Federated platforms face considerable obstacles to robust and scalable governance, particularly with regard to persistent threats such as coordinated behavior and spam.

The broader challenge here — and perhaps, the inescapable one — is the essential humanness of online trust and safety efforts. It isn’t machine learning models and faceless algorithms behind key content moderation decisions: it’s people. And people can be pressured, intimidated, threatened and extorted.

Many discussions about social media governance and trust and safety are focused on a small number of centralized, corporate-owned platforms. The emergence and growth in popularity of federated social media services introduces new opportunities, but also significant new risks and complications.

Major social media and technology companies continue to make algorithmic, user interface, and policy changes to their products to address information integrity challenges on their platforms.