In mid-April we learned about Bluesky censoring accounts as demanded by the government of Türkiye. While I haven’t seen coverage of who the account-holders were and what they said, the action followed on protests against Turkish autocrat Erdoğan for ordering the arrest of an opposition leader — typical behavior by a thin-skinned Führer-wannabe. This essay concerns how we might think about censorship, its mechanics, and how the ecosystems built around ActivityPub and ATproto can implement and/or fight it.
That link above is to TechCrunch’s write-up of the situation, which is good. There’s going to be overlap between that and this but neither piece is a subset of the other, so you might want to read TechCrunch too.
Censorship goals and non-goals · How, as the community of people who live and converse online, should we want our decentralized social media to behave?
I’m restricting this to decentralized social media because the issues around censorship differ radically between a service owned and controlled by a profit-seeking corporation, and an ecosystem of interoperating providers who may not be in it for the money.
So, from the decentralized point of view, what should be the core censorship goals? As Mencken said, “For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong.” Here are two of those:
No censorship. Let people say what they will and the contest of ideas proceed. Freedom of speech must be absolute.
Suppress any material which is illegal in the jurisdiction where the human participant is located. Stop there, because making policy in this area is not the domain of of social-media providers.
“Free speech”? · The absolutists’ position is at least internally consistent. But it has two fatal flaws, one generic and one specific. In general, a certain proportion of people are garbage and will post terrible, hateful, damaging things that make the online experience somewhere in the range between unpleasant and intolerable, to the extent that many who deserve to be heard will be driven away.
And specifically, history teaches us that certain narratives are dangerous to civic sanity and human life: Naziism, revanchism, hypernationalism, fomenting ethnic hatred, and so on.
Another way to put this: Everyone has a basic right to free speech, but nobody has a right to be listened to.
So, the Free Speech purists can now please show themselves out. (Disclosure: I didn’t mean that “please”.)
“Rule of law”? · I can get partially behind this. If you’re running a social-media service in a civilized democratic country and posting X is against the law, you’d better think carefully about allowing X. (Not saying that civil disobedience is always wrong, just that you need to think about it.)
But mostly no. The legalist approach suffers from positive and negative failures. Negative, as in censoring-is-wrong: I really DGAF about Turkish legal restrictions, because they’re more or less whatever Erdoğan says they are, and Erdoğan is a tinpot tyrant. Similarly, on Trump’s current trajectory it’ll soon be illegal to express anti-Netanyahu sentiment in the USA.
Positive, as in not-censoring is wrong: Lolicon is legal in Japan and treated like CSAM elsewhere. Elsewhere is right, Japan is wrong. Another example: Anti-trans hate is increasingly cheerled by conservative culture warriors all over the place and is now the official policy of the British government. Sir Keith Starmer would probably be suspended from my Mastodon instance and invited to find somewhere else, except for somewhere else would be mass-defederated if it tolerated foolish bigots like Starmer.
How Bluesky does it · (I should maybe say “How ATproto does it” but this seems more reader-friendly.) It’s not as though they pushed some button and silenced the hated-by-Erdoğan accounts. In fact, it’s subtle and complicated. For details, see Bluesky, censorship and country-based moderation by Laurens Hof at The Fediverse Report. Seriously, if you think you might have an opinion about Bluesky and what they’re doing, go read Hof before you share it.
Having said that, I think I can usefully offer a short form. Bluesky supports the use of multiple composable moderation services, and client software can decide which of them to subscribe to. It provides a central moderation service aimed at stopping things like CSAM and genocide-cheerleading that’s designed to operate at the scale of the whole network, which seems good to me.
It also offers “geographic moderation labelers”, which can attach “forbidden” signals to posts which are being read by people in particular areas. That’s what they did in this case; the Erdoğan-hated accounts had those labels attached to their posts, but only for people who are in Türkiye.
The default Bluesky client software subscribes to the geographic labeler and does as it’s told, which made Erdoğan and his toadies happy.
But anyone can write Bluesky client software, and there’s nothing in the technology that requires clients to subscribe to or follow the instructions of any moderation service. One alternate client, Deer.social, is a straightforward fork of the default, but with the geographic moderation removed. (It may have other features but looks about like basic Bluesky to me.)
How the Fediverse does it · (I should maybe say “How ActivityPub does it” or “How Mastodon does it” but…) Each instance does its own moderation and (this is important) makes its own decision as to which other instances to federate with. There are plenty of sites out there running Fediverse software that are full of CSAM and Lolicon and Nazis and so on. But the “mainstream” instances have universally defederated them, so it’s rare to run across that stuff. I never do.
To make things easy, there are “shared block-lists” that try to keep up-to-date on the malignant instances. It’s early days yet but I think this will be a growth area.
Most moderation is based on “reporting” — if you see something you think is abusive or breaks the rules, you can hit the “report” button, and the moderators for your instance and the source instance will get messaged and can decide what to do about it.
The effect is that there is a shared culture across a few thousand “mainstream” instances that leads, in my opinion, to a pretty pleasing atmosphere and low abuse level. We have a problem in that it’s still too easy to for a bad person to post abusive stuff in a way that is hard for moderators to see, but it’s being worked on and I’m optimistic.
Dealing with Erdoğan: Bluesky · So, suppose we want our social-media services to route around Erdoğan’s attempts to silence his political opponents. I do. How effective would Bluesky and the Fediverse be at that?
Bluesky makes it easy: Just use an alternate client. Yay! Except for, most people don’t and won’t and shouldn’t have to. Boo!
Still I dunno, in a place where the politics is hot, the word might get out on the grapevine and a lot of people could give another client a try. Maybe? Back in the day a lot of people used alternate Twitter clients, until Twitter stomped those out. I’m not smart enough to predict whether this could really be effective at routing round Erdoğan. I lean pessimistic though.
Wait, what about the Bluesky Web interface? Who needs a client anyhow! No luck; it turns out that that’s a big fat React app with mostly the same code that’s in the mobile apps. Oh well.
Anyhow, this ignores the real problem. Which is that if Erdoğan’s goons notice that people are dodging the censorship they’ll go nuclear on Bluesky (the company) and tell them to just stop displaying those people’s posts and to do it right fucking now.
If that doesn’t work, they have a lot of options, starting with just blocking access to bsky.app, and extending to arresting any in-country staff or, even better, their families. And throwing them in an unheated basement. I dunno, a courageous and smart company might be able to fight back, but it wouldn’t be a good situation.
And that’s a problem, because even though the ATproto is by design decentralized, in practice there’s only one central service that routes the firehose of posts globally. So my bet would be that Erdoğan wins.
Dealing with Erdoğan: Fediverse · This is a very different picture. Block access to the app and a lot of people won’t notice because they use the browser, connecting to one of the thousands of Fediverse instances, desktop or mobile, and it’ll work fine. OK, how about finding out which instances the people they’re trying to ban are on, and going after those instances? If the instance is in a rule-of-law democracy, the Turks would probably be told to go pound sand.
OK, so what if the Turks ferociously attacked the home servers of the Thought Criminals? No problemo, they’d migrate to a more resilient instance and, since this is the Fediverse, their followers might never notice, they’d just come along with them.
Pretty quickly the Erdoğan gang are gonna end up playing whack-a-mole. In fact I think it’s going to be really, really hard in general for oppressive governments to censor the Fediverse. Not impossible; the people who operate the Great Firewall would probably find a way.
When Bluesky progresses to the point that there isn’t a single essential company at the center of everything, it should be censorship-resilient too, for the same reasons.
Take-aways · I think that, to resist misguided censorship by misguided governments, we need (at least) these things:
A service with no central choke-points, but rather a large number of independent co-operating nodes.
Accounts, and the follower relationships between them, are not tied to any single node.
Clearly these conditions are necessary; we don’t know yet whether or not they’re sufficient. But I’m generally optimistic that decentralized social media has the potential to offer a pretty decent level of censorship resistance.