Collaborative Content Moderation in the Fediverse
It addresses content moderation for administrators in low-resource decentralized platforms, offering a practical alternative to centralized methods.
The paper tackles content moderation in the decentralized Fediverse by designing FedMod, a collaborative system using federated learning, which achieves average macro-F1 scores of 0.71, 0.73, and 0.58 on harmful content detection, bot detection, and content warning tasks.
The Fediverse, a group of interconnected servers providing a variety of interoperable services (e.g. micro-blogging in Mastodon) has gained rapid popularity. This sudden growth, partly driven by Elon Musk's acquisition of Twitter, has created challenges for administrators though. This paper focuses on one particular challenge: content moderation, e.g. the need to remove spam or hate speech. While centralized platforms like Facebook and Twitter rely on automated tools for moderation, their dependence on massive labeled datasets and specialized infrastructure renders them impractical for decentralized, low-resource settings like the Fediverse. In this work, we design and evaluate FedMod, a collaborative content moderation system based on federated learning. Our system enables servers to exchange parameters of partially trained local content moderation models with similar servers, creating a federated model shared among collaborating servers. FedMod demonstrates robust performance on three different content moderation tasks: harmful content detection, bot content detection, and content warning assignment, achieving average per-server macro-F1 scores of 0.71, 0.73, and 0.58, respectively.