Mastodon, an alternative social network to Twitter, has a serious problem with child sexual abuse material according to researchers from Stanford University. In just two days, researchers found over 100 instances of known CSAM across over 325,000 posts on Mastodon. The researchers found hundreds of posts containing CSAM related hashtags and links pointing to CSAM trading and grooming of minors. One Mastodon server was even taken down for a period of time due to CSAM being posted. The researchers suggest that decentralized networks like Mastodon need to implement more robust moderation tools and reporting mechanisms to address the prevalence of CSAM.
That’d be useless though, because first, it’d probably opt-in via configuration settings and even if it wasn’t, people would just fork and modify the code base or simply switch to another ActivityPub implementation.
We’re not gonna fix society using tech unless we’re all hooked up to some all knowing AI under government control.
That’d be useless though, because first, it’d probably opt-in via configuration settings and even if it wasn’t, people would just fork and modify the code base or simply switch to another ActivityPub implementation.
No it wouldn’t, because it’d still be significantly easier for instances to deal with CSAM content with this functionality built into the platforms. And I highly doubt there’s going to be a mass migration from any Fediverse platform that implements such a feature (though honestly I’d be down to defederate with any instance that takes serious issue with this).
And the instances who want to engage with that material would all opt for the fork and be done with it. That’s all I meant.
Right, and the rest of us would be able to more effectively filter it out from our instances.
That’s not the point. Yes, child porn sites can host child porn. Other sites/instances can’t stop that. But what other instances can stop, is redistributing said child porn. And for that purpose, such technology would be useful.
researchers found 112 instances of known CSAM across 325,000 posts on the platform
So you’re willing to vacuum up the hashes of every image file uploaded on thousands of decentralized systems into a centralized systems (that is out of “our” control and coupled with direct access for law enforcement and corporations) to prevent the distribution of 0.034% of files that are CSAM and that could just as well be reported and deleted by admins and moderators? Remember how Snowden warned us about metadata?
If you think that’s a wise tradeoff, I guess, go ahead. But then I’d have to question the entire goal of being decentralized in the first place. If it’s all about “a billionare can’t wreak havok upon my social network”, then yeah, I guess decentralization helps a bit but even that remains to be seen.
But if you’re actually willing to do that, you’d probably also be in favor of having government backdoors into chat encryption (and thus rendering the entire concept moot, because you can’t have backdoors that cannot be discovered by other nefarious actors) and even more censorship-resistant systems like Tor because evil people use it to exchange CSAM anonymously as well?
If you read the article, there’s actually more. The problem also isn’t just that they post the material directly onto Mastodon, they also use the platform to network.
I don’t know how you get the impression that this increases censorship.
Instance admin already manually block content. And they are already able to do that to any extend they wish to do.
This tool would simply automate that process.
Admins would not gain or lose any ability to block content. Identifying child porn would simply be easier.
(Imagine an admin going to their database and doing a CTRL+F with the term “child porn”, and then going through the posts to find offending ones. But instead of CTRL+F it’s an AI.)
(For some reason I don’t get a notification when you answer my comment. Is that a known issue? Did you block me or something?)
