[LINK] silly idea re trolls?

[Stephen Loosley]

Hey K .. sounds good to me.

One thing perhaps you should add, and that is, the word "Copyright", followed by the year of the first publication of the work and the name of the copyright holder.

Of course, this is notwithstanding the Berne Convention Implementation Act of 1988 (BCIA), 102 Stat. 2853, 2857. Whereby, one of the changes introduced by the BCIA was to section 401, which governs copyright notices on published copies, specifying that notices such as the above "may be placed on" such copies; prior to the BCIA, the statute read that notices "shall be placed on all" such copies.  And of course, and as an alternative, maybe you might consider a CC version: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creative_Commons

But whatever, this should suffice anyway: https://mailman.anu.edu.au/pipermail/link/2021-September/107877.html

And, have you had any thoughts regards an initial and beta .exe of this?

Early days of course, but one thinks maybe you should fella. 😊


From: Karl Auer<mailto:kauer at biplane.com.au>
Sent: Saturday, 11 September 2021 5:29 PM
To: Link List<mailto:link at anu.edu.au>
Subject: [LINK] silly idea re trolls?

I just had what may or may not be a silly idea about a way to deal with
trolls and extremism in forums like Facebook. It doesn't deal with the
issue of detecting bad content, it just deals with the content when
detected.

It's similar to greylisting, a technique used against email spam.

The idea is to delay posts identified as "bad" (by whatever criteria)
or from a poster identified as "bad" (by whatever criteria). Posts are
flagged as "delayed because of content" or "delayed because of source"
accordingly.

The messages are not published immediately. To be published, the exact
same message must be posted again, no earlier than some specified later
time. The exact same message posted before then will simply be
discarded. If it's not the exact same message, it gets treated as a new
message and if detected as bad will get its own delay applied. If a
message is never reposted, it is deleted (say) 24 hours after the
initial delay expired. Only if the message is reposted exactly as it
was, after the delay has expired, will it be published. Messages
exactly matching a message "delayed because of content", but from
different sources, will be delayed.

Identifying a post as bad simultaneously identifies the poster as bad.
All messages from that poster are delayed, and go into the "more
careful checks" queue.

The more problematic posts the same poster makes, the longer the delay
becomes. I'm thinking an initial two hour delay, then going up in
twelve-hour increments. Or start smaller but be exponential. If the
detection is up to it, start with larger delays for worse
transgressions.

The delay decays at a fixed rate - say two hours per day, so
rehabilitation is automatic.

Delays could/should be imposed on all responses made TO people with
known (bad) provocative effect. Any response to e.g. Trump (retweets,
reposts, replies etc) would automatically get the delay applied,
regardless of the respondent or the content of the response, and
regardless of whether any particular message from him was delayed.

Delays could be applied to messages/posters that use particular
hashtags or similar identifiers.

And finally, any response to a post that was delayed because of
content, gets delayed.

All this is on top of other avenues against serious transgressors, such
as banning them outright, deleting seriously bad material and so on.

In my head this should have several good effects:
- it does NOT stop people saying what they want to say, if they really
want to say it

- it gives a publisher such as Facebook more time to deal with a
problem poster or a problem post (e.g apply a ban or decide to not
accept the repost)

- it sorts pending responses neatly by seriousness (if the detection
process is good)

- it reduces the explosive effect of instant responses around events or
provocative messages from others

- it will give people time to consider that a) the platform finds their
post objectionable and thus b) do they really want to say it?

- only the most persistent will actually repost their messages

- a delay can be applied immediately with little harm being done to
freedom of speech; automation of this measure is less dangerous

- even if someone writes software to automatically repost delayed
messages, the delay is still in there.

Bad effects would be:
- it imposes delays on those seeking to debunk or otherwise defend
against a bad post. Given that such messaging generally just feeds the
trolls, I'm not sure it's a big problem. And good posters, if they are
keen, can repost just like the bad ones.

- someone with a delay imposed who seeks to make an emergency
communication via the platform would see that communication delayed
too.

- I can see a form of DDoS if someone posts a great many almost
identical messages seeking to overwhelm the badness detectors, but I
think that measures already exist to cope with it. If a single source
does this, it is relatively easy to detect and to block or rate-limit.

- the whole thing does need a badness detector for the platform.

So - is it a silly idea?

Regards, k.

--
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Karl Auer (kauer at biplane.com.au)
http://www.biplane.com.au/kauer

GPG fingerprint: 61A0 99A9 8823 3A75 871E 5D90 BADB B237 260C 9C58
Old fingerprint: 2561 E9EC D868 E73C 8AF1 49CF EE50 4B1D CCA1 5170



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