Not a good look for Mastodon - what can be done to automate the removal of CSAM?
These articles are written by idiots, serving the whims of a corporate stooge to try and smear any other than corporate services and it isn’t even thinly veiled. Look at who this all comes from
The article written by WaPo and regurgitated by The Verge is crap, but the study from Stanford is solid. However, it’s nowhere near as doom and gloom as the articles, and suggests plenty of ways to improve things. Primarily they suggest better tools for moderation.
The study from Stanford conflates pencil drawings of imaginary characters with actual evidence of child rape.
Half the goddamn point of saying CSAM instead of CP is to make that difference blindingly obvious. Somehow, they still missed it. Somehow they are talking about sexual abuse as if it’s something that can happen to pixels.
better tools for moderation
Where have I heard that before?
Its weird how this headline shows up only when other headlines start covering how popular Mastadon is now.
Coincidence? Sure smells like it. God, I love astroturfing in the morning.
Tell them to look into their government and politicians.
https://stacks.stanford.edu/file/druid:vb515nd6874/20230724-fediverse-csam-report.pdf
I’d suggest that anyone who cares about the issue take the time to read the actual report, not just drama-oriented news articles about it.
4.1 Illustrated and Computer-Generated CSAM
Stopped reading.
Child abuse laws “exclude anime” for the same reason animal cruelty laws “exclude lettuce.” Drawings are not children.
Drawings are not real.
Half the goddamn point of saying CSAM instead of CP is to make clear that Bart Simpson doesn’t count. Bart Simpson is not real. It is fundamentally impossible to violate Bart Simpson’s rights, because he doesn’t fucking exist. There is nothing to protect him from. He cannot be harmed. He is imaginary.
This cannot be a controversial statement. Anyone who can’t distinguish fiction from real life has brain problems.
You can’t rape someone in MS Paint. Songs about murder don’t leave a body. If you write about robbing Fort Knox, the gold is still there. We’re not about to arrest Mads Mikkelsen for eating people. It did not happen. It was not real.
If you still want to get mad at people for jerking off to the wrong fantasies, that is an entirely different problem from photographs of child rape.
Okay, thanks for the clarification
Everyone except you still very much includes drawn & AI pornographic depictions of children within the basket of problematic content that should get filtered out of federated instances so thank you very much but I’m not sure your point changed anything.
They are not saying it shouldn’t be defederated, they are saying reporting this to authorities is pointless and that considering CSAM is harmful.
Everybody understands there’s no real kid involved. I still don’t see an issue reporting it to authorities and all the definitions of CSAM make a point of including simulated and illustrated forms of child porn.
What’s the point of reporting it to authorities? It’s not illegal, nor should it be because there’s no victim, so all reporting it does is take up valuable time that could be spent tracking down actual abuse.
It’s illegal in a lot of places including where I live.
In the US you have the protect act of 2003
(a) In General.—Any person who, in a circumstance described in subsection (d), knowingly produces, distributes, receives, or possesses with intent to distribute, a visual depiction of any kind, including a drawing, cartoon, sculpture, or painting, that— (1) (A) depicts a minor engaging in sexually explicit conduct; and (B) is obscene; or (2) (A) depicts an image that is, or appears to be, of a minor engaging in graphic bestiality, sadistic or masochistic abuse, or sexual intercourse, including genital-genital, oral-genital, anal-genital, or oral-anal, whether between persons of the same or opposite sex; and (B) lacks serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value; or attempts or conspires to do so, shall be subject to the penalties provided in section 2252A(b)(1), including the penalties provided for cases involving a prior conviction.
Linked to the obscenity doctrine
Wow, that’s absolutely ridiculous, thanks for sharing! That would be a very unpopular bill to get overturned…
I guess it fits with the rest of the stupidly named bills. It doesn’t protect anything, it just prosecutes undesirable behaviors.
Definitions of CSAM definitely do not include illustrated and simulated forms. They do not have a victim and therefore cannot be abuse. I agree that it should not be allowed on public platforms, hence why all instances hosting it should be defederated. Despite this, it is not illegal, so reporting it to authorities is a waste of time for you and the authorities who are trying to remove and prevent actual CSAM.
CSAM definitions absolutely include illustrated and simulated forms. Just check the sources on the wikipedia link and climb your way up, you’ll see “cartoons, paintings, sculptures, …” in the wording of the protect act
They don’t actually need a victim to be defined as such
That Wikipedia broader is about CP, a broader topic. Practically zero authorities will include illustrated and simualated forms of CP in their definitions of CSAM
If you don’t think images of actual child abuse, against actual children, is infinitely worse than some ink on paper, I don’t care about your opinion of anything.
You can be against both. Don’t ever pretend they’re the same.
Hey, just because someone has a stupid take on one subject doesn’t mean they have a stupid take on all subjects. Attack the argument, not the person.
He invented the stupid take he’s fighting against. Nobody equated “ink on paper” with “actual rape against children”.
The bar to cross to be filtered out of the federation isn’t rape. Lolicon is already above the threshold, it’s embarrassing that he doesn’t realize that.
We’re not just talking about ‘ew gross icky’ exclusion from a social network. We’re talking about images whose possession is a felony. Images that are unambiguously the product of child rape.
This paper treats them the same. You’re defending that false equivalence. You need to stop.
Who places the bar for “exclusion from a social network” at felonies? Any kind child porn has no place on the fediverse, simulated or otherwise. That doesn’t mean they’re equal offenses, you’re just not responsible for carrying out anything other than cleaning out your porch.
I don’t think the OP ever said the bar was rape, the OP said the article and the person they responded to are treating drawn depictions of imaginary children the same as depictions of actual children. Those are not the same thing at all, yet many people seem to combine them (apparently including US law as of the Protect Act of 2003).
Some areas make a distinction (e.g. Japan and Germany), whereas others don’t. Regardless of the legal status in your area, the two should be treated separately, even if that means both are banned.
“treating them the same” => The threshold for being refused entry into mainstream instances is just already crossed at the lolicon level.
From the perspective of the fediverse, pictures of child rape and lolicon should just both get you thrown out. That doesn’t mean you’re “treating them the same”. You’re just a social network. There’s nothing you can do above defederating.
Some confused arguments reveal confused people. Some terrible arguments reveal terrible people. For example: I don’t give two fucks what Nazis think. Life’s too short to wonder which subjects they’re not facile bastards about.
If someone’s motivation for making certain JPEGs hyper-illegal is “they’re icky” - they’ve lost benefit of the doubt. Because of their decisions, I no longer grant them that courtesy.
Demanding pointless censorship earns my dislike.
Equating art with violence earns my distrust.
Perhaps. But pretty much everyone has a stupid take on something.
There’s obviously a limit there, but most people can be reasoned with. So instead of jumping to a conclusion, attempt a dialogue first until they prove that they can’t be reasoned with. This is especially true on SM where, even if you can’t convince the person you’re talking with, you may just convince the next person to come along.
Telling someone why they’re a stupid bastard for the sake of other people is not exactly a contradiction. You know what doesn’t do observers any good? “Debating” complete garbage, in a way that lends it respect and legitimacy. Sometimes you just need to call bullshit.
Some bullshit is so blatant that it’s a black mark against the bullshitter.
Step up the reading comprehension please
I understand what you’re saying and I’m calling you a liar.
You mean to say I’m wrong or you actually mean liar?
‘Everyone but you agrees with me!’ Bullshit.
‘Nobody wants this stuff that whole servers exist for.’ Self-defeating bullshit.
‘You just don’t understand.’ Not an argument.
You should keep reading then, because they cover that later.
What does that even mean?
There’s nothing to “cover.” They’re talking about illustrations of bad things, alongside actual photographic evidence of actual bad things actually happening. Nothing can excuse that.
No shit they are also discussing actual CSAM alongside… drawings. That is the problem. That’s what they did wrong.
Oh no, what you describe is definitely illegal here in Canada. CSAM includes depictions here. Child sex dolls are illegal. And it should be that way because that stuff is disgusting.
CSAM includes depictions here.
Literally impossible.
Child rape cannot include drawings. You can’t sexually assault a fictional character. Not “you musn’t.” You can’t.
If you think the problem with child rape amounts to ‘ew, gross,’ fuck you. Your moral scale is broken, if there’s not a vast gulf between those two bad things.
Oh, wait, Japanese in the other comment, now I get it. This conversation is a about AI Loli porn.
Pfft, of course, that’s why no one is saying the words they mean, because it suddenly becomes much harder to take the stance since hatred towards Loli Porn is not universal.
I mean, I think it’s disgusting, but I don’t think it should be illegal. I feel the same way about cigarettes, 2 girls 1 cup, and profane language. It’s absolutely not for me, but that shouldn’t make it illegal.
As long as there’s no victim, knock yourself out with whatever disgusting, weird stuff you’re into.
If I can try to summarize the main findings:
- Computer-generated (e.g…, Stable Diffusion) child porn is not criminalized in Japan, and so many Japanese Mastodon servers don’t remove it
- Porn involving real children is removed, but not immediately, as it depends on instance admins to catch it, and they have other things to do. Also, when an account is banned, the Mastodon server software is not sending out a “delete” for all of their posted material (which would signal other instances to delete it)
Problem #2 can hopefully be improved with better tooling. I don’t know what you do about problem #1, though.
Such a signal exists in the ActivityPub protocol, so I wonder why it’s not being used.
One option would be to decide that the underlying point of removing real CSAM is to avoid victimizing real children; and that computer-generated images are no more relevant to this goal than Harry/Draco slash fiction is.
And are you able to offer any evidence to reassure us that simulated child pornography doesn’t increase the risk to real children as pedophiles become normalised to the content and escalate (you know, like what already routinely happens with regular pornography)?
Or are we just supposed to sacrifice children to your gut feeling?
Would you extend the same evidence-free argument to fictional stories, e.g. the Harry/Draco slash fiction that I mentioned?
For what it’s worth, your comment has already caused ten murders. I don’t have to offer evidence, just as you don’t. I don’t know where those murders happened, or who was murdered, but it was clearly the result of your comment. Why are you such a terrible person as to post something that causes murder?
I have no problem saying that writing stories about two children having gay sex is pretty fucked in the head, along with anyone who forms a community around sharing and creating it.
But it’s also not inherently abuse, nor is it indistinguishable from reality.
You’re advocating that people just be cool with photo-realistic images of children, of any age, being raped, by any number of people, in any possible way, with no assurances that the images are genuinely “fake” or that pedophiles won’t be driven to make it a reality, despite other pedophiles cheering them on.
I was a teenage contrarian psuedo-intellectual once upon a time too, but I never sold out other peoples children for something to jerk off too.
If you want us to believe its harmless, prove it.
You keep making up weird, defamatory accusations. Please stop. This isn’t acceptable behavior here.
Awful pearl-clutchy for someone advocating for increased community support for photorealistic images of children being raped.
Which do you think is more acceptable to Lemmy in general? Someone saying “fuck”, or communities dedicated to photorealistic images of children being raped?
Maybe I’m not the one who should be changing their behavior.
I don’t know what you do about problem #1, though.
Well the simple answer is that it doesn’t have to be illegal to remove it.
The legal question is a lot harder, considering AI image generation has reached levels that are almost indistinguishable from reality.
In which case, admins should err on the side of caution and remove something that might be illegal.
I personally would prefer to have nothing remotely close to CSAM, but as long as children aren’t being harmed in any conceivable way, I don’t think it would be illegal to post art containing children. But communities should absolutely manage things however they think is best for their community.
In other words, I don’t think #1 is a problem at all, imo things should only be illegal if there’s a clear victim.
So if I’m understanding right, based on their recommendations this will all be addressed as more moderation and QOL tools are introduced as we move further down the development roadmap?
What development roadmap? You’re not a product manager and this isn’t a Silicon Valley startup.
What makes you think that development roadmaps are exclusive to Silicon Valley startup product managers, and not just a general practice in software engineering?
Mastodon actually does have a roadmap, and you can find it here: https://joinmastodon.org/roadmap
As does most successful open source software. It’s more of a "this is where we’d like to see things go long term, but that in no way restricts contributions, it merely helps communicate the ideas of the core contributors.
The article points out that the strength of the Fediverse is also it’s downside. Federated moderation makes it challenging to consistently moderate CSAM.
We have seen it even here with the challenges of Lemmynsfw. In fact they have taken a stance that CSAM like images with of age models made to look underage is fine as long as there is some dodgy ‘age verification’
The idea is that abusive instances would get defederated, but I think we are going to find that inadequate to keep up without some sort of centralized reporting escalation and ai auto screening.
How do you plan to train the AI to recognise CP?
The problem with screening by AI is there’s going to be false positives, and it’s going to be extremely challenging and frustrating to fight them. Last month I got a letter for a speeding infraction that was automated: it was generated by a camera, the plate read in by OCR, the letter I received (from “Seat Pleasant, Maryland,” lol) was supposedly signed off by a human police officer, but the image was so blurry that the plate was practically unreadable. Which is what happened: it got one of the letters wrong, and I got a speeding ticket from a town I’ve never been to, had never even heard of before I got that letter. And the letter was full of helpful ways to pay for and dispense with the ticket, but to challenge it I had to do it it writing, there was no email address anywhere in the letter. I had to go to their website and sift through dozens of pages to find one that had any chance of being able to do something about it, and I made a couple of false steps along the way. THEN, after calling them up and explaining the situation, they apologized and said they’d dismiss the charge–which they failed to do, I got another letter about it just TODAY saying a late fee had now been tacked on.
And this was mere OCR, which has been in use for multiple decades and is fairly stable now. This pleasant process is coming to anything involving AI as a judging mechanism.
THEN, after calling them up and explaining the situation, they apologized and said they’d dismiss the charge–which they failed to do
That sounds about right. When I was in college I got a speeding ticket halfway in between the college town and the city my parents lived in. Couldn’t afford the fine due to being a poor college student, and called the court and asked if an extension was possible. They told me absolutely, how long do you need, and then I started saving up. Shortly before I had enough, I got a call from my Mom that she had received a letter saying there was a bench warrant for my arrest over the fine
Off topic, but a few years ago a town in Tennessee had their speed camera contractor screw up in this way. Unfortunately for them, they tagged an elderly couple whose son was a very good attorney. He sued the town for enough winnable civil liability to bankrupt them and force them to disincorporate.
Speed cameras are all but completely illegal in TN now.
When I lived in Clarksville, they had intersection cameras to ticket anyone that ran a red light. Couple problems with it.
- Drivers started slamming on their brakes; causing more accidents
- The city outsourced the cameras, so they received only pennies on the dollar for every ticket.
I think they eventually removed them, but I can’t recall. I visited last September to take a class for work, and I didn’t see any cameras, so they might be gone.
Dresden’s House rep got a bill passed several years ago to outlaw them. The Australian vendor’s lobbyists managed to get a carve out for school zones and blind curves, but I haven’t even seen any of those in years.
Wait…so the company that supplied the cameras wasn’t even from the U.S.?
Wow…this just gets more insane the more I learn about it. As conservative as Tennessee can be, they first outsourced their law enforcement for a return of pennies on the dollar to the city, AND the taxpayers ended up subsidizing a foreign company.
As I understand it, this is exactly the case. It’s insane.
Personally, I’m not that surprised by it
According to corporate news everything outside of the corporate internet is pedophiles.
Well, terrorists became boring, and they still want the loony wing of the GOP’s clicks, so best to back off on Nazis and pro-Russians, leaving pedophiles as the safest bet.
Nazis not being the go-to target for a poisoning the well approach worries me in many different levels
Agreed. I’m in my 40s, and I’ve never seen anywhere near the level of subsurface signaling and intentional complacency we’re experiencing now.
Is this Blahaj.zone admin “child abuse material” or actual child abuse material?
Or maybe it’s better to err on the side of caution when it comes to maybe one of the worst legal offences you can do?
I’m tired of people harping on this decision when it’s a perfectly legitimate one from a legal standpoint. There’s a reason tons of places are very iffy about nsfw content.
So what im reading is they didnt actually look at any images, they found hashtags, undisclosed hashtags at that. So basically we’ve no idea what they think they found, for all we know cartoon might’ve been one of the tags
Hasn’t Twitter had the same problem for years?
I’m not actually going to read all that, but I’m going to take a few guesses that I’m quite sure are going to be correct.
First, I don’t think Mastodon has a “massive child abuse material” problem at all. I think it has, at best, a “racy Japanese style cartoon drawing” problem or, at worst, an “AI generated smut meant to look underage” problem. I’m also quite sure there are monsters operating in the shadows, dogwhistling and hashtagging to each other to find like minded people to set up private exchanges (or instances) for actual CSAM. This is no different than any other platform on the Internet, Mastodon or not. This is no different than the golden age of IRC. This is no different from Tor. This is no different than the USENET and BBS days. People use computers for nefarious shit.
All that having been said, I’m equally sure that this “research” claims that some algorithm has found “actual child porn” on Mastodon that has been verified by some “trusted third part(y|ies)” that may or may not be named. I’m also sure this “research” spends an inordinate amount of time pointing out the “shortcomings” of Mastodon (i.e. no built-in “features” that would allow corporations/governments to conduct what is essentially dragnet surveillance on traffic) and how this has to change “for the safety of the children.”
How right was I?
I’m not going to read all that. You were probably pretty right.
Halfway there. The PDF lists drawn 2D/3D, AI/ML generated 2D, and real-life CSAM. It does highlight the actual problem of young platforms with immature moderation tools not being able to deal with the sudden influx of objectional content.
The content in question is unfortunately something that has become very common in recent months: CSAM (child sexual abuse material), generally AI-generated.
AI is now apparently generating entire children, abusing them, and uploading video of it.
Or, they are counting “CSAM-like” images as CSAM.
Of course they’re counting “CSAM-like” in the stats, otherwise they wouldn’t have any stats at all. In any case, they don’t really care about child abuse at all. They care about a platform existing that they haven’t been able to wrap their slimy tentacles around yet.
…If you read it then you’d know if you’re rig
removed by mod
This is one of the reasons I’m hesitant to start my own instance - the moderation load expands exponentially as you scale, and without some sort of automated tool to keep CSAM content from being posted in the first place, I can only see the problem increasing. I’m curious to see if anyone knows of lemmy or mastodon moderation tools that could help here.
That being said, it’s worth noting that the same Standford research team reviewed Twitter and found the same dynamic in play, so this isn’t a problem unique to Mastodon. The ugly thing is that Twitter has (or had) a team to deal with this, and yet:
“The investigation discovered problems with Twitter’s CSAM detection mechanisms and we reported this issue to NCMEC in April, but the problem continued,” says the team. “Having no remaining Trust and Safety contacts at Twitter, we approached a third-party intermediary to arrange a briefing. Twitter was informed of the problem, and the issue appears to have been resolved as of May 20.”
Research such as this is about to become far harder—or at any rate far more expensive—following Elon Musk’s decision to start charging $42,000 per month for its previously free API. The Stanford Internet Observatory, indeed, has recently been forced to stop using the enterprise-level of the tool; the free version is said to provide read-only access, and there are concerns that researchers will be forced to delete data that was previously collected under agreement.
So going forward, such comparisons will be impossible because Twitter has locked down its API. So yes, the Fediverse has a problem, the same one Twitter has, but Twitter is actively ignoring it while reducing transparency into future moderation.
I think the common sense solution is creating instances for physically local communities (thus keeping the moderation overhead to a minimum) and being very judicious about which instances you federate your instance with.
That being said, It’s only a matter of time before moderation tools are created for streamlining the process.
My instance is for members of a certain group, had to email the owner a picture of your card to get in. More instances should exist like that. General instances are great but it’s nice knowing all the people on my local are in this group too.
Nah, not intimidated. More that I ran a sizeable forum in the past and I know what what a pain in the ass this kind of content can be to deal with. That’s why I was asking about automated tools to deal with it. The forum I ran got targeted by a bunch of Turkish hackers, and their one of their attack techniques involved a wave of spambot accounts trying to post crap content. I wasn’t intimidated (fought them for about two years straight), but by the end of it I was exhausted to the point where it just wasn’t worth it anymore. An automated CSAM filter would have made a huge difference, but this was over a decade ago and those tools weren’t around.
Not sure why you’re continually @ replying to me? Is discussion around activitypub content moderation an issue for you?
If you run your instance behind cloudlare, you can enable the CSAM scanning tool which can automatically block and report known CSAMs to authorities if they’re uploaded into your server. This should reduce your risk as the instance operator.
https://developers.cloudflare.com/cache/reference/csam-scanning/
Sweet - thanks - that’s a brilliant tool. Bookmarked.
@Arotrios @corb3t @redcalcium perhaps we should learn to not stand behind cloudflare at all! their proxy:
- is filtering real people,
- is blocking randomly some requests between activity pub servers ❌the best way to deal with non solicited content is human moderation, little instance, few people, human scale… #smallWeb made of lots of little instances without any need of a big centralized proxy… 🧠
some debates: 💡 https://toot.cafe/@Coffee/109480850755446647
https://g33ks.coffee/@coffee/110519150084601332I trust CloudFlare a helluva lot more than I trust most of these companies discussed on this thread. Their transparency is second to none.
Thanks for the comment - I wasn’t aware of a cloudflare controversy in play, and went through your links and the associated wikipedia page. It’s interesting to me, as someone who previously ran a public forum, to see them struggle with the same issues surrounding hate speech I did on a larger scale.
I agree with your thoughts on a centralized service having that much power, although Cloudfare does have a number of competitors, so I’m not quite seeing the risk here, save for the fact that Cloudfare appears to be the only one offering CSAM filtering (will have to dig in further to confirm). The ActivityPub blocking for particular instances is concerning, but I don’t see a source on that - do you have more detail?
However, I disagree with your statement on handling non-solicited content - from personal experience, I can confidently state that there are some things that get submitted that you just shouldn’t subject another human too, even if it’s only to determine whether or not it should be deleted. CSAM falls under this category in my book. Having a system in place that keeps you and your moderators from having to deal with it is invaluable to a small instance owner.
@Arotrios @corb3t @redcalcium it’s all about community & trust. I agree that no one should ever has to deal with such offensive content, and my answer again is: running a small instance, with few people, creating a safe space, building trust… ☮️
Of course it’s a different approach about how to create and maintain an online community I guess. We don’t have to deal with non solicited content here because we are 20 and we kind of know each other, subscription is only available by invitation, so you are kind of responsible for who you’re bringing here… and we care about people, each of them! Again, community & trust over any tools 👌
obviously we do not share the same vision here, but it’s ok, I’m not trying to convince, I just wanted to say our approach is completely different 😉
more about filtering content: https://www.devever.net/~hl/cloudflare 💡
Thanks -that’s the detail I was looking for. Definitely food for thought.
Nothing you can do except go after server owners like usual. Has nothing to do with the fedi. Mastodon has nothing to do with either because anyone can pop up their own alternative server. This is one of many protocols they have or will use to distribute this stuff.
This just in: criminals are using the TCP protocol to distribute CP!!! What can the internet do to stop this? Oh yeah, go after server owners and groups like usual.
There is a database of known files of CSAM and their hashes, mastodon could implement a filter for those at the posting interaction and when federating content
Shadow banning those users would be nice too
They are talking about AI generated images. That’s the volume part.
Things are a bit complicated in the fediverse. Sure, your instance might not host any pedo community, but if a user on your instance subscribe/interact with those community, the CSAMs might get federated into your instance without you noticing. There are tools to help you combat this, but as an instance owner you can’t just assume it’s not your problem if some other instance host pedo stuff.
That is definitely alarming, and a downside of the fedi, but seems like a necessary evil. Unfortunately admins and mods of small communties in the fedi will be the ones exposed to this. There has been better methods if handling this though. There are shared block lists out there and they already have lists that block out undesirable stuff like that, so it at least minimizes the amount of innocent eyes of mods, who are just regular unpaid people, from seeing disgusting stuff. Also, obviously those instances should be reported to the police, fbi, or whatever the heck
I know that people like to dump on Cloudflare, but it’s incredibly easy to enable a built-in CSAM scanner with CloudFlare.
On that note, I’d like to see built-in moderation tools using something like PDQ and TMK+PDQF and a shared hashtable of CSAM and other material that may be outlawed or desirable to filter out in different regions (e.g. terrorist content, Nazi content in Germany, etc.)
Wait, why do people like to dump on CloudFlare? I must be out of the loop.
People are wary about how internet got more and more centralized behind cloudlare. If you’re ever getting caught in cloudlare’s captcha hell because they flag your IP as suspicious, you’ll get wary too because you suddenly realized how big cloudlare now when half of the internet suddenly ask you to solve cloudlare captcha.
Got it. Damn. I just switched some services to CloudFlare DNS today…now I guess I’ll change them back.
Are you so easily swayed by a single post from a rando internet person?
Cloudflare DDoSes about 23% of the internet. Stop defending Cloudflare.
Absolutely.
But, no, however the sentiment makes sense and as I am trying to disperse / decentralize most everything I can these days, including getting away from Google services, for example, this does make sense as well.
He actually looks at others’ opinions and weighs the pros and cons unlike almost everyone here on lemmy.
Lemmy.world had to start using CloudFlare because some script kiddies were DDOSing it. Some people were complaining that it encourages centralization, etc.
Personally, I love it. The service you get even at the lowest level of payment ($20/mo) is great. And what you get for free can’t be compared.
Does the CSAM scanner hook into lemmy properly though?
It looks like it scans and flags on the outbound (user download of the image), so as long as it sits in front of your instance, it should work just fine.
You’re still responsible for removing the material, complying with any preservation requirements, and any other legal obligations, and notifying CloudFlare that it’s been removed.
It would be ideal if it could block on upload, so the material never makes it to your instance, but that would likely be something else like integration with PhotoDNA or something similar.
I don’t want much, I just want deletion to be propagated reliably across the fediverse. If someone got banned for CSAM and their contents purged, I want those action propagated across all federated instances. I can’t even delete my comment reliably here on Lemmy since many instances doesn’t seem to get the deletion requests.
This seems like a very normal thing with all social media. Now if the server isn’t banning and removing the content within a reasonable amount of time then we have major issues.
Seems like if you talk about Mastodon but not Twitter or Facebook in the same post it makes it feel like one is greater than the others. This article seems half banked to get clicks.
Don’t bother with the bullshit clickbait article. Honestly, don’t give them the views.
The underlying study is good though, and worth reading.
