I took a look at the content of Tesseract's filter list

I don’t really know where to post this but this community felt relevant, apologies if this is not welcome here, feel free to moderate, ping, and redirect me if I should share it elsewhere (especially because I’m not a good fact checker, but I felt like it would be interesting to have a level headed discussion about this drama).

I originally posted to [email protected], but a moderator there banned me and deleted the post, I’m guesing the Tesseract dev feels harassed by the whole situation, and do not want to hear about it any more. The community is now locked.

My original post read as follows:

"Was curious about The List™ and took a look at what it contained. There’s interesting stuff that tells us more about the intentions of whoever made it.

I’m not making this list to pile one the current drama, I don’t plan on being added to The List™. I just thought that, when something like this arises, one thing the Tesseract dev could have done is explain why some individual keywords are included, this would have been more transparent. Because when you look closer, there’s some absurd stuff in there, which can lead to confusion as to why some are filtered out.

I can’t be bothered to go through content posted by each individual user and community that are filtered out, so I skipped those.

Community names

~25+ occurrences words referring almost exclusively to leftist political activism including but not limited to criticising american supremacy, the israeli-led genocide, racism, white supremacy, capitalism, paedophilia…
4 occurences of anime related content
3 occurences of right wing related content (Libertarianism, Conservativism, and a conspiracy theory)
usgreenlandwar
“Collapse” (discusses the environmental (and more) collapse of our civilization)
any word referring to the green party of UK (their main platforms: anticapitalism, ecology, progressivism)
“death to” (understandable, but depends on context)
4chan (and similar imageboard names) + greentext formats
“billionnaire”
“anonymous”
1 specific username and variants of their spam accounts / communities
“Police” or “Cops”

Keywords

~30+ occurences of usernames, website urls, company names, sentences, to filter out spam / scam
~30+ occurrences of various sentences almost exclusively used by leftist circles, including but not limited to criticising american supremacy, the israeli-led genocide, racism, white supremacy, capitalism, paedophilia…
🥺?👉👈
“What would (france|the french) do” (probably to prevent referring to the guillotine or the french revolution, still funny)
“chatgip+ity+” used when someone criticises OpenAI’s LLM
“censoring me” (maybe because conspiracy theorists often claim to be censored)
4 Occurrences of sentences mentioning when an article is paywalled
“pedophile” (can’t talk about it?)
“rap(e|ing)s? (kids?|child)” (can’t describe the actions of the above?)
“Perchance” (random LLM related website)
1 dead instance link, which was used by a computer science student that hasn’t posted in 3 months
“neoliberal” (can’t even name a specific political and economic ideology?)
“death to” (that one is understandable)
“pray for nuke” (same as above)
“remove from reality” (same as above but euphemism)
“Kirk(e|'|’)d” (used to refer to the murder of Charlie Kirk)
whenever any post is crossposted from a list of already filtered out instances
whenever any user from a list of already filtered out instances posts or comments

Website URLs

I started this whole summary ~2,5 hours ago based on my search history. There about 300+ direct url entries and I can’t be bothered to check every single one of them (I’ve been looking up their domain name on google, then directly entered their url in a separate browser, and searched the domain on lemmy). I went through about half of them before thinking I had better things to do, here’s the pattern(s) I noticed so far:

4chan
Any Blogspot blogs
Any website hosted on Infinityfree
Lemmy instances the Tesseract dev considers to be extremist (some are part of the free anarchist flotilla (btw quick fun fact, FAF is short for fascist in french, it’s ironic for us french lemmy users))
Any gumroad page
Any itchio page
Bunch of url shorteners
Bunch of piracy related sites
Bunch of cryptocurrency related sites
Some are obvious scam / spam / typo squatting sites NOT shared on lemmy
Left-wing related websites outweight Right-wing related websites 4 to 1
A lot of links are just random companies over the world without them ever being shared on lemmy, or being scams, or spamming the web about their services
- there’s a heavy bias against indian companies
- very few of them were probably filtered out because of their company name, for example a printing company from chicago has “freaks” in their name
- There’s a french rodent control company that was filtered out, this one is interesting because its domain name is also the initials of the main left-wing french politician, but it could also have been filtered out because it obviously uses negative keywords related to their field. I feel like this perfectly highlights the flaws of this lists logic.
- - edit: that one was actually shared twice on lemmy by a user asking relevant questions, my guess is the dev added them preemptively to prevent spam
Some are links to website shared on lemmy, of those:
- a lot were obvious scams / spams
- some were ai related websites
- few were just devs asking ONCE for feedback on their project

Anyway if anyone is motivated enough to take a deeper look and share their findings, or correct me if I missed/mislabeled something, feel free to tag me!"