---
# System prepended metadata

title: Moderation Design

---

# Moderation Design

> This document services to document and discussion design proposals for a Twt.social Pod moderation system that strikes a balance between preventing and blocking abuse whilst not interferring with or censoring content unnecessarily. @prologic 

## Prior discussions

Discussions have alrady happened around the need for "Moderation" tooling in Twtxt the software behind Twt.social Pods. Apple App Store submission guidelines seems to require there by some level of content moderation (_something we want to avoid per se_), whilst folks like [@felixp7](https://twtxt.net/user/felixp7) emphatically state the need for moderation tooling as it will become very important to fight abuse, abusers and spam.

All of these things are true, and there has always been a place for some level of moderation tooling, especially to prevent/block abuse and spam.

## Examples

### micro.Blog

[micro.Blog](https://micro.blog) has two user-facing tools:

- Report User
- Mute User

Both of these tools are available AFAICT from the Desktop and Web Apps (_but not thee iOS App_).

![](https://i.imgur.com/VJgpOZk.png)

And here is a link to the [micro.Blog Community Guidelines](https://help.micro.blog/2017/community-guidelines/).

In particular to note are:

> Many great friendships and interesting conversations can start as an @-reply. We are committed to making Micro.blog a place where these interactions can happen. Unfortunately, abuse and harassment frequently come in the form of an @-reply from someone you don’t follow.

Which is has the following solution(s):

> To combat this type of abuse and harassment, Micro.blog can help filter replies out of your timeline. Potentially harmful replies to you that are flagged will be separated from your regular mentions. You can also mute any user to hide their posts.

The first part appears to be a form of Administrative moderation/censorship where the later is what you see above with the "Mute User" feature.

THe rest of the guidelines is pretty straight forward and users are asked to contact the community manager if being harrassed via email.

And finally the types of content that are against the community guidelines and considered "abuse" are:

- Hate speech
- Threats of violence
- Harassment
- Posting private information (aka doxxing)
- Illegal activities

Hopefully this is all pretty straightforward, but haev a read of the full guidelines above.

## Options

### 1. Community based flagging

This proposal is inspired by some of the discussions with `@felixp7` where users of a Pod can flag content such as individual Twts or Twt Blogs of other users. This would bring these Users and their Posts to the Pod Owner's attention for investigation and action.

Some questions:

- Do wee allow Pod Owners to delete offending Twts or Twt Blogs or just Delete User Accounts?
- Do we hide offending Twts from users?

### 2. Mute User

Another option is to allow users to "Mute" other users effectively filtering out their Twts and Twt Blogs from view from their own Timeline and Discover.

Of course Users are also free to Unfollow those same users, but "Muting" a user has the added benefit of also hiding/filtering content from Discover for thos users too.

### 3. Report User

Allow from a User's Profile page a way for other users to report a user as being abusive, spam, etc that flags the user to the Pod Owner for investigation and removal from the Pod.

Some questions:

- What options would we psent to the user?

## Proposals

### Mute + Report

[@kt84](https://twtxt.net/users/kt84) and I have discussed the above options and a few other examples of how these types of things are handled in other similar platforms and we _think_ the following proposal could work really well:

- Provide two options on a User's Profile page in the Web App and Mobile App that allows a user to "Mute @prologic" or "Report @prologic"

Unlike micro.Blog however we will for "Report @prologic" prompt the user for which specific parts of the "Abuse Policy" is in violation and provide examples by linking any example Twts by their either their Permalink URIs or Hashes. We feel that by adding this small layer that it would help to also thwart abusers/harrassers that would report users wrongfully for things like questionable content or opinions they don't agree with but that are **in fact not** in violation of the Pod's Abuse Policy.

## A more granular approach

1 - Hide this user: similar to Mute, it would hide any post from the user won't be shown to the user but still can see @- mentions

> Why I think we need a more granular approach than Mute, since with Mute @-mentions are hidden from the user. Let's say @mark likes to twt about the Liberal party, and I simply don't like so I Unfollow him and also Mute him so I don't see his posts on Discover. But now @mark follows me and since I like to post about the Labour party @mark starts to disagree with me. Well I have Muted @mark so I don't see his posts. I don't even know now that his has been getting abusive on his @-mentions at me. But @john follows @mark and me so he is seeing all this abusive posts but he doesn't think that is his place to report @mark since @mark is talking @me so I should be the one reporting him, @john thinks. But I don't even know. @john starts getting annoyed with twt and doesn't think it a safe place for him so he moves on.



2 - Report this user: it will notify the pod owner of abusive content and the user will be automatically blocked by the whom reported him 


3 - Block this user: the user will be blocked and nothing will be shown, the blocked user won't see the twt from the who blocked him and if they try to @-mention you, they won't be able to. There is a very detailed page on [Twitter](https://help.twitter.com/en/using-twitter/blocking-and-unblocking-accounts) about how they handle it.