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Some days ago I discovered that there is apparently a censorship filter running that replaces certain expletives with removed on my end.
I specifically chose .zip because it is federated with all but illegal instances, and I get the full, raw fediverse in my feed. This way I can choose for myself If I want to engage with that type of content.
I must say I strongly dislike the idea of this constant content surveillance that is apparently being performed in the background, it seems very antithetical to the degree of user agency that is being provided here otherwise.
Is there a chance to turn it off?
Hey, so this has been in place a while now, and you can see the rationale behind this decision and how it works here (you may need to scroll down to the comments) - in summary, only a small amount of commonly racist words were added to the filter to reduce mod burden on this instance.
However if this is causing issues on remote communities (which was never the intention) then we can review this and look to implement this in another way. However it won’t be until after lemmy 0.19 is released (which is hopefully very soon!).
So yes happy to look at this again and if we can implement certain word restrictions locally only then we will.
There will always be a block locally though because a) it’s not the sort of content we want on lemmy.zip and b) I have to comply with local laws around hate speech.
(When I say locally I mean in local communities if that makes sense?)
Of course I understand the need to comply with laws and the need to properly moderate an instance to foster a healthy climate. My main gripe with this is that it seems to filter what is displayed, not what is written, even in other instances.
I wouldn’t take as much offense to a bot that simply prevents zip users from using certain slurs in posts or comments, though I’m not sure if that is feasible or even meets your requirement of easing the moderation load.
Yes, I agree with your gripe, it stifles discussion on external instances which was not the idea behind it.
Using the bot is the plan, and should be feasible to some extent - it may end up a whole comment or post is removed instead of just the word but I’ll do some work on it ASAP. It may be we just take a notification approach instead and will manually moderate it.
Sounds good. Thank you by the way for your work and the great service you provide with this instance!
No worries. Glad you’re here! Btw I’ve worked on this today and its 80% implemented. The slur filter is off on the instance, and the bot scans comments (not yet posts) and reports those posts to mods and admins.
