Post

Simon Willison
@simonwillison.net

A lot of people are concerned about the potential for abuse with this custom label feature What's the worst case scenario here, given that labels are only visible to the people who opt-in to seeing labels from that specific labeler?

Simon Willison
@simonwillison.net

Co-ordinated harrasment campaigns can already share links to Bluesky profiles that they plan to target using off-site mechanisms like shared Google Docs, WhatsApp groups etc Is the threat from custom labels purely one of making things more convenient for those groups, or is there something else?

0 reposts14 likes

Nmn
@nmn.sh

The convenience does make the potential for harassment worse. Just think about how Community Notes are more effective than Snopes. The same principles apply in the opposite direction too. Labelers can work if the Labelers themselves are so strictly moderated that they’d become irrelevant.

Joe Shaw
@joeshaw.org

One issue I think is that it makes drive-by harassment easier, and could have a chilling effect on speech. If I don’t know you but you engage with my post and I see you’ve been labeled, I can maybe use that info to harass or demean you in a specifically hurtful way.

Simon Willison
@simonwillison.net

My opinion right now is that the features to watch out for are features that make some form of harassment possible that isn't possible at all if the feature doesn't exist - and I don't think custom labelers qualify for that I'm very ready to be convinced otherwise

Simon Willison
@simonwillison.net

... and here's the inevitable US politician labeler showing their top corporate donors! bsky.app/profile/hips...

Andrew Lisowski 💻@hipstersmoothie.com

My latest labeler is finally working! What it shows for each politician - 3 labels for the top corp donators - 3 labels for the top industries that donate to them Subscribe to this labeler to be more aware of the interests our politicians represent 🚀 bsky.app/profile/us-g...

Private School (and Landlord) Labeller
@handle.invalid

From my experience actually setting this up, noone is going to bother with using the label system as a way to target harassment or vector people while the list system still exists - labels basically only exist for this very limited use case, and are a bit of a royal pain to actually set up and use

Private School (and Landlord) Labeller
@handle.invalid

- you need a server to run the labeller, a domain name and public IP to link it to, and then the actual process of applying labels is in a moderation-style report-queue system. The labels are then not searchable by others. Lists, on the other hand, are baked into the app and really easy to set up

Simon Willison
@simonwillison.net

Bluesky has an open API (as does Mastodon), so if someone wanted to build a custom app for targetted harrasment there would be nothing to stop them from doing that So labels is less friction for building something like that - but I agree that less friction does matter

Simon Willison
@simonwillison.net

On Twitter you could build that as a Chrome extension, which these days isn't necessarily that much harder than building a custom labeler - but of course Chrome extensions aren't an option for the Twitter native mobile apps

Shablo Pleye
@shablopligh.bsky.social

It’s info that’s already published, just a new way of organizing and delivering it for consumers. As long as the labels are accurate, I don’t see the issue, but unsurprising some public figures may be uncomfortable with the factual record

Rabble
@rabble.nz

Labeling can totally become harassment. I run a nostr labeling bot for offensive behavior and language. The folks getting labeled definitely feel harassed by my bot. It’s ironic.