The long-dormant Funkwhale project is still alive and in active development, with an impending 2.0 release predicted to land soon. Recently, the project posted an update regarding a new initiative for the platform: filtering fascists off the network.

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.

While the ethos behind this seems laudable, some aspects to this approach seem deeply problematic. Firstly, there’s a question of autonomy and agency: self-hosted software generally gives admins the power to decide how to manage their server or community. Building a central, automated mechanism into Funkwhale may violate this expectation of user agency.

How Would This Work?

Curious to learn more, we dove into the development threads [1,2] to make sense of the proposal. There are two big changes worth understanding: mandatory tagging, and tag processing.

Mandatory Tagging

Future versions of Funkwhale are pushing to require all uploaded tracks to have MusicBrainz data associated with them. If the track is missing a MusicBrainz ID or incorrectly using a different ID, that track may be filtered out of network discovery and possibly not even federate to other Funkwhale servers.

This isn’t so much of an issue for established artists producing studio releases, but it does undermine Funkwhale’s long-underserved secondary community: independent musicians on the Fediverse. While producing MusicBrainz data for a track isn’t necessarily hard, it can be extremely time-consuming, and brings friction to a simple process like uploading your own music. For people looking for a more Soundcloud-like publishing experience, Funkwhale’s approach is the exact opposite.

Banned Tags

Funkwhale is currently leveraging WikiData and hopes to filter out music with the following MusicBrainz tags:

• Neo Nazi Music
• White Power Music
• Nazi Rock
• National Socialist black metal
• Rock identitaire français
• Nazi punk
• Italian right-wing alternative music
• Rock Against Communism
• Hatecore

This is a limited list, and the project is already contemplating adding more genres. Based on existing code and public statements, the filter does the following things:

1. When a related tag is detected in a track during the upload process, Funkwhale will simply refuse to upload it, stating that a Right-Wing Artist has been detected.
2. By default, the filter will change the behavior of the local UI to hide any content that matches the banned list.

An open question remains regarding already-uploaded materials. If it meets the criteria of the filter, does the media disappear entirely? For now, there doesn’t seem to be any automated deletion, but a filter may just hide that media for everyone regardless.

Problem Areas

There are a few areas that raise concerns about the approach the project intends to take. Even though labeling bigoted content and filtering it out seems cut and dry, there are a lot of details that raise questions. The biggest concerns involve delegating project infrastructure to a public WikiData community, using crowdsourcing to produce this data, what the criteria for filtering music should be, and whether this approach is actually effective.

Project Infrastructure and WikiData

One point of contention here is that the Funkwhale project is hoping to motivate some subset of the WikiData community to effectively do the work of tagging musicians. Not only is this project not part of Funkwhale’s own core infrastructure, but it’s also completely crowdsourced, while providing a central authority on how individual servers process music locally.

There will be no artist list hardcoded in funkwhale. The only hardcoded thing will be the query to wikidata to get the list of artist. This task can be launch manually by the admin to update the list to the last wikidata state.

And a fallback, static (but manually updated) list will bee available in funkwhale.audio in case wikidata get attacked.

Using project infrastructure as a backup instead of the main source seems like an odd decision, in that it would only be used if the existing way of doing things was ever compromised.

Defining Scope and Criteria

Enlisting a crowdsourced, public platform to do the dirty work here could open up a proverbial can of worms. Labeling known out-and-proud Neo-Nazis and white supremacists is one thing, but this mechanism could theoretically be used against any artist for any reason, with little accountability in place. Now that a precedent is set and a mechanism exists, will this scope be expanded to other kinds of controversial and problematic artists? Given the reactive nature of online spaces and hearsay, could this mechanism be used against independent musicians that have nothing to do with the far-right?

There’s also some categorical issues worth considering. Does this initiative aim to only block overtly bigoted media, or does it aim to remove media from anyone publicly known to be a bigot? An open issue in the project tracker mentions one user enjoying music from Burzum: despite the artist himself being labeled a Nazi, the artistic and lyrical content were influential to blackened death metal, and are not considered to contain Nazi content. The project lead effectively shrugs and states that they, too, are a fan of the band, but they would rather lose access to that music than have to implement the extra logic necessary to allow certain kinds of music, while blocking the artists themselves from being on Funkwhale.

Circumvention and Efficacy

There’s also an open question as to whether admins who disagree with this decision could simply just fork Funkwhale and remove the mechanism. We’ve seen this in the past: when a number of fediverse clients blocked access to Gab and a number of other right-wing Fediverse instances, they ended up getting forked as new projects to restore access. There’s nothing in standard open source licenses to prevent this behavior – in fact, Gab and Truth Social both benefit from forking Mastodon’s own codebase.

The main problem that Funkwhale is trying to address here is that instance admins don’t really have any power over what other servers are hosting. The main tools at their own disposal involve defederation, blocking, and filtering content, all actions taken within the moderation layer. An automated filter mechanism effectively circumvents that sense of agency, with its central argument being “What? We’re only preventing you from uploading Nazi music. Are you against this because you’re a Nazi or something?”

Alternative Approaches

While Funkwhale is attempting to take an admirable stance against fascism and hateful ideology, it could be argued that this project is trying to solve a social problem with a technical solution, which doesn’t always work out well. One thing to keep in mind is that some of the most effective approaches for establishing norms and drowning out hate speech is to do this at the community level.

One alternative here might be to adopt an approach similar to the CARIAD blocklist by IFTAS, but for music:

1. Instead of a hard-coded feature, build infrastructure for a proposed list of banned tags
2. Provide a feature in Funkwhale for admins to specify which tags to block on their instance, maybe filled out with recommended tags by default.
3. Said feature offers an automatic option that just syncs with the project’s own blocklist.
4. Individual instances could publish a short list of which tags are bad, giving instance admins the power to decide who to federate with.

Looking Ahead

While this development decision might introduce some level of controversy within the community, we believe it’s important to investigate this fairly, and report what we’ve found. Some posts have already started circulating that the Funkwhale project is trying to control instance libraries and delete existing media, but the existing mechanisms don’t appear to actually delete anything. Time will tell whether this initiative is effective, but it’s an interesting decision coming from an established Fediverse platform.

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