The impact of Capitol Hill on Pleroma

The popularity of Decentralised Web (DWeb) platforms (e.g. Pleroma, Mastodon) has grown in recent years. This has presented users with alternatives to the well-known centralised social network platforms like Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube. In the DWeb, infrastructure and data ownership is decentralized and hence not under a single administrative authority. This paper explores the challenge of content moderation in such an environment. Specifically, we seek to motivate the need for better moderation technologies, via a use-case analysis of DWeb activity surrounding the 6th January 2021 events at Capitol Hill. Through empirical measurements, we inspect the activity of instances that have grown in popularity during this period, and explore the policies imposed on them by other instances. To do this, we inspect Pleroma, a major DWeb microblogging platform. We investigate the posts generated before, during and after the storming of Capitol Hill on the 12 largest instances in terms of user base and posts, and measure the policy reaction on them.