Call me crazy, but I a) think the fediverse probably doesn’t have more ‘toxic content’, harmful and violent content, and child sexual abuse material then other platforms like X, Facebook, Meta, YouTube etc, and b) actively like the fediverse because of that.
But after a few hours carefully drafting and sourcing an edit to make it clear that no, the fediverse isn’t unusual in social media circles for having a lot of toxic content, I realised that the entire ‘fediverse bad’ section was added by 1 editor in 2 days. And the editor has made an awful lot of edits on pages all themed around porn (hundreds of edits on the pages of porn stars), suicide, mass killings, mass shootings, Jews, torture techniques, conspiracy theories, child abuse, various forms of sexual and other exploitation, ‘zoosadism’, and then pages with titles like ‘bad monkey’ that seemed reasonably innocent until I actually clicked on them to see what they were and, well.
I decided to stop using the internet for a while.
I’ve learned my lesson trying to change Wikipedia edits written by people like that - they tend to have a tight social circle of people who can make the internet a very unpleasant place for anyone suggesting maybe claims like ‘an opinion poll indicated that most people in Britain would prefer to live next to a sewage plant than a Muslim’ should maybe not on Wikipedia on the thin evidence of paywalled link from a Geocities page written by, apparently, a putrid cesspit personified.
I thought I’d learned my lesson about trusting Wikipedia.
It just makes me so angry that most people’s main source of information on the fediverse contains a massive chunk written solely by a guy who spends most of his time making minor grammar edits to pages about school shootings, collections of pages about black people who were sexually assaulted and murdered, etc, and that these people control the narrative on Wikipedia by means of ensuring any polite critics’ are overcome with the urge to spend the rest of the day showering and disinfecting everything.
I’ve just seen your edit and the material added to the Fediverse entry on Wikipedia, your assertions seem well founded although I’m not tied into Wikipedia’s Mod community and the motivations of users therein. You’re definitely right that the Fediverse isn’t exactly a node of objectionable content, frankly I’ve seen none, although admittedly I haven’t plumbed the depths of every single instance. Their assertion should be noted though, that the Fediverse is wide open for abuse despite IMO not already being affected by the same volume as other platforms.
By their own numbers, the volume of CSAM was 0.03%, the volume of CSAM posted alongside keywords was 0.17%, the volume of CSAM posted with known associated hashtags was 0.22%, and 0.37% contained text related that kid of content. Less than ideal, you could say, given the nature of the content in question. The real crux of the matter seems to be whether or not it will increase, and whether or not Lemmy’s Mods have the capacity to moderate the content like other platforms IMO, but their claim that “toxic or abusive content being common in the Fediverse” is more than slightly overblown even in considering the material.
I get your point, but the 'real crux of the matter ’ is very much - what is the fediverse. That’s what an encyclopedia is for. It defines things.
Wikipedia is not the place to highlight or discuss the moral or legal standards that every entity must meet. That would be ridiculous.
Chicken soup is subject to at least 10,000 individual regulatory restrictions (no poisons, name must reflect content, pay this tax to enter this country, staff must be paid and free and blah blah, no more than x foreign substances, must not go rancid within this time frame, can’t be packaged in a paper envelope). Some, like the workers’ rights and fair pricing and amount of weird chemicals, are actually pretty important human rights issues that have very real, immediate effects of the health and wellbeing of various population groups.
Should they all be on the Wikipedia article for chicken soup? All of them? If so, I have news about the laws, restrictions, relations, challenges, emerging research, etc, into vegetable soup. And also tomato soup. And, in fact, every processed food. And if that looks a bit ridiculous, consider the ethical considerations of the tea industry. It’s horrific (source: I’m English). It’s been horrific for hundreds of years now and has literally ended nations, killed millions of people, and doesn’t look like it’s in the final stretch of being solved.
It is, therefore, probably too much to include on a page about a new cruelty-free brand of iced tea that’s just taking off. People would go to that page to read about that brand of iced tea, not tea in general, and certainly not the troubled history and socio-political scandals of the tea trade in general, unless they had a beef with the iced tea brand.
Which, I suspect, is what happened on the fediverse page. And I didn’t put the flags on the page, or remove the content, but I’m glad someone did.
I think this kind of critical analysis of the Fediverse could be completely right in every single one of the details and still miss the more important point that corporate social networks are being used in a directly hostile fashion towards vulnerable people RIGHT NOW to a near catastrophic degree of negligence to put things in the most charitable terms possible. Further the people who own those corporations publicly endorse narratives that invisiblize the violence happening to real human beings.
Realize that by getting lost in a baseball stats esque evaluation of the Fediverse that we cede ground already to people who are disengenous. We have to consider the context of the alternative reality of corporate social media to fairly evaluate the Fediverse.
You’re right, yes, op point. I’m not getting lost in the stats per se, and nearly turned my reply into an essay addressing the information readily available, but it bears saying given the nature of the info in the Wiki edit. You’ll find no corpo booster here in my camp, the very purposeful abuse (Mod or otherwise) of some users/groups on social media has been readily observable even beyond the purges of Antifascist and leftist groups.