Hello, dear community,
It's been a while! We've been working hard, though. The Funkwhale 2.0 release candidate is close to being released, but that's not the main topic today!
Given the current political climate, we want to talk about making Funkwhale more actively involved in the fight against far-right ideologies. To achieve this, we're developing a filter to remove all far-right-associated artists from the network. Since anti-fascism is not optional in our community, this filter will be hardcoded into our codebase, preventing right-wing extremists from using Funkwhale.
But who decides what constitutes far-right content? How do we moderate and fact-check this information? We believe the best approach is to have a centralized system with experience in fighting misinformation collectively. So, we’ve nominated... The Wikimedia Foundation! More specifically, Wikidata. Of course in case there is an issue with the Wikidata database, we will provide a cli tool to use a manually generated ban-list. This ban list will be manually maintained by the Funwhale community, avoiding any attack on Funkwhale instances.
We've identified a set of genres affiliated with far-right extremism, and now we need your help :
- Investigate and tag artists under the corresponding genres (if you have proper references demonstrating the affiliation).
- Moderate these artists (ensure affiliations are not removed or added without valid reasons).
- Add MusicBrainz artist IDs and English labels to Wikidata.
- Add more genres to the list. You can probably tag genres with neo nazi music under the subclass of property on Wikidata. But please communicate about this in the forum or the GitLab issue if you want it to be taken into account.
If you're interested in this topic, the related forum post is here. For more organized discussions, you can also use the GitLab issue here. We want to have a collective reflexion around this, so this issue makes a resume of arguments against the filter. Please be sure to be in accordance with our Code of Conduct before commenting o/
This is also a way to open Funkwhale to Wikidata generated playlists ! If you want to build this feel free to reach out has always :D
If you are a liberal or if you want to have fun, have a look at "Aamer Rahman: Is it really ok to punch nazis?" :)
We wish you happy music in your ears and hope to see you around our community spaces !