88
submitted 11 months ago by trashhalo@beehaw.org to c/technology@beehaw.org

The social media platform Bluesky recently had an incident where a user created an account with a racial slur as the handle. The Bluesky team quickly removed the account but realized they should have had automated filters in place to prevent such issues. They are now implementing a two-step automated filtering and flagging system for user handles while still involving human moderators. The team acknowledges they were too slow to communicate with the community about the incident and are working to improve their Trust and Safety team and communication processes going forward. They are committed to learning from this mistake and building a safer and more resilient social media platform over time.


Previous post about this topic https://beehaw.org/post/2152596

Bluesky allowed people to include the n-word in their usernames | Engadget

Bluesky, a decentralized social network, allowed users to register usernames containing the n-word. When reports surfaced about a user with the racial slur in their name, Bluesky took 40 minutes to remove the account but did not publicly apologize. A LinkedIn post criticized Bluesky for failing to filter offensive terms from the start and for not addressing its anti-blackness problem. Bluesky later claimed it had invested in moderation systems but the oversight highlighted ongoing issues considering Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey backs the startup. The fact that Bluesky allowed such an obvious racial slur shows it was unprepared to moderate a social network effectively.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[-] dingus@lemmy.ml 7 points 11 months ago

They probably don't have a list of slurs as much as they use partial variations in Regular Expressions for filtering, which I guess could be better or worse, depending on how you look at it. Better: they don't have to see the whole slur. Worse: they have to think deeply about the slur and all the variations of it that might arise.

[-] JackbyDev@programming.dev 5 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago)

I remember some post where someone's username Nasser got censored to N***er making it look way fucking worse. One of the Dark Souls games.

[-] peter@feddit.uk 5 points 11 months ago

As they mentioned in the blog post though, simply matching slurs inside of a string will ban a lot of innocent people

[-] ninchuka@lemmy.one 3 points 11 months ago

yeah wordlists for any kind of moderation can easily catch false positives

this post was submitted on 22 Jul 2023
88 points (100.0% liked)

Technology

37208 readers
58 users here now

Rumors, happenings, and innovations in the technology sphere. If it's technological news or discussion of technology, it probably belongs here.

Subcommunities on Beehaw:


This community's icon was made by Aaron Schneider, under the CC-BY-NC-SA 4.0 license.

founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS