Networks Of Trust: Dismantling And Preventing Harassment

Purism’s David Seaward recently posted an article titled Curbing Harassment with User Empowerment. In it, they posit that “user empowerment” is the best way to handle harassment. Yet, many of their suggestions do nothing to prevent or stop harassment. Instead they only provide ways to allow a user to plug their ears as it occurs.

Trusting The Operator

David Seaward writes with the assumption that the operator is always untrustworthy. But, what if the operator was someone you knew? Someone you could reach out to if there were any issues, who could reach out to other operators? This is the case on the Fediverse, where Purism’s Librem Social operates. Within this system of federated networks, each node is run by a person or group of people. These people receive reports in various forms. In order to continue to be trusted, moderators of servers are expected to handle reports of spam, hate speech, or other instances of negative interactions from other services. Since the network is distributed, this tends to be sustainable.

In practice, this means that as a moderator my users can send me things they’re concerned by, and I can send messages to the moderators of other servers if something on their server concerns me or one of my users. If the operator of the other node breaches trust (e.g. not responding, expressing support for bad actors) then I can choose to defederate from them. If I as a user find that my admin does not take action, I can move to a node that will take action. The end result is that there are multiple layers of trust:

  • I can trust my admins to take action
  • My admins can trust other admins to take action

This creates a system where, without lock-in, admins are incentivized to respond to things in good faith and in the best interests of their users.

User Empowerment And Active Admins

The system of trust above does not conflict with Purism’s goal of user empowerment. In fact, these two systems need to work together. Providing users tools to avoid harassment works in the short term, but admins need to take action to prevent harassment in the long term. There’s a very popular saying: with great power comes great responsibility. When you are an admin, you have both the power and responsibility to prevent harassment.

To continue using the fediverse for this discussion, there are two ways harassment occurs in a federated system:

  1. A user on a remote instance harasses people
  2. A user on the local instance harasses people

When harassment occurs, it comes in various forms like harassing speech, avoiding blocks, or sealioning. In all cases and forms, the local admin is expected to listen to reports and handle them accoridngly. For local users, this can mean a stern warning or a ban. For remote users, the form of response could range from contacting the remote admin to blocking that instance. Some fediverse software also supports blocking individual remote accounts. Each action helps prevent the harasser from further harming people on your instance or other instances.

Crowdsourcing Does Not Solve Harassment

One solution David proposes in the article is crowdsourced tagging. Earlier in the article he mentions that operators can be untrustworthy, but trusting everyone to tag things does not solve this. In fact, this can contribute to dogpiling and censorship. Let’s use an example to illustrate the issue. A trans woman posts about her experience with transphobia, and how transphobic people have harmed her. Her harassers can see this post, and tag it with “#hatespeech”. They tell their friends to do it too, or use bots. This now means anyone who filters “#hatespeech” would have her post hidden – even people that would have supported her. Apply this for other things and crowdsourced tagging can easily become a powerful tool to censor the speech of marginalized people.

Overall, I’d say Purism needs to take a step back and review their stance to moderation and anti-harassment. It would do them well if they also took a minute to have conversations with the experts they cite.

Announcing my Contract with Purism for an Adaptive Fractal UI

Over the past year or so I have been a regular contributor to Fractal, a Matrix chat client for GNOME. My contributions have allowed me to take on a bigger role in the GNOME community, including the maintainership of a few apps. I am pleased to announce that over the next week I will be working to make Fractal’s UI adaptive for the Librem 5’s launch. This contract began last week, and I already have some results to show off.

The Main View

Fractal has used a split window pattern since it’s inception. With HdyLeaflet apps that use this pattern can adapt their size to fit different widths. Once !363 is merged, Fractal will use HdyLeaflet to adapt it’s main view.

The Dialogs

In combination with HdyLeaflet, HdyDialog allows us to have dialogs that grow to the full size of the window at smaller sizes. I changed most of the instances of GtkDialog into HdyDialog and made sure each one would fit into the Librem 5’s constraints.

The Room Details

The room details view was something started a long while ago by Julian Sparber, made before HdyColumn was a thing. HdyColumn allows widgets to expand up to a certain width, while still being able to size appropriately on smaller screens.

Login

Our on-boarding process is in need of a redesign in general, so while redesigning it we can design for mobile as well.

Mapping Clicks To Touches

Currently we have a context menu that is accessed by right clicking on a message. This will need to work for long press on the phone, since there’s no way to right click on a touchscreen.

The Image Viewer

The controls of the Image Viewer’s headerbar are too large for it to shrink to the Librem 5’s constraints. We’ll need to make sure these controls are re-arranged in order to allow the viewer to fit correctly.

The Room Directory

The room directory is another view with controls that will need to adapt to small sizes. It has a searchbar, a back button, the items in the list don’t shrink enough for the rest of the window.

Overall, I’m very excited that Purism accepted my proposal and that I get to work on this. I have been looking forward to the day where I can run Fractal on my phone, and I’m glad to be bringing that closer.