Comment by PoignardAzur

I've only read this article, not the rest of the series, so take this as a grain of salt...

But the author's conclusion about decentralized networks seems extremely understated and optimistic. She correctly points out that they are vulnerable to the same coordinated actors as Facebook & co, that hostile actors are likely to have many more resources than the people running these decentralized networks, and yet she concludes with:

> The inescapable downside of not relying on centralized networks to fix things is that there’s no single entity to try to pressure. The upside is that we can all work toward the same goals—better, safer, freer networks—from wherever we are. And we can work toward holding both centralized and new-school networks accountable, too.

So basically, "it's up to all of us to hold 'them' accountable". And she acts like this is anything but wishful thinking.

If you have a single soldier defending a position against a full battalion of tanks and an artillery barrage, you can hold your soldier "accountable" as much as you like, the enemy is still going to take the position.

As the rest of the article points out, the problem is "scale". Propaganda network can output more content faster than individual users, and moderators can't up. This is especially true when the content already plays off the audience's existing biases: unfortunately, most of the Myanmar population did not bat an eye at the horrifying atrocities perpetrated on the Rohingya. So your Fediverse instances in Myanmar are going to be full of Myanmar citizens with conservative/regressive opinions who will actively promote the government propaganda and ban any users linking to pro-democracy content as foreign agents.

(And it's not like the "resistance" will be of much help. Many of the politicians in the NUG didn't protest at all when the Rohingya genocide took place.)

And that's another problem the article doesn't address at all: "truth", "propaganda", "hate campaigns" and "resistance" are subjective and interchangeable terms. The author ends with a mention of the renewed Israel-Gaza conflicts, but how the fuck is Facebook supposed to moderate that?

When you're asked to consider "We should kill all the jewish oppressors / We should put down the muslim terrorists in gaza / We should slaughter the russian orcs until our land is free", which ones count as defensive patriotism and which ones count as hate speech?

The author acts like good and evil are legible concepts that Facebook and social networks ought to enforce. I don't pretend I have a solution for these problems (and we do need to make progress, urgently), but if we ever find one it won't be with the mindset she displays.