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?
Others are doing the same thing. This isn’t “weird” or bad judgment. I don’t like Kaplan but they did nothing wrong here.
Yes. If you skip over the entire problem, it does appear as if there is no problem. My issue is that he had to have his feet held to the fire over something that minor because he did not disclose it in the first place. If someone keeps trying to sneak shit past my face and then keeps backing down and going “Uwu sorry I add opt out” but then doesn’t add opt out for the other opinionated stuff that was not discovered yet, why would I applaud them? They’re still doing the bad thing.
What I’m saying is that even though admins know there were some opinions in the software, they still started Piefed instances. And that’s in a world where Lemmy exists.
In other words, every instance admins assesses whether the additional Piefed features make it worth it to accept the opinionated aspect of the software.
That’s the main value of Piefed here, and that’s why so many people prefer it compared to Lemmy. All the features people wanted, be it users, mods, admins, Rimu delivered them, and fast.
Doing something, even imperfectly, but listening to the users, still seem valuable to a lot of people. Some people obviously dislike it a lot, and expect the software to be written be a perfect person, but the devs behind Lemmy, Piefed and Mbin all have their flaws.