remove or demote your own commentary. But secretive content moderation is extremely common on today's major platforms. In order to be heard there, you would need to fight back against the practice, and you cannot effectively do that while keeping secrets yourself.

(2) Undisclosed content moderation does not express any kind of message, and therefore the platforms' use of it may not even be protected by the first amendment.

#2 is currently under discussion in a few cases before the Supreme Court:

https://twitter.com/rhaksw/status/1752367424303771948

Full moderation logs are different than showing submitters how their posts have been moderated.

On HN, my understanding is that you (moderators) can penalize stories without the submitter's knowledge. But if HN instead disclosed that penalty to the story's submitter, that would help this community communicate better.

As for how it works elsewhere, if a YouTube channel removes your comment, you won't know [1]. Same thing on Reddit, Facebook, and X. So while HN is relatively small, the practice of withholding content moderation decisions from submitters/commenters is widespread.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8e6BIkKBZpg

Wtf are you talking about? He’s literally telling us and has mentioned in the community many times that flagging quickly crushes a story.

It's discussed in the link, and elsewhere [1]. Some mod actions on HN are transparent, some are not. You should not assume that, just because you see marks of some form of moderation, that you can see them all.

Undisclosed content moderation is like directly modifying your production database. It's faster, but always more troublesome. Nobody else knows what changed or why, etc.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36435312

Communities would get a good sense for the frequency if forums would simply disclose content moderation to the submitting users. Offending users would learn what's not allowed and share that with the community.

But today's forums frequently do not disclose moderation to submitting users, and that is why we are now seeing major court cases over 230, government-led censorship, etc.

Robin89, can you please fix the text? know that was just a mistaken good-faith assumption but it's super wrong.

How can he/we verify it's wrong? The down-weighting you describe is not visible to users. Even OP won't know.

You can say that down-weighting happens, but we're asking to see where down-weighting happens.

It was in the official docs:

Often, it may be advantageous to shadowban a troll or spammer rather than ban them - an actual ban simply tells them that it's time to create a new account. With a shadowban, they don't know they've been banned. [1]

They've since renamed that to a "bot ban", but the effect is the same. Anyway, all comment removals on Reddit are shadow banned by default. You can try it yourself by commenting in r/CantSayAnything [2]. Your comment will be removed, you won't receive any notification, and it will still appear to you as if it's not removed.

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/AutoModerator/wiki/library?v=acf57c...

[2] https://old.reddit.com/r/CantSayAnything/about/sticky

At least according to the words attributed to the former head of safety there, it IS complicated.

Yoel is talking about telling people WHY their content was actioned. Such removal reasons are not categorized according to Twitter's rules, they are stored in free-form text notes. So sure, assigning a rule to each of those would take time.

But it should take zero time to place a "demoted or removed" status on content so that the account owner can see its true status.

Bare notice [1] should take zero time to implement. Just show users the true status [2]. Reasons for removal can come later. Right now everyone is still in the dark, and it's a year after acquisition.

It is way too easy to shadowban on social media. Some mods are not only brazen about shadowbanning, they also suggest digital IDs would be a substitute [3].

However, once we move to digital IDs, I doubt shadowbanning will go anywhere. Just like we pay for ads on cable TV, shadowbanning will always be a thing. Don't fall for the line, "we'll stop when X happens."

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WrZs-A0ETjY&t=2603s

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8e6BIkKBZpg

[3] https://twitter.com/rhaksw/status/1689887293002379264

Your first three points are blind assertions without supporting justification or basis.

You asked me for an alternative and I gave one.

You yourself have expressed concern over HN silently re-weighting topics [1].

You don't see transparent moderation as a solution to that?

The fact that some spammers overcome some countermeasures in no way demonstrates that...

Once a spammer knows the system he can create infinite amounts of content. When a forum keeps mod actions secret, that benefits a handful of people.

We already established that secrecy elbows out trustful people, right? Or, do you dispute that? I've answered many of your questions. Please answer this one of mine.

That removing such blocks and practices would improve overall site quality.

To clarify my own shade of grey, I do not support shadow moderation. I support transparent-to-the-author content moderation. I also support the legal right for forums to implement shadow moderation.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36435312

What alternative(s) do you propose?

A forum should not do things that elbow out trustful people.

That means, don't lie to authors about their actioned content. Forums should show authors the same view that moderators get. If a post has been removed, de-amplified, or otherwise altered in the view for other users, then the forum should indicate that to the post's author.

How do you think spammers and abusers will exploit those options?

Spammers already get around and exploit all of Reddit's secretive measures. Mods regularly post to r/ModSupport about how users have circumvented bans. Now they're asking forums to require ID [1].

Once shadow moderation exists on a forum, spammers can then create their own popular groups that remove truthful content.

Forums that implement shadow moderation are not belling cats. They sharpen cats' claws.

[1] https://twitter.com/rhaksw/status/1689887293002379264