AI-assisted moderation in the fediverse is happening. Now what?
UPDATE: proof is at https://piefed.social/c/fediverse/p/2035409/proof-of-ai-assisted-political-profiling-by-unruffled-lemmy-dbzer0-com. The main instance is lemmy.dbzer0.com but anarchist.nexus and quokka.au share admin/mod teams so those two are suspect also.
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“.
OpenAI’s LLM (they’re using GPT-5.3-mini) then responds with something like:
Below is a structured analysis of the uploaded content, focused on *specific ideology* rhetoric. This is an analytic classification, not a moral judgement.
1. Overall Pattern
blah blah
2. Evidence of *specific ideology* sentiment
blah blah
3. several pages more, concluding with (in this case)
Yes, the content contains:
Clear *specific ideology* alignment
Repeated *specific ideology* framing, especially through blah blah
Extensive use of canonical *ideology* tropes, in blah blah domains.
The pattern is not accidental or isolated; it is consistent, internally coherent, and reproduces well‑documented *country with the ideology* public‑diplomacy narratives rather than neutral analysis.
===========================================
FULL DUMP OF COMMENT HISTORY BELOW
===========================================
Date: 2026-xx-xxT0xxxxx
Comment ID: https://instance.told/comment/2497xxxx
Post ID: 603xxx
Community ID: 1xx
Content of the comment has been redacted
========================================
Date: 2026-xx-xxT0xxxxx
Comment ID: https://instance.told/comment/2497xxxx
Post ID: 603xxx
Community ID: 1xx
Content of the comment has been redacted
========================================
Date: 2026-xx-xxT0xxxxx
Comment ID: https://instance.told/comment/2497xxxx
Post ID: 603xxx
Community ID: 1xx
Content of the comment has been redacted
========================================
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 are using it and maybe we’re ok with that because it’s being used by communities 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 questions.
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?
#fediverse
