Bryan Pendleton @bp@qoto.org

Yearly reminder to not give money to the Salvation Army. It is not a charity, it's a fundamentalist Christian organization that supports anti-queer policies. Support mutual aid resources instead.

#SalvationArmy

Yearly holiday reminder - if someone says they don't want an alcoholic drink, that's all they need to say. Unless they offer, it's none of your business if they're in recovery, have a health issue, or just don't feel like it. Don't be the one who makes it weird.

I see repeated claims that content moderation isn't that big a problem, that it "can be done with AI", etc. Anyone who says this is unlikely in the extreme to have worked with UGC (User Generated Content) at scale.

While AI/ML is getting better, and can be useful as a first level filtering mechanism, the false positive and false negative error rates tend to be quite high. It's pretty obvious why. Without a human understanding of context, sarcasm, and the constantly evolving tricky ways of authoring a post, etc., it's easy to mischaracterize a post.

Major social media firms who care about the quality of their content utilize the services of large numbers of humans in conjunction with automated systems. They work not only to deal with posts those systems find confusing, but also to deal with flagged posts and user appeals.

Find a large social media firm that doesn't employ enough human moderators working from a set of ethical rules, and you've found a social media firm whose content is likely full of toxic posts.

#Twitter

There's A LOT of discussion about content moderation right now and very little of it touches on the fact that we've all lived on the big social sites for the last decade-plus thanks to the massively exploitated labor of mostly-invisible moderation workers. The social web at scale wouldn't have happened without these laborers, who in addition to shit wages, have been exposed to literally every imaginable horror.

If we're remaking this world, let's do better on that front.

Sigh. I should not have to point out that some #BlackMastodon friends have been booted for EXISTING.

Or to point out AGAIN that *moving to another instance as Black people in circumstances where white people don’t IS ALSO AN OPPRESSION DYNAMIC.

You don’t have to listen. You don’t have to care.

I am not addressing even you - why would I discussing drowning with WATER??

https://mastodon.social/@Tinu/109321899146294406

Disturbed by reports of Black Mastodon users—Black women in particular—having negative experiences on this app, including being randomly banned for discussions of racism. Some of these users will not come back. All will share their experiences. The answer is not to condescendingly lecture them on “how the fediverse works,” as if their experiences are inevitable, nor to swear to do better next time. (There may not be one.) It’s to do better now lest the reputation of this app be cemented.

Pediatrician here. I care for LGBTQ+ youth.

Many state & federal leaders decrying #ColoradoSprings are the same ones given ample chances to vote for #LGBTQ policies to help our community, but don’t. Many support anti-LGBTQ laws.

Homo/transphobia & violence are a direct result.