Exploring Content Moderation in the Decentralised Web: The Pleroma Case

TL;DR

This paper investigates how federation policies in decentralised web platforms like Pleroma influence content moderation, highlighting potential negative effects on users and proposing solutions to improve fairness and effectiveness.

Contribution

It provides the first analysis of federation policies in the Decentralised Web, examining their real-world usage and impact on users, and suggests ways to mitigate adverse effects.

Findings

Federation policies can negatively affect innocent users.

Current policies are often used in unintended ways.

Proposed solutions aim to improve moderation fairness.

Abstract

Decentralising the Web is a desirable but challenging goal. One particular challenge is achieving decentralised content moderation in the face of various adversaries (e.g. trolls). To overcome this challenge, many Decentralised Web (DW) implementations rely on federation policies. Administrators use these policies to create rules that ban or modify content that matches specific rules. This, however, can have unintended consequences for many users. In this paper, we present the first study of federation policies on the DW, their in-the-wild usage, and their impact on users. We identify how these policies may negatively impact "innocent" users and outline possible solutions to avoid this problem in the future.