I recently discovered that some popular federated instances have been using LLM-assisted moderation tooling that evaluates whether someone has said something bannable. They do this by running a script/app that sends the user’s comment history to OpenAI with the question “analyze this content for evidence of specific political ideology sentiment. Also identify any related political ideology tropes“. (The italic bits are where I’ve redacted the ideology they’re seeking).
OpenAI’s LLM (they’re using GPT-5.3-mini) then responds with something like:
and so on, hundreds of comments.
I have not named the instances or people involved, to give them time to consider the results of this discussion, make any corrective changes they want and disclose their practices at their own pace and in their own way. I have also redacted the evidence to avoid personal attacks and dogpiling. Let’s focus on the system, not the individuals involved. Today these instances and people are using it and maybe we’re ok with that because it’s being used by groups we agree with but what if people we strongly disagree with used it on their instances tomorrow?
The use and existence of this tooling raises a lot of other questions too.
What are the risks? Fedi moderators are often unsupervised, untrained volunteers and these are powerful tools.
What safeguards do we need?
Would asking a LLM “please evaluate this person’s political opinions” give different results than “find evidence we can use to ban them” (as used in the cases I’ve seen)?
What are our transparency expectations?
Is this acceptable and normal?
Should this tooling be disclosed? (it was not – should it have been?)
If you were given a choice, would you have opted out of it?
Can we opt out?
Are there GDPR implications? Privacy implications? Should these tools be described in a privacy policy?
Are private messages being scanned and sent to OpenAI?
How long should these assessments be retained and can we request to see it, or ask for it to be deleted?
Once the user’s comments are sent to OpenAI, is it used to train their models?
What will the effect be on our discourse and culture if people know they are being politically profiled?
Where are the lines between normal moderation assistance tools, political profiling and opaque 3rd-party data processing?
I hope that by chewing over these questions we can begin to establish some norms and expectations around this technology. The fediverse doesn’t have any centralized enforcement so we need discussions like this to develop an awareness of what people want in terms of disclosure, privacy, consent and acceptable use. Then people can make choices about which instances they join and which ones they interact with remotely.
And of course there are the other issues with LLMs relating to environmental sustainability, erosion of worker’s rights, increasing the cost of living and on and on. I can’t see PieFed adding any functionality like this anytime soon. But it’s happening out there anyway so now we need to talk about it.
What do you make of this?
Thank you for calling this out. I think people assume that since it’s held by private instance owners that the fediverse is secure. I’ve posted this comment many times, that no, the fediverse is quite literally by design open and unencrypted.
A post is literally blasted out to anyone who listens, same with comments, upvotes, downvotes, everything can be saved, stored, and used for whatever anyone who listens wants. It should be completely assumed that nefarious agencies are currently listening and storing everything we do here. This is by design. It’s the tradeoff we have of having an open platform. Anyone can spin up a server, and that means anyone.
DMs are similar, they’re blasted out to the other server. If the server admin of the user in question wants to read them, they can. Lemmy/the fediverse is not a secure messaging platform. That’s why the Lemmy devs literally put a Matrix handle option in the profile, to encourage people to use Matrix instead. A DM on here should be simple, to the point, and if need be, inviting them to speak on something secure.
Edit - As a perfect example of the fact that there should be no expectation of privacy here on Lemmy, as an Admin myself, I can see that @A_normy_mouse has been downvoting all of my comments here. Absolutely everything here is public and visible, even if I weren’t an admin there are tools to view this, regardless of your opinions. It’s imperative that everyone understand this.
Edit 2 OP as well has downvoted me. @rimu@piefed.social I’m sorry if you disagree, but it’s irrelevant. Everything you do here can and should be assumed will be used in any way that you disagree with, that is the nature of the fediverse. Mastodon, Pixelfed, Piefed, Lemmy: ActivityPub is an open and unencrypted protocol. Even if it were encrypted, you still put 100% of your trust in your server admin, and beyond that each server admin you are blasting your messages out to.
I’d highly suggest accepting this fact before trying to push for rules. The very nature of the Fediverse is that no one can dictate rules, and to do that the tradeoff quite literally is that everything is open and unecrypted.
Another way to think of this. I run a server myself. I made my own rules and decided how to run it. Now your server starts sending activity to my server. That’s your server’s choice. I didn’t agree to your rules, I may disagree with your rules, but you’re sending your data to my server, of which I have complete and total ownership over. I didn’t click accept on a ToS, I didn’t agree to anything. Hell on my server I could literally have a “By sending me your data you accept that I can do whatever I want with your data”. You sent me your data, I quite literally can do whatever I want. (Personally I won’t, but that’s how you should think of the fediverse)
While you are technically correct, you’re implying that the “natural” state is a good enough state and nothing should be done about it.
My house has walls and a door; it doesn’t mean anyone can do anything they want with this. Even if the windows are clear, you’re not supposed to install a camera that watches my bedroom. Even if the door is open, you’re not supposed to open. A a society it has been decided that we should respect each other, respect each other’s privacy. We have created rules, some written down and some implicit, for how to interact with each other.
That is the point of OP. The “natural” state of whatever exists with the technical means, but that doesn’t mean it’s ok (or not ok): do we want to respect each other ? To take care of each other ? I very much want that, because the technical means should be only a means to an end, and in that end I want respect. The technical means, to me, must adapt to the end, not the other way around.
I mean with the fediverse your house becomes more like a library, more still, everyone gets a copy of what you have that they never have to return. You can ask people not to do x or y with the text but at the end of the day there is nothing you can do to enforce it, sans defederation of course. But the main sticking point, data being fed to a 3rd party LLM, is moot if we’re talking about openAI which already crawls lemmy.world. Or in fact any website intended to be found via search engines (and then some). Anything you post on lemmy.world (the instance hosting this thread e.g.) will already be added to the chatGPT training set.
lol @ Rimu downvoting your post. Be careful he’s probably going to make a hit piece against you next!
Or just delete them entirely from piefed.social social 😂
That’s what he does when he doesn’t have anything he can say against you.
Idk. This and previous threads just lead to them saying well you just can be trusted or why don’t you believe me over your lying eyes
Those removal happened in the context of a mod calling Rimu a zionist (which he’s not)
It didn’t happen out of nowhere.
He’s been doing that for a long time.
Is that supposed to make it better?
Rimu is not a Zionist. It’s this wrong accusation that escalated the tensions. I’ll clarify my comment.
That didn’t address anything even with the clarification as it’s his go to response. He’s been doing it since the instance was stood up
In this specific case, even the dbzer0 admin agreed it was undeserved:
https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/modlog?userId=7015938
Which other removals from Piefed.social are you referring to?
What are you talking about? It’s nothing to do with db0 and rimu. Rimu will delete accounts off piefed.social social if a user displeases them or mwog tells them too.
How did you get to db0 banning rimu out of rimu deleted the accounts of people they don’t like?
Btw with this and the statistics post it may be better for everyone if rimu was still banned
Edit, oh just using rimus talking points to also distract. Blaze please please please stop being star struck by rimu
https://lemmy.world/comment/23565992
You’re hyperfocusing on one point, as if that’s the only part that matters and ignoring all the rest. I don’t consider that helpful, hence the downvote.
What is especially unhelpful is abusing your admin access to call out people’s votes. Leave that shit alone.
Focusing on a point that one can address best and making the best possible case for/against it is probably better than trying to address everything at once.
Plus, if the full argument can be made without the weakest point, it should be. And if it cannot, then it cannot be made at all.
That is quite literally my point. Everything, absolutely everything here is open and can be used however any instance owner wants. You can say “leave that shit alone”, but there is no obligation to whatsoever.
You should assume every instance owner can and is viewing all of your private data, sending it through whatever LLM/mod tools they want. Are they? Probably not. But they can, and there is no obligation not to.
And there is no obligation to federate with you. Please don’t publicly discuss users’ votes.
You are correct, and it’s what I was suggesting op do if they don’t like what other admins do. It’s right there.
As for viewing votes there’s a whole site dedicated to showing everyone’s votes, it’s called Lemvotes. Feel free to say please, but people are still going to do it. Votes and everything elsewhere are very much public, best to get used to that now.
Which is why we’re not federated with it. Pasting lemmy.ml links returns a 404 error.
Interesting, so even you have no way to know whether I was one of the downvotes on this comment?
As an admin I see all the votes. At least all the votes on instances federated with lemmy.ml, which is almost all of them.
Great. You show me an 10 foot fence I’ll show you an 11 foot ladder. Go ahead and audit every server that federates with you, send them a questionaire. There’s absolutely nothing stopping the next lemvotes from setting another server up, and there is nothing stopping any three letter agency from setting up their own listening server.
Yeah you can do that but now you’re on my do-not-trust list. And probably a few other people’s lists.
I appreciate you being open about your opinions because now I can make an more informed choice about interacting with you and the instance you run.
Don’t you think everyone deserves the information they need to choose which instances they want to interact with, according to whatever criteria is important to them? Even if your criteria are different?
GOOD. NO ONE should be trusted here! I’m just some guy who decided to spin up a server, there should be zero trust! THIS IS MY POINT.
This depends on the trustworthiness of the admin themselves, and even then every admin is just some person who decided to spin up a server, just like me. Trust is built and earned, it shouldn’t be implicit. The option you have is to defederate, or leave and join another server.
I’m really not trying to be an asshole here, but your post is what caused me to do this. This is not a unique post, this is a fundamental core principal of the fediverse that every user must understand. That by being here, it is not a private secure place, you are quite literally blasting every comment, post, and upvote, to whoever wants to listen. Literally everyone. Any semblance of privacy is purely a UI trait. Rules/guidance is purely 100% based on what each server owner chooses.
It’s absolutely wild that the obvious needed to be pointed out at all, and that the reaction to it was ‘you just made my list, buddy’.
That’s a stupid take, you’re basically shooting the messenger here.
Stop throwing a tantrum like a child. You ranted. You were explained why your tantrum is pointless. Move on.
Are you J Edgar Hoover? Anyone who gives you mild criticism must be tagged and marked for distrust?
This is the person calling you a tankie. Someone so afraid of words that they need a hallucinating robot to hold their hand and confirm that everything is a secret plot against them. The absolute only way I could see this being useful is for something like trying to sniff out if a Lemmy.world mod account is a leftist infiltrator or not.
You could maybe run a speech pattern comparison but that’s it. For everything else you just made Stupid Reddit and the purpose of their forum is to feed training data to ChatGPT so that it can profile Fediverse users.
Huh? What exactly are your expectations here, that everybody addresses every point in every comment? You just listed like 2 dozen points of discussion in the op, every comment would be an essay. Scrubbles has a good point that should honestly be foundational to the discussion, and they’re being respectful, so I really don’t understand what your problem is here.
If you really wanted their take on your other points, instead of downvoting you could’ve just asked for it. You know, have a discussion? Or just let it stand alone, it’s still a valid take.
Anyone (anyone) can be an admin of their own instance, there’s absolutely nothing exclusive about it. Hell you don’t even have to go through the work of doing that, there’s other tools. Lemmy/Piefed are super open, by design.
And any admin can ban someone or defederate from someone’s instance for doing it.
If Lemmy could have kept the votes hidden, it would have, but the nature of federation precludes it. So instead is does the best it can to not make them obvious. In the case of lemvotes.org, lemmy.ml is defederated from it so that it doesn’t have access to our votes.
Our instances voted not to defederate from lemvotes, so votes are effectively public.
Everyone has admin access, including you…
I don’t think I do.
Agreed. This is poor form, and ban-worthy if continued.