Digital blackface

Digital blackface is a term used to describe the phenomenon of non-Black individuals using digital media, such as GIFs, memes, or audio clips featuring Black individuals, to express emotions or convey ideas. This behavior has sparked debate and criticism due to concerns about cultural appropriation and the perpetuation of stereotypes. Digital blackface has been described as "one of the most insidious forms of contemporary racism"[1] and has been compared to historical minstrelsy by Black individuals and social justice advocates.

Labelwatch

Bluesky doesn’t have a single moderation team deciding what you see. Instead, it has labelers — and nobody’s watching the watchers. Labelwatch monitors every public labeler: who’s labeling, what they’re labeling, and whether their behavior is stable, bursty, or going dark.

Beyond moderation: labelers for security/safe browsing, existing services to use · bluesky-social atproto · Discussion #1595

So far, much of the conversation around third party labelers has focused on content moderation. That's an important first use case, but obviously not the only one. We talked a bit about the dow...

Blacksky Moderation (@moderation.blacksky.app)

Building the intercommunal net This account is a mod service for Blacksky, subscribe to use our filters Main account: @blackskyweb.xyz Appeals: https://blackskyweb.xyz/about/support/moderation-appeal/

Bluesky 2023 Moderation Report - Bluesky

We have hired and trained a full-time team of moderators, launched and iterated on several community and individual moderation features, developed and refined policies both public and internal, designed and redesigned product features to reduce abuse, and built several infrastructure components from scratch to support our Trust and Safety work.

Visual Moderation - Sexual Content Classes

Visual Moderation Class Descriptions

Moderation on Blacksky-Only Posts: A Community Proposal

Our team has explored several ways to make permissioned posts possible. Now we’re bringing the decision back to the community. Below are three approaches to moderation: a machine-learning system that automates moderation, a large-scale peer moderator program, or a hybrid model that combines both. We’re inviting your feedback to help decide how we should govern privacy together.

TikTok and the Evolution of Digital Blackface

On the app, users drape themselves in the trappings of Black culture—and steal the viral spotlight. It’s exploitation at its most refined and disturbing.

WE ALL WE GOT

Welcome to We All We Got: A Digital Green Book for the Culture—a guide for navigating the ever-growing wave of digital manipulation aimed at dividing, deceiving, and discouraging Black communities.

AT Moderation Architecture | bryan newbold (⛱️ sabbatical mode)

The AT network is becoming more heterogeneous in practice, with independent PDS hosts, apps, and alternative bsky AppViews establishing themselves. This means that more complex inter-service moderation scenarios are starting to get attention. While the labeling system was released all the way back i...

Labels are a way to categorize content and users on BlueSky. They are part of the moderation tools but they can be do lots of interesting things like foster community.

Harm Through the “#RizzCam”: Smart Glasses, Ambient Capture and Invisible Harassment

In online safety research, harassment is commonly understood as involving overt and unwanted acts that create a hostile environment for individuals or groups. Smart glasses, or wearable digital devices that are often indistinguishable from ordinary eyewear but can record video, audio and location data in real time, enable new forms of online harassment and gender-based harms that may not be recognised by current online safety or platform governance frameworks. Drawing on an interpretive content analysis of 350 point-of-view Instagram videos posted by individuals self-associated with the pick-up artistry (PUA) community, we examine how smart glasses can be used to harass women through what we call ambient capture. Ambient capture includes clandestine recording of people and social interactions within public, semi-private and private spaces. We argue this can constitute harassment when it is targeted at women and shared online without their consent. In our study, we found videos using ambient capture practices to harass women that had gone undetected by Instagram’s content moderation systems. These findings suggest online safety regimes and content moderation approaches should be assessed to ensure they account for the more invisible forms of harassment introduced by smart glasses and other wearable technologies.

Reading the Digital Safety Act with My Mastodon Admin Hat On

Back in 2024, I published a reading of the Online Harms Act from my perspective as an admin of a Mastodon instance. The Online Harms Act was a proposed Canadian bill meant to regulate social media to prevent harmful content, particularly hate speech and child abuse materials. While the Online Harms Act ultimately did not come to pass (due the proroguing of Parliament later that year), the Carney Liberal government is bringing much of it back with a new Digital Safety Act. In this post, I am also giving the new Act a look from the perspective of a Mastodon admin.