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.
I browsed through an anime instance while trying to convince myself to like Mastodon and unfortunately I believe I’ve found some of this myself. I wasn’t going to confirm it was real, I just reported and closed out but considering I’ve never seen such content on other websites and this instance was rife with it, I don’t find this article hard to believe at all.