IFTAS

We’re celebrating our early donors on a special page on our website and we’d love you to be one of them! We need funding to build better tools that help make the Fediverse, and the Open Social Web at large, safer for everyone. We’re looking for aligned businesses and corporations in the Trust and Safety and digital space to help us fund the next stage of our work. In return, the First 50 will get a special shout-out on our website. Support our work today with a charitable gift: https://lnkd.in/egx3aaCX #TrustAndSafety #OnlineSafety

Our 2024 moderator survey received over 120 responses representing nearly two million hosted accounts. While we work on the final report, we have some early highlights on the Blog: https://lnkd.in/eG2xPqVE . Early data shows a continued need for help with CSAM, spam, NCII and core moderation guidance. A big thank you to everyone who took part. We can’t wait to publish the full report once we’ve finished going through all the data. [Image 1: A bar chart showing number of responses against platform. Lemmy has the most at 13, followed by PeerTube at 10, Pixelfed and Bookwyrn at 8, Akkoma at 6, Wordpress and Bluesky at 5, mbin, WriteFreely and Matrix at 4, Friendica, Hometown, Mobilizon, IceShrimp and Sharkey at 4, Pleroma, Firefish, GoToSocial, Misskey, and PieFed at 2, and Hubzilla, Forgejo, flohmarkt and OwnCast at 1. Image 2: a bar chart showing size of community by accounts with 24 having fewer than 10, 20 having 10-100, 23 having 100-1,000, 19 having 1,000-10,000, 15 having 10,000-100,000, and 6 having more than 100,000.] #SocialMedia #Fediverse #Decentralization

We are expanding our CSAM scanner to add three more servers, with one already connected. To date we have scanned 20,000 media files (with zero matches) and will be slowly onboarding more servers as we monitor the service in a closed beta. To support important work like this, become an IFTAS supporter - details in the comments. #SafetyFirst #DigitalSafety #ChildSafety

5 ways to fight election disinformation on Bluesky and the Fediverse https://lnkd.in/eXCq7eDV Key points for dealing with disinfo on any social network: 1. THINK before you engage or share 2. SHARE accurate information about the election 3. REPORT disinformation when you see it 4. EDUCATE yourself — and your friends and family 5. GET INVOLVED – and get your friends and family involved THINK - How to tell whether or not information is accurate? Use the SIFT method: Stop Investigate the source  Find better coverage Trace claims, quotes, and media to the original context. https://lnkd.in/e7kD2cb4 Even credible sources sometimes get it wrong – especially when there’s fast-breaking news and rumors are flying. On Bluesky and the Fediverse, the algorithm is people boosting and reskeeting posts. So (just like on Facebook and Twitter with their different approach to algorithms) it’s vital to think before you post so that you don’t feed the algorithm with disinfo. SHARE - The last few days of voting are always somewhat chaotic. This year, we’ve already had at least four reports of arson affecting ballots – three true, one was fake. Sharing accurate information is even more important than *not* sharing disinfo REPORT - disinformation when you see it Bluesky specifically prohibits voter suppression, sharing misleading content about election processes, or encouraging real-world disruption of the election processes. Report to the Bluesky Moderation Service - the first category is "Misleading post". Many Fediverse instances have rules prohibiting disinformation. Even if there isn’t an explicit rule, disinfo often violates other server rules, so moderators may well take action. And disinfo on Bluesky and the Fediverse is also likely to be elsewhere, so it’s worth reporting it to ReportDisinfo.org, run by Common Cause Election Fund. You can include a link – either the post or an article that it’s linking to – or upload an image. EDUCATE - yourselves , and your friends and family  about disinformation You’re not the only person who needs to recognize disinformation, avoid amplifying it, and respond. Your friends, family, and colleagues do as well. So as well as educating yourself, please share the knowledge. GET INVOLVED - and get your friends involved! If you want to do more, consider joining a grassroots disinfo fighting campaign. Common Cause’s Digital Democracy Activists has just kicked off their pre-election week of action. https://lnkd.in/eXYKYU57 There's a lot more information (including some excellent videos) in the post. We'll keep it updated over the next few weeks as the situation changes, so if there are suggestions or links we left out, please let us know!

We rely entirely on the generous support of individuals and organisations who believe in creating #BetterSocialMedia and promoting trust and safety across the Fediverse. Your contributions enable us to equip moderators with the tools, resources, and knowledge they need to keep communities safe and thriving. Every donation supports training, technology, and vital assistance for everyone safeguarding our digital spaces. Make a Difference Today! Contact us to learn how you can support our mission. ℹ️ Alt text for the PDF in the comments due to character limit restrictions. #TrustAndSafety #OnlineSafety #Decentralization

We couldn’t be prouder of the IFTAS Connect community and all the folks who gave their personal time and energy for the good of all during the latest spam attack on the Fediverse. On October 8, an IFTAS Connect member observed one of the first spam posts from a network attack conducted by what appeared to be a reuse of the same “nuke” script we saw earlier this year in February. In short, a Discord bot was created that can automate the creation of a new account on an open registration service and then repeatedly spam a new post with ten direct mentions, causing notifications to pop up for hundreds of thousands of Fediverse users, which -thanks to network bridges and unmanaged group functionality – included Bluesky accounts and Friendica groups that automatically boost the posts to potentially thousands more individuals. Within an hour of observing the first spam messages, the IFTAS Connect community had created a shared spreadsheet of affected servers. We saw fewer than a hundred servers involved in the spam wave so the community decided to try to alert the small number of impacted service providers. An alert was drafted in English, translated into Japanese and Chinese to help the server operators understand the issue being described, and research began to find contact information for the servers being tracked. Within the hour, server operators began responding to the alerts and closing down registration, deleting the relevant accounts, and wiping the spam content. After 24 hours almost all servers had responded, leaving only ten still open and spamming the network. At this point, the Social Web ISAC issued an alert to limit content from those ten servers, and began filing abuse reports with the remainder’s web hosts and content delivery networks. The community tracked outbound emails and messages, and updated the spreadsheet as servers responded and mitigated the issue. If no response was observed after 12 hours, emails were then sent using the relevant web host abuse report functions, which send an email directly to the service operator from their web host or domain registrar. This mitigated several more servers, bringing the list of servers that were entirely unmonitored “ghost ships” to six. At this point, IFTAS decided to add the remaining servers to the IFTAS Do Not Interact list, which in turn updated users of FediCheck to automatically block those servers. Overall, the community mitigated almost all of the spam within 48 hours, proving that despite the core issue of decentralised networks not having a network-wide view of the Fediverse, opportunities exist to work together and combat the same issues inherent to all social media platforms. To help us keep supporting community efforts like this one - get in touch! [Image ID: A section of the tracking spreadsheet showing each server's status.] #Bluesky #Fediverse #Mastodon #Decentralization

We are kicking off an exciting collaborative with the Bonfire Networks developer team -a governance-first community platform using ActivityPub. The Bonfire developer team are interested in reviewing proposals from the moderator community for rapid iteration of evidence-based, prosocial tooling and workflow in a co-design effort with the moderator community. The Bonfire team have already rapidly adopted several proposals including: 1) Greyscaling and blurring media in reported content to reduce trauma for moderators reviewing harmful content. 2) Muting audio in media files so there are no sudden noises, loud volume or traumatic audio for the moderation workflow. 3) Removing clickable links from reported content and suggesting URL investigation tools to reduce the chance of moderators clicking through to phishing, malware, and other harmful websites. Our IFTAS Connect community is working to provide additional feedback, and anyone is free to suggest additional feedback on the Bonfire GitHub. This is a fantastic opportunity for the Fediverse’s trust and safety community to interactively guide the development of modular tooling that we hope will not only benefit Bonfire communities but can benefit the ecosystem at large, through modular adoption of the tooling, Fediverse Enhancement Proposals, or other platforms incorporating the same evidence-based prosocial approaches to empowering community managers and moderators. We urge all IFTAS Connect moderator members to join us in the Moderator Tooling Workgroup and tell us all the tools, features and functions you want to see added to keep you and your community safe! #TrustAndSafety #OnlineSafety

We are extremely proud to announce our Content Classification Service is up and running, with our first classifier active. We are starting with detecting CSAM for our opt-in connected servers, and our plan is to introduce additional classifiers over time, including non-consensual intimate imagery, terroristic and violent extremist content, malicious URLs, spam, and more. For the time being we are operating in a closed test with a very small number of servers, and we have a slate of additional server admins ready to participate in our beta. We’re currently seeking funding to enable us to keep up this important work. If you can help us secure sponsorships or funding, please get in touch! #TrustAndSafety #OnlineSafety

A huge thank you to everyone who has responded to our community support drive, we’ve raised over $2,000 this year in direct community support and our IFTAS First 50 page is filling up! As we head into giving season, a quick reminder IFTAS is a 501c3, all donations are tax-deductible for US supporters, and we accept a wide range of support. If you can, donate today to keep supporting our mission: https://lnkd.in/egx3aaCX . #Gratitude #Fundraising #Community

Working with the great folks at Tremau, we launched the first of our regulatory guidance materials. This easy-to-read guide to the DSA allows Fediverse administrators to review their exposure to the DSA, and offers practical guidance on working toward compliance. #ActivityPub #Fediverse #TrustAndSafety