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?
this is flat out not ok, does not matter who is doing it. our instance ls should defederate all which do this.
I would opt out that’s no question, but I don’t believe it’s possible. GDPR does not matter here, as nothing can be proven unless the perpetrators give up themselves
What do you think of lemmy being searchable via search engines, since that’s how most of the training data is generated? Or that lemmy.world data is already in the OpenAI training sets?
I know that not much prevents ai crawlers to collect all the content, but I think it is very different when an admin feeds data to it. partly because it’s a different legal situation (sadly that does not mean much)
Firstly it’s apparently not an admin but a mod(s?) and I don’t think OP reached out to the admin of the instance before making this post otherwise they would have said as much
Secondly from a legal standpoint I don’t think there is much difference between an admin signing the instance up for a search engine (aka volunteering the data to be collected) and a mod feeding bits of data to an LLM piecemeal. If anything the former is worse than the latter.
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.
To me the problem is what they are looking for not how they are doing it. Thought experiment: in what way would it be qualitatively different if they hired a team of people in Upper Elbonia to do the same thing?
What if the specific ideology is something like nazism or zionism? What if that instance in already very open about not allowing that type of content?
sounds like a great opportunity to inject attack through a comment.
The answers to these kinds of issues is never disclosures or ToS or admin vigilance. It’s always technical. Everything which is technically possible will become normal.
Lemmy is not popular because it is a well designed piece of technology. Frankly it’s a pretty naive implementation of activitypub. It’s popularity comes from being the biggest alternative around when Reddit pissed off a good chunk of its users.
The only way to control how data is used, is to make it technically or practically impossible to do so. Until then, expect all the data on the fediverse to be used in every way possible for any purpose, and act accordingly.
I don’t see a technical or practical way to limit - let alone render impossible - AI moderation tools that is not at odds with decentralized open-protocol social media.
If you can copy-paste user activity into a textbox, this remains trivial.
If you’re not going to name them, why post here at all? Don’t you have other communication channels to “give them a fair chance to reply”? Why post here, letting users form their own assumptions about what those instances are without any solid evidence?
OP literally asks like 10 relevant questions for this place, and names their reasons for not naming specific instances. And all you focus on, is the question: who did it?
To me that is proof that OP did the right thing here.
Lets first figure out how to approach this without knowing the pupotrator.
The posts/comments on the fediverse are already public. The privacy questions are better answered here by another commenter:
My issue is that OP is not providing any solid proof. They are just giving 'wink wink’s about some ‘popular’ instances doing it. When asked whether they have proof, OP says they has proof of some mods doing it. Mods don’t handle instances, admins do. They haven’t yet provided any concrete proof, yet creating an impression that some instances are banning en masse using LLMs based on “political ideology”.
Well curated echo chambers. You might think it’s in a good faith, but a lot of these mods are only interested in removing political wrongthink.
Never mind the issue of incorrect political bias classification, is political bias a bannable offense? That seems to be the prompt focus being used.
Is it not public knowledge that lemmy already gets scraped by LLM bots? Which is why every bigger instance has anti-LLM measures in place now to limit that behavior? To me this just looks like a mod trying to get ai-generated reports which is not a bad idea imo since I know reporting is not often done by users who see rule breaking stuff.
This is AI generated bullshit below, it should be treated as such. I only want to convey the idea that what you do on lemmy is already fed to LLM’s.
here is chatgpt's reply for
What do you know about lemmy user and piefed dev rimu?Here’s a grounded picture of “rimu” in the Lemmy / fediverse context:
🧑💻 Who “rimu” is
- Rimu (Rimu Atkinson) is the lead developer of PieFed, a Reddit/Lemmy-style platform in the fediverse. (Elite AI Tools)
- He’s also the main author of the underlying software (pyfedi), built with Python/Flask and designed as an alternative to Lemmy and Mbin. (IFTAS)
- The flagship instance is piefed.social, which he runs and develops actively. (IFTAS)
🧩 Role in the fediverse
- He’s not just a random user—he’s a core project maintainer / “benevolent dictator” style lead for PieFed’s development. (PieFed)
- He’s fairly active on Lemmy via [email protected], with hundreds of posts and thousands of comments across tech, politics, and general discussion. (lemmy.world)
- He moderates multiple communities and participates in meta discussions about federation, scaling, and platform design. (lemmy.world)
🛠️ What PieFed (his project) is about
PieFed is positioned as:
-
A federated Reddit-like platform interoperable with Lemmy via ActivityPub (Elite AI Tools)
-
Focused on:
- Simplicity of codebase (easy for contributors) (PieFed)
- Trust/safety features (reputation systems, filtering, anti-spam tooling) (Elite AI Tools)
- Some experimental ideas, like merged cross-posts and AI-content detection (Elite AI Tools)
💬 Reputation & controversy
Rimu is somewhat known and occasionally controversial in fediverse circles:
-
Supporters see him as:
- A productive solo/lead dev shipping features quickly
- Someone pushing new ideas beyond Lemmy’s design
-
Critics argue:
- Some features reflect strong personal opinions embedded in the platform (e.g., moderation logic, reputation systems) (lemmy.world)
- PieFed can feel more opinionated / experimental compared to Lemmy’s more neutral baseline
Important nuance: because everything is open source and instance-configurable, many of these behaviors can be changed by instance admins.
🧠 What he’s like as a user
From his public activity:
- Talks about tech (ActivityPub, scaling, APIs)
- Engages in global politics and news discussions
- Shares design decisions and roadmap thoughts about PieFed
- Generally communicates in a direct, pragmatic developer tone
🧾 Bottom line
-
Rimu is a real, identifiable fediverse developer, not just a random Lemmy user.
-
He’s best understood as:
a lead dev + active community participant shaping an alternative to Lemmy
-
His visibility comes mainly from his project (PieFed) rather than mainstream recognition.
If you want, I can compare PieFed vs Lemmy vs Mbin in terms of ideology/design—that’s usually where discussions about Rimu get interesting.
Why be misunderstood from human reading comprehension when we can be misunderstood from sloppy reading comprehension? Yay for technology!
Yay!
I understand that some form of automation is necessary - we saw large instances closing because they couldn’t find mods. My main objection in this scenario would be is that I didn’t consent to train OpenAI models. I think the users should know if their instance uses external services like that.
I also suspect that there might be cheaper and more ethical solutions. Although it’s hard to talk about this without seeing the actual results.
That was not why lemm.ee died. That one was lack of admins, presumably due to their choice to become a “free speech haven” where all voices were allowed to be heard. But then having given in that far to incel culture, nonetheless still trying to pull back to stop short of becoming another 4chan. The burden on those admins was INTENSE, and they simply gave up.
Btw, PieFed already offers a number of tools that helps reduce the burden on human mods to make decisions easier.
some examples
One example is an indicator that reports the likelihood that a user’s content is generated by AI.
Many other tools reduce even the need for moderation in the first place, e.g. iirc if someone receives 10x more downvotes than upvotes, a visual icon is added next to their username to indicate that they are known as a contentious user. Note this is not a filter, just a label. As as end-user reads through comments, upon seeing this they are warned that having a deeper discussion with such a person is unlikely to be considered pleasant, by the majority of others who have done so in the past.
Another feature example is keyword filtering - if someone wants to remove all content containing the words “Trump” or “Musk”, then rather than downvote or report it to mods for its removal, they can have it removed at the level of themselves, thereby substantially reducing the burden of mods for such things as e.g. having to keep politics out of unrelated (comics?) communities.
Still another pair of examples is the ability to automatically collapse or even hide comments that fall below a given vote threshold - personally I have these options off, but if someone were to want that for themselves, then the tool is available to them, again independently of any need for moderator intervention. And the user likewise controls what that threshold is, rather than the mod having to make a single call for everyone in the entire community.
PieFed’s democratization of moderation features are breathtakingly awesome to behold - Reddit and even Lemmy (+ Mbin, nodeBB, etc.) have nothing that even comes close! And note that article was even written two years ago (but I will stop myself short of making my comment a billet-doux on PieFed, instead just saying that it has long had this automation already).
The use of AI for moderation isn’t the choice of users, but moderators and admins.
I disagree: ultimately it can be, if users choose instances that defederate from those who allow their kids to use AI tools. (Autocorrect changed “mods” to “kids”, but I think I will leave it that way bc it’s funnier 😜)
Realllllly keen on that defederation?? Why not talk with the admins of that instance first?? Hmmm … almost like there is an agenda at play here…
I’m not surprised. Lemmy has been sold as a Reddit where people can be in more control than they could be on Reddit. It turns out you only get that control if you’re an admin.
Really glad for the instances that have votes for rule changes and defederations and stuff.
Yeah, but those tools should be built into Lemmy and they aren’t. Even something as basic as mod seniority based on something other than how long someone has been a mod should have been corrected.
Good mods and admins are able to do good work despite the tools provided, not with the tools provided.
I think that could be implemented via a plugin even which are coming with Lemmy 1.0
But the decision to defederate or allow a mod to use AI is at the admin level, not the user level.
The user threat to leave isn’t worth that much.
Defederate, no question.
Are you gonna tell us which instance is doing this?
OP already answered this: not at the present time.
So its hard for me to get into these things without harping on my personal philosophy. Which is that I think ideally this should mirror the way we would interact in person. So moderating or running a community is like running or being part of the core group that runs a club. Would you want to throw that to a robot? Basically I don’t feel people should create or run or moderate communities unless they enjoy it. So the idea of ai moderation is to me pointless. Of course at this point I notice you are talking instances. Boy that is different. This is more like talking about running the institution that allows spaces for clubs to meet. It kinda feels understandable then. Honestly people complain about being banned but I kinda feel like anyplace that bans me is kinda doing me a favor. Like I would like the option to just mark it permanent. Its less things I got to block. Its the same reason I would like blocking to be symetric. Saves me some work (ok and the creepy I turn them invisible so I don’t see them but they can watch me). I really would like to be able to block an instance seperately for communities or users. Ok as usually im digressing quite a bit but I guess in the end run I kinda see why at the instance level it might be used but I would be concerned it would start being used at the community level. It would be nice to know its happening at either level and have the ability to block them if a user is not wild about the concept.
For some of us, power carries with it a certain level of responsibility. 🕸️
For others, it is just a fun tool to wield over the fates of others. 🐒 And AI lets them do that with less effort. 💤
How was this discovered and what instances are doing it?
I think it’s fair to quote them to give them a chance to reply.
Aside from the ethical implications of profiling users or of using a corporatly owned server and model to execute this, I see nothing uniquely concerning about this practice that isnt already a risk of federated social media generally.
Every mod on every instance is free to use whatever tools or standards for moderation they want - that’s an intentional byproduct of federation. Similarly, the collection of this data for use with llms is a bygone conclusion at this point - there was never any way of preventing that from happening with a federated network.
I think the only thing here to talk about is the way these questions are being framed as a question of intra-instance policy. We already have communities where moderation abuse can be called out and adjudicated- why pose this as a question of instance administration when there doesnt seem to be any evidence for it?
these questions are being framed as a question of intra-instance policy
I think this is just more of the ongoing controversy being spun up against db0.
This weeks flavor appears to be more data driven, a ‘just asking questions’ phase. I guess in hope the whole ‘falsifying evidence to make db0 users look like neo-nazis’ thing blows over.
Like it’s clear there’s an effort to rid db0 from the fediverse, and it’s just the pretext hasn’t been sorted out yet.
I don’t doubt it even for a second.
I’m lowkey kind of fascinated this morning with what feels like a moment of real panic among western liberal-democratic institutions (projecting a little from my morning news and coffee). That an anarchist instance is getting this much targeted harassment feels like a microscopic extension of that (if I allow myself to be so bold)
As far as I can tell, dbzer0 isnt even being explicitly called out here, but it has an undeniable bdzer0 flavor to it. If it doesnt come out that this was one of our mods at this point, I’d almost be disappointed.
Yep and it doesn’t help that Rimu himself is a very questionable dude. He says he defederated from lemy.lol over their pepe frog logo but honestly I don’t believe it is the reason/ He hates memes. He said as much to me himself. A while back, someone realized that piefed was hard coded to give negative reputation to certain people, regardless of what settings the admins had made. Piefed is built off of Rimu’s opinions and he puts the majority there as an opt-out, not an opt-in. When I made a jokingly apology for all the memes I post, he said “It’s not your fault that the lemmy devs didn’t put guardrails in.”
If he’s that opinionated about memes…
Combine that with the fact that this post has literally no information other than “Trust me bro”? I don’t trust Rimu as far as I can throw his garbage platform and I can’t even throw the thing because its digital code. Hell, Mr. Kaplan even had to do a ton of un-fucking of Piefed to get piefed.world to work and was talking with me about it at the time. Just LITTERED with Rimu’s stances.
Not to mention that Rimu routinely comes in with preconcieved notions that others have to point out the bullshit of and he quietly then steps back from it or refuses to engage entirely and dismisses it out of hand.
Like… the Lemmy devs suck, absolutely. But the only facet in which Rimu is better is he’s not a transphobe.
Edit: See below for screenshots. I’m tired of this shit. Yes. He’s wildly opinionated.
hates memes
builds reddit clone
A while back, someone realized that piefed was hard coded to give negative reputation to certain people, regardless of what settings the admins had made.
Please don’t spread old mis-info or at least back this up with actual links to the source-code (and if we are talking about the same thing, this was clearly debunked).
As for the OP post, this is factually correct and I have seen the evidence. Although maybe Rimu should have been more clear in pointing out that this seems to be not an official instance tool, but rather something some moderators have cobbled together themselves.
Please don’t spread old mis-info
I mean, you just did it. The OP post is not factually correct as he stated that it is at an instance level. It is not. It is at a moderator level.
Please don’t spread old mis-info or at least back this up with actual links to the source-code (and if we are talking about the same thing, this was clearly debunked).
Gotta say though, getting real tired of people telling me that I didn’t understand conversations I was a part of. No. It was not ‘debunked’. It was added under an opt-in toggle after everyone noticed it and called out his bullshit. You might be thinking of something else, but this is what I was talking about.
Piefed is infected with Rimu’s extreme opinionated garbage and he only backs down and puts them into a toggle after someone notices it. That’s not the behavior of a developer that I find personally trustworthy. So when he’s out here making a post that is outright false, claiming that instances are doing something that moderators are doing, I don’t trust him. Not to mention the extremely long conversations I had with Mr Kaplan about how Piefed.world needed to be un-rimu’d in order to work as LW wanted it to.
I was referring to a different but similar case where someone intentionally spread mis-information about supposedly hardcoded things that turned out to be a complete nothingburger as all of it was behind an admin toggle. The same seems to be now true for this old issue you specifically pointed out here.
It is true that there is some experimental stuff in Piefed, which is part of the relatively rapid iteration of features, but looking at the code and also the explanations given by the Piefed development team I can really not see any malice in those settings. It is perfectly normal that things get overlooked or implemented partially and when someone reports a bug (like a missing admin configuration setting) it usually gets fixed quite quickly, and at least in my experience without much discussions.
The same seems to be now true for this old issue you specifically pointed out here.
But it isn’t. First off, you made an assumption and dismissed my initial complaint. Now you’re dismissing this one saying it’s basically the same thing when it isn’t. Having a long discussion with large admins saying “Hey. What the fuck is this stuff?” only for Rimu to constantly push back and saying how he wants to reshape everything is fucking concerning. The fact it took everyone pushing back against him to add it under a toggle even more so. You’d have a point with the whole “this happens” if this didn’t happen with every single major Rimu feature.
But, once again, Rimu is actively pushing misinformation and you have dodged the point that you are doing the same. This is not an admin or instance level problem. Moderators are doing this and claiming this is “instance level” is to be a liar.
It is perfectly normal that things get overlooked or implemented partially and when someone reports a bug (like a missing admin configuration setting) it usually gets fixed quite quickly, and at least in my experience without much discussions.
And, as we all know, your experience is the only universal experience that everyone has at all times. I guess the month long conversation I had with Kaplan, head admin of Lemmy.world, about unfucking Piefed because Rimu filled it with his opinionated garbage didn’t happen. I guess the fork of Piefed being created that’s taking out all of his opinionated garbage didn’t happen. Not to mention his 4chan screenshot scanner (that can be bypassed immediately), the cm0002 filter he put onto piefed.social (that can be bypassed immediately), the blocking of any numbers of 88 put together (which can be bypassed immediately), the private votes that would prevent admins from locating vote brigaders (which can be opted, granted, but after a HEATED discussion in the piefed matrix).
Rimu is over opinionated to a fault and Piefed is the same.
You know nothing of which you speak.
But, once again, the only important point is that Rimu is actively spreading misinformation by claiming this is an instance problem when it is moderators that is doing it. Once again, with action after action, Rimu cannot be trusted.
Although maybe Rimu should have been more clear in pointing out that this seems to be not an official instance tool, but rather something some moderators have cobbled together themselves.
This isn’t an issue of clarity. His closing call to action is to ‘develop awareness so that people can choose which instances to join and interact with’. There aren’t any practical administrative solutions to the problem being called out, with the exception of defederation or the threat thereof. Any single user on the entire fediverse can copy-paste user activity into any LLM and use the output to make moderation decisions, or craft personalized agitprop or whatever else, but centering the focus on instances that allow their usage turns the issue into a nail that can be solved with a hammer.
You are jumping to conclusions. I think it is generally worthwhile to discuss the use of LLMs for making moderation decisions and also using them to produce ideological profiles of users.
The worthiness of a discussion has no bearing on the intent and framing of the person prompting it.
The questions are being raised by the same person who included global reputation scores in his backend piefed code for the purposes of suppressing his personal pet peve behaviors. I find that to be informative context for considering the intent of the discussion being prompted.
edit: Oh look, here he is saying exactly what I was just pointing out was likely the intent
I’m lowkey kind of fascinated this morning with what feels like a moment of real panic among western liberal-democratic institutions (projecting a little from my morning news and coffee). That an anarchist instance is getting this much targeted harassment feels like a microscopic extension of that (if I allow myself to be so bold)
As far as I can tell, dbzer0 isnt even being explicitly called out here, but it has an undeniable bdzer0 flavor to it. If it doesnt come out that this was one of our mods at this point, I’d almost be disappointed
These type of posts are why people (from all walks of life) view western leftism as more of an aesthetic, performative thing.
Right - which is why it was quite interesting watching Fox news have a 20 minute power struggle over the sudden popularity of May Day in the US and the rise of ““extreme socialist sentiment””
All online political discourse is performance - feel free to speculate how well it is representative of IRL leftist spaces in the west.
From my time in the US, what you describe seems like a pretty run of the mill local rhetorical strategy; a tried and true American polemic if you will.
Sure, but even with something like online political discourse you can do better than getting obsessed over a bastardized provincial political term (liberal which means something completely different outside of the US) and providing cover for promoters of russian and Chinese genocidal imperialism and propaganda. We are not talking about a deep discussion on philosophy and political economy, just the absolute basics.
Can’t speak for your definition of leftist spaces, but many (not all of course) self-proclaimed western leftists IRL have a very performative approach to imperialism (among other things).
Sure, but even with something like online political discourse you can do better than getting obsessed over a bastardized provincial political term (liberal which means something completely different outside of the US)
Sorry, I’m having a hard time following the train of thought - are you referring to my use of ‘liberal-democratic institutions’?
I don’t want to word-vomit on you unnecessarily if you’re pointing to something else or speaking broadly about leftist discourse on lemmy (i’ve seen plenty of debates like the one you’re describing)
and providing cover for promoters of russian and Chinese genocidal imperialism and propaganda
Ok well now i’m even more confused - where is this jab coming from?
Maybe you’re taking issue with my categorizing db0 as a leftist space and are speaking broadly about the perspectives about china and russia from that instance? What are we talking about here?
whats funny is I don’t have much negative dbzer0 experience until you two guys start making this about that.
Is this a negative db0 experience for you?
im just saying when there is a particular thing and someone starts pulling in something unrelated as a conspiracy it leaves a bad taste. Its a bit like folks suddenly saying something about lemmy.ml being so and so in an unrelated type post that gets me to do my posting in their communities but in a reverse kinda way. rimus last post about a trend he saw I think it had some interesting perspectives and few if any where that the instances were ban happy. Similarly this one has some good conversations going.
unrelated
Well, it is noting that there’s now at least an appearance of a relationship going on. Especially so, if you’re already clued into the ‘ban-happy’ statistics magic thread.
Similarly this one has some good conversations going.
Hopefully those continue unimpeded and this can remain contextual or tangental.
this one did not name any instances. paranoia is the only reason to link them or knowldge that the two things are indeed connected. Each is fine to me though. Bringing up data and slicing and dicing it a bit is fine and the convo brought up issues with the way it was massaged. Similarly this is about a particular thing. Niether indicated an opinion or want for some sort of action against instances. so yeah. unrelated. but yeah I like good and vibrant convo which is why I have enjoyed both posts. one thing im not wild about this is some comments suggest its an admin thing and should be discussed in some admin community but im not wild about the cigar filled room type thing.
That’s an odd takeaway, for sure.
