iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

US Politics Labeler [OFFLINE] @handle.invalid · 22/02/2025

Honestly, the scale isn't a big issue, it's quite scalable as far as most things go. Ozone could use some kind of built-in cleanup and/or compression operation, though. A dedicated $10-a-month VPS should be able to handle labelers, no problem.

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US Politics Labeler [OFFLINE] @handle.invalid · 22/02/2025

Obviously neither of these were my intention, and it was a band-aid that backfired.

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US Politics Labeler [OFFLINE] @handle.invalid · 22/02/2025

The threats were more comical than anything but people were quite mad about it. No death threats or threats of violence that I had to see, thank God. It was a lot of people who thought I was selectively censoring with it, or that it was censoring people who find writing alt text difficult.

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US Politics Labeler [OFFLINE] @handle.invalid · 11/02/2025

I've made the difficult decision to turn off the US Politics Labeler. The linked post has more info about why and what's next. I will shortly begin the process of removing the labeler's data from my server. If you want to run your own, the source code is linked in the article.

whtwnd.com

The fate of the US Politics Labeler | US Politics Labeler [OFFLINE]

I am not pleased to report I have made the difficult decision to power off the labeler, effective immediately. The decision comes after potentially weeks of it not functioning anyway, which I haven't...

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US Politics Labeler [OFFLINE] @handle.invalid · 01/02/2025

As far as I can tell, it's still online. It may have been affected by server outages and it's probably now affected (at least on the firehose consumer) by a recently emergent bug in some ATProto libraries I use, so it's severely crippled right now.

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US Politics Labeler [OFFLINE] @handle.invalid · 22/01/2025

In general, I think someone should use my source code to stand up a dedicated Musk labeler that's more broad and selects his non-political arms as well -- so people can clean their feeds of everything related to him, including Tesla, SpaceX, and X if they so choose.

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US Politics Labeler [OFFLINE] @handle.invalid · 22/01/2025

This is pretty difficult to get automatically. Given some of his recent actions, I'll look into fine-tuning the relevant keywords. Also: since he's a member of the Trump Administration as appointed head of DOGE, that is the label that applies to him currently.

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US Politics Labeler [OFFLINE] @handle.invalid · 22/01/2025

I try to keep the scope pretty strict. Given that Musk does other things than Nazi stuff and DOGE (though everything is influenced), such as Tesla and SpaceX which some people may still want to keep in touch with, my scope here is for his role in DOGE and his involvement in politics. 🧵

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US Politics Labeler [OFFLINE] @handle.invalid · 22/01/2025

it was not. oops. turns out somehow the scanning scripts got signed out, and I had to sign them back in manually. so that's fixed now...

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US Politics Labeler [OFFLINE] @handle.invalid · 22/01/2025

i may have messed something up when I restarted the server. i did that and then went to work and forgot about it so I should check to make sure it's all live

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US Politics Labeler [OFFLINE] @handle.invalid · 19/01/2025

I understand the objections, I hear you loud and clear. Unfortunately, it seems like the only financially feasible way to handle the mass of images I otherwise can't automatically label.

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US Politics Labeler [OFFLINE] @handle.invalid · 19/01/2025

Why do some posts that are missing alt text not get labeled? They simply haven't been seen by the bot yet. That's it.

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US Politics Labeler [OFFLINE] @handle.invalid · 19/01/2025

Other advantages to alt text include: * Improved searchability * You can still figure out what the picture would have been when the Bluesky CDN dies and most importantly: * You're including people with blindness.

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US Politics Labeler [OFFLINE] @handle.invalid · 19/01/2025

As a reminder, appeals for posts with the "no alt text" label are not accepted and will be dismissed immediately. It simply checks for the presence of alt text, and you can easily avoid it by adding appropriate alt text to your images. This label will remain until a better solution can be found.

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US Politics Labeler [OFFLINE] @handle.invalid · 27/12/2024

Due to a misconfiguration, the automatic labeling script may not have been running the past few days (or running in a very limited capacity). It may not be possible to fix until tomorrow due to rate limits. It is running in a limited capacity now. I'm very sorry for the inconvenience.

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US Politics Labeler [OFFLINE] @handle.invalid · 12/12/2024

It's not labeled as political. It's labeled as missing alt text, which it is.

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US Politics Labeler [OFFLINE] @handle.invalid · 10/12/2024

Just to clarify: images in link embeds aren't labeled with "no alt text." The title, description, and URL for the link should be enough to label with.

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US Politics Labeler [OFFLINE] @handle.invalid · 10/12/2024

I somehow just found out that posts without alt text weren't getting labeled. They should start getting labeled now. Sorry about that.

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US Politics Labeler [OFFLINE] @handle.invalid · 08/12/2024

And of course, if something hasn't been labeled, report the post and the bot will check it and label it. * If post editing is ever added to Bluesky, adding correct alt text after posting might cause/enable the label to be removed; this depends on me adding support for edits, too.

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US Politics Labeler [OFFLINE] @handle.invalid · 08/12/2024

The only way to avoid your post getting this label is to add correct alt text to your media. Do it for the blind, do it for us. We will NOT remove this label from posts, likely ever*; this is programmatically applied, which is 100% accurate for completely missing alt text.

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US Politics Labeler [OFFLINE] @handle.invalid · 08/12/2024

I've just introduced a new label that allows you to block posts that have missing or bad alt text for their media. It defaults to "Warn" because I think people would get pissed that their timelines are suddenly and unexpectedly devoid of images. I recommend you set it to "Hide".

A screenshot of the bottom of this labeler's settings, with an entry for Missing/bad Alt Text.
People post images and videos a lot without alt text. This is a temporary tool to hide those posts, in case they contain political content, which cannot be labeled if they're in media. See https://github.com/bluesky-social/social-app/issues/4550 for a better, more permanent solution.

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US Politics Labeler [OFFLINE] @handle.invalid · 07/12/2024

These screenshots were taken on a computer, but the flow on the phone app is the same. More specific instructions are in the alt text.

The "Report post" button is at the bottom of the menu that appears when you press the "dots" or "More" button on a post.

Select the US Politics Labeler from the list. If you're reporting a post to a different service, you can select that instead from the list. (Technically, you can report to multiple services, by picking one here and checking the rest of them on the report comment page later. We don't recommend you do this with the US Politics Labeler, since it is unlikely that a given post overlaps our coverage and another labeler's.)

We recommend you submit the report to "Other," since the report reasons here are all completely irrelevant to the US Politics Labeler.

You may add some additional context, particularly if it may not be clear why a post may be political (i.e. the quoted post, or an emerging news story). Then, press "Send report."

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US Politics Labeler [OFFLINE] @handle.invalid · 07/12/2024

i'll add that one to the match list! thanks

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US Politics Labeler [OFFLINE] @handle.invalid · 07/12/2024

The service may see some downtime and more missed posts than usual as I am about to scale up the server. Donations to help cover the cost would be appreciated. liberapay.com/bleonard252

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US Politics Labeler [OFFLINE] @handle.invalid · 07/12/2024

The policy doc was updated to mention an anticipated case for account labeling, how media is handled, and links to the owner's donation page and the automation source code.

whtwnd.com

WhiteWind

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US Politics Labeler [OFFLINE] @handle.invalid · 07/12/2024

The source code for this service's automation tool, codenamed Star Spangled, has been released on Codeberg. This allows you to set up your own powerful weighted-keyword labeler. A full guide on its installation along with Ozone will be written in the future. codeberg.org/bleonard252/...

codeberg.org

star-spangled

The code behind @uspol.bluesky.bot, for others who might want to run a similar service.

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US Politics Labeler [OFFLINE] @handle.invalid · 06/12/2024

I'd like you to report those, so I can take another look to see why those get triggered. They shouldn't be, especially if they mention Yoon, his name has a negative weight... Sometimes people in other languages talk about US politics. Those are supposed to get labeled too.

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US Politics Labeler [OFFLINE] @handle.invalid · 05/12/2024

1. Bundling it with the labeler means one less labeler slot would need to be used. 2. It makes sense paired with this labeler, to cover posts that is financially impossible to properly label. Obviously the superior, and more consistent, approach would be to bundle it with the appview itself:

github.com

Add a native setting to hide from the feed posts containing images without alt text · Issue #4550 · bluesky-social/social-app

There are labelers that do something like that but I think there should be a native accessibility/moderation setting to hide or remove from feed posts that either contain images without alt text / ...

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US Politics Labeler [OFFLINE] @handle.invalid · 05/12/2024

Idea: what if I introduced a label, ignored by default, that applies to posts that have media without alt text?

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US Politics Labeler [OFFLINE] @handle.invalid · 04/12/2024

I just installed another update, which will also crawl the reply-threads of posts it finds, up and down. If that feature fails, it should not affect any other operations of the labeler.

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US Politics Labeler [OFFLINE] @handle.invalid · 04/12/2024

More details on the bug: Previously, it could sometimes auto-review a post from a feed or firehose, when it has already done that before. That would make it override any reports it finds. (This never happened to self-appeals.) This new update should prevent that from happening.

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US Politics Labeler [OFFLINE] @handle.invalid · 04/12/2024

Just pushed an update that should mean less missed reports. There may be hiccups due to the server restart; I'll keep you posted.

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US Politics Labeler [OFFLINE] @handle.invalid · 03/12/2024

I imagine it would look more like X/Twitter's Community Notes feature, but attributed to a fact-checking service.

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US Politics Labeler [OFFLINE] @handle.invalid · 03/12/2024

I'm not sure what you mean. The automated script handles the automated labeling: reading a post and determining what labels need to be applied to it, which it sends to Ozone. Ozone remembers any labels that were assigned, and sends those to Bluesky. My script is custom-made and not yet published.

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US Politics Labeler [OFFLINE] @handle.invalid · 02/12/2024

It is possible to have a simple badge-based fact-check labeler (i.e. labeling with "True" or "False" or "Mostly True", etc). It is not yet possible to give any extra information on a per-post basis using the labels system.

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US Politics Labeler [OFFLINE] @handle.invalid · 02/12/2024

But when it's up and running, Ozone's out-of-box setup guides you through attaching the labeler to the service account you create. There's a somewhat guided editor in settings that you'll use to define the labels when you're signed into it with the service account.

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US Politics Labeler [OFFLINE] @handle.invalid · 02/12/2024

For entirely manual (reports and lookups only), you could "just" run Ozone. It is server software you have to host somewhere on the public Internet, but it's very inexpensive to run: a Raspberry Pi at home or a VPS you can rent anywhere. You'll also need a dedicated account for it. 🧵

github.com

GitHub - bluesky-social/ozone: web interface for labeling content in atproto / Bluesky

web interface for labeling content in atproto / Bluesky - bluesky-social/ozone

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US Politics Labeler [OFFLINE] @handle.invalid · 30/11/2024

That is actually possible! Skyfeed has an option to get posts by label. This is one thing that self-labeling has been said to be useful for.

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US Politics Labeler [OFFLINE] @handle.invalid · 30/11/2024

I don't think there is a guide for automatic labeling scripts yet. Maybe I should write one.

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US Politics Labeler [OFFLINE] @handle.invalid · 30/11/2024

When @uspol.bluesky.bot applies a label to a post, it is only applied (warning label appears, or the post is hidden or labeled) for people subscribed to it, and no-one else. This could be different with labeler-connected or custom self-labels, if they're ever added.

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US Politics Labeler [OFFLINE] @handle.invalid · 30/11/2024

It hides or warns content from feeds (including Following), within reply threads, and on profile pages. The only place I know of where it doesn't warn, but it instead just labels posts, is in search.

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US Politics Labeler [OFFLINE] @handle.invalid · 30/11/2024

For my labeler, usually I do not need or use a comment. If there's possible ambiguity or missing context, they can be helpful, but usually it's easy enough to tell from just the post -- and the automatic labeling script never even sees the comment!

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US Politics Labeler [OFFLINE] @handle.invalid · 30/11/2024

Bluesky does not allow you to do either of these things (yet). It's quite unfortunate. For self-labeling, the issue is being tracked here: github.com/bluesky-soci... and for the list of reports it's at: github.com/bluesky-soci...

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US Politics Labeler [OFFLINE] @handle.invalid · 28/11/2024

because it's political. it involves politicians. that's more than enough to merit a label saying "this is political"

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US Politics Labeler [OFFLINE] @handle.invalid · 27/11/2024

We don't label troll accounts. You should instead report them to a blocklist maintainer.

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US Politics Labeler [OFFLINE] @handle.invalid · 27/11/2024

(Personally I'd keep it set to warnings, or just don't add any labeler you don't trust.)

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