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?
It’s very clear on signup, on the READMEs, even on the DM portal itself, that messages are unencrypted and there is no sense of privacy, and that admins have full visibility and can do what they want with them.
There is no promise, duty, or responsibility that an admin has beyond legal and what they themselves promise. The fediverse is great in that if you disagree with your admin, you are free to leave and choose a different one.
As for GDPR, feel free to argue it, but when it’s claimed at every turn that messaging is unencrypted and basically open, well, I don’t think it’d hold up. It literally says to go use Matrix or something else.
I only have that freedom if the admin tells me that they use LLMs in this manner or if they federate with instances that do. At the moment everyone is in the dark.
You should assume everything you post here is being used to train LLMs. It doesn’t take an admin to do so. It takes anyonr who feels like looking. And there’s already evidence that we’re being scraped.
and it will continue to be. Again, you need to understand this. There are no rules, guidelines or anything that an instance owner needs to follow beyond whatever legal requirements they have in their specific jurisdiction.
So, I guess in your pervalence, you are correct, you do not have that freedom. Even I, as an instance owner, do not have that freedom, because everything I’m typing here is being sent out to as many servers are listening too. By being completely open so that anyone can spin up a server and listen for activity, it literally means that we are open and any server can listen for activity.
Anyone can spin up a server, create some LLM bot, and start replying to anyone they want. That instance can be defederated of course, but that is the only tool. This is what you signed up for, this is the open and free internet. We do not have any walls here.
Check this out - https://www.structural-integrity.eu/the-politics-of-decentralization-and-the-libertarian-allure-of-mastodon/
You’re a fucking AnCap? That explains soooooo much.