Right: the moderation is really to serve themselves including by protecting brands of commercial interests & advertiser revenue, but these platforms have deluded users into buying the pretext that it’s an essential part of a “safe, non-toxic” culture.

Though that may be the case with references to Luigi, they’ll happily abide by much senseless moderation like

• blanket blocks of comments containing links of any kind in subreddits such as r/mildlyinfuriating
• blocks of meta discussions
• strange ideas of brigading that treat a link to a post in another subreddit as “community inference”
• practical bans of subreddits airing grievances about bad moderation
• blocking any insult even when it doesn’t amount to harassment
• blocking any expression of violence even when it’s not incitement until it swings back & strikes against expressions of class consciousness that refer to Luigi.

With newer platforms like mastodon & bluesky, it seems like more of the same: their advocates often gush proudly of their robust moderation & claim that their extra moderation is indispensable to a safe, non-toxic experience.

I think all we need from moderation is removal of illegal content & perhaps offloading of off-topic content somewhere else. Rather than block offensive content, they could label it & let users decide whether to filter it out. Bluesky already does this, but they hardcode their in-house moderation, so users can’t opt out as we saw when they blocked the Trump toe-sucking Elon deepfake video.