this post was submitted on 19 Jul 2024
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I feel like this could be abused by admins to create a system of social credit. An admin acting unethically could revoke access up the chain as punishment for being associated with people voicing unpopular opinions, for example.
Absolutely, but the chain of trust, in a way, doesn't start with the admin - only the explicit chain does. Implicitly, the chain of trust starts with all of us. We collectively decide if any given chain is trustworthy or not, and abuse of power will undoubtedly be very hard to keep hidden for long. If it becomes apparent that any given chain have become untrustworthy, we will cast off those chains. We can broke new bonds of trust, to replace chains that have broken entirely.
It's a good system, because started a new chain should be incredibly easy. It's really just a refined version of the web rings of old, presented in a catalogue form. It's pretty great!
By "up the chain", you mean the nodes that I represented near the bottom, right?
Theoretically they could, by revoking their guarantee. But then the guarantee could simply ask someone else to be their guarantor, and the chain is redone.
For example, check the infographic #2. Let's say that, instead of botting, Charlie used her chain to bully Hector.
Now the only one out is Charlie. Because the one abusing power also loses intrinsic trust (as @skaffi@infosec.pub correctly highlighted, there's another chain of trust going on, an intrinsic one).
When I say "up the chain," I mean towards the admins. A platform isn't gonna let just anyone start a chain, because any random loser could just be the start of an access chain for a bunch of bots, with no oversight. So I conclude that the chain would necessarily start with the website admins.
My experience online is that the upper levels of moderation/administration feel beholden to no one once they get enough users. It's been shown time and time again that you can act like a dictator if you have enough people under you to make some of them expendable. It might not be a problem on, say, db0. However, I've seen Discord servers that are big enough to have this problem. I could definitely see companies abusing this to minimize risk.
So, for example, pretend Reddit had this system during the API nonsense:
Maybe I'm still misunderstanding how this system works, but it seems like it would start to run into problems as a website got more users and as people became reliant on it for their social life (like I am with Discord and some of my friends/family are with Facebook).
Got it - up "up".
Yes, if this sort of chain starts with the admins, they could exploit it for censorship. However that doesn't give them "new" powers to abuse, it's still the "old" powers with extra steps.
And, in this case, the "old" powers are full control over the platform and access to privileged info. Even without this system, the same shitty admins could do things yielding the same dystopia as your example - such as censoring complains through vaguely worded bans ("multiple, repeated violations of the content policy") or exploiting social relations to throw user against user, since they know who you interact with.
So, while I think that you're noticing a real problem, I think that this problem is deeper and appears even without this feature - it's the fact that people would be willing to play along such abusive admins on first place, even as the later misuses systems at their disposal to silence the former. They should be getting up and leaving.
It's also tempting to think on ways to make this system headless, with multiple concurrent chains started by independent parties, that platforms are allowed to accept or decline independently. In this case admins wouldn't be responsible so much for creating those chains, but accepting or declining chains created by someone else. With multiple sites being able to use the same chains.
My main criticism was how this system enables admins to implement collective punishment with almost zero effort, unless it's made headless.
I got it. And to be fair it is an actual concern.