Discussion
oh goddess: people there on the bluest of sky, people who never used a social media platform with an edit buttion, are telling each other horror stories about what a dystopian nightmare would be a platform that allows edits.
people will rationalize lack of platform capabilities into virtue every single time.
@mawhrin as useful as the edit function is, it really does open up a whole bunch of abuse possibilities. of course the funny thing on Bluesky is that you actually can edit posts if you know the trick, and the abuse cases aren't fully thought through there, so it really is the worst of all worlds.
then again it's not like people thought through the abuse cases with the implementations here either, and my guess is that it's only a matter of time until there's a high-profile situation on fedi. but there are enough other paths for spamming and harassment here (well and on Bluesky too) that there's plenty of low-hanging fruit that's likely to get exploited first.
@jdp23 i haven't seen that particular scenario even on facebook, which was the most toxic platform i ever used.
in all situations that i have seen, where the edit button was available, it seems that providing a visible change history is enough to stop people from trying that specific exploit.
@jdp23 (though i wish mastodon offered a visual diff along with the change history)
@mawhrin this is a difference between the centralized case of Facebook (etc) and decentralized social networks. In a centralized situation, people report the malicious change, and the history makes it esy to verify that yep it's malicious, and it gets taken down quickly. And they're doing automated moderation, so in the really egregious cases like putting the kind of violent images that give people nightmares in people's faces, it's likely to get taken down before anybody even sees it.
In fedi, there generally isn't any automated moderation, so the images are going to propagate. And if the post is from a self-hosted instance, or an instance with malicious admin, then the reporting and takedowns have to happen on an instance-by-instance basis -- which not only exposes thousands of moderators to the grisly (or racist, or anti-rans, or whatever) stuff, but also means that it's going to be up on most instances for a while because volunteer moderators don't always respond instantly.
Even in cases where it's only disinfo, it's not really clear how much the history helps (other than allowing reporters and moderators to verify that it's changed). Most people don't check the history of posts, so if they see something that somebody they follow has boosted -- or has been widely-enough boosted to get into the trending lists -- they're likely to believe it. So I really do see it as likely to get exploited at some point.
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