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’m not fully sure about the logic and perhaps hinted conclusions here. The internet itself is a network with major CSAM problems (so maybe we shouldn’t use it?).
It doesn’t help to bring whataboutism into this discussion. This is a known problem with the open nature of federation. So is bigotry and hate speech. To address these problems, it’s important to first acknowledge that they exist.
Also, since fed is still in the early stages, now is the time to experiment with mechanisms to control them. Saying that the problem is innate to networks is only sweeping it under the rug. At some point there will be a watershed event that’ll force these conversations anyway.
The challenge is in moderating such content without being ham-fisted. I must admit I have absolutely no idea how, this is just my read of the situation.
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Maybe my comment wasn’t clear or you misread it. It wasn’t meant to be sarcastic. Obviously there’s a problem and we want (not just need) to do something about it. But it’s also important to be careful about how the problem is presented - and manipulated - and about how fingers are pointed. One can’t point a finger at “Mastodon” the same way one could point it at “Twitter”. Doing so has some similarities to pointing a finger at the http protocol.
Edit: see for instance the comment by @[email protected] to this post.
Understood, thanks. Yes I did misread it as sarcasm. Thanks for clearing that up :)
However I disagree with @[email protected] in that Lemmy, and the Fediverse, are interfaced with as monolithic entities. Not just by people from the outside, but even by its own users. There are people here saying how they love the community on Lemmy for example. It’s just the way people group things, and no amount of technical explanation will prevent this semantic grouping.
For example, the person who was arrested for CSAM recently was running a Tor exit node, but that didn’t help his case. As shiri pointed out, defederation works for black-and-white cases. But what about in cases like disagreement, where things are a bit more gray? Like hard political viewpoints? We’ve already seen the open internet devolve into bubbles with no productive discourse. Federation has a unique opportunity to solve that problem starting from scratch, and learning from previous mistakes. Defed is not the solution, it isn’t granular enough for one.
Another problem defederation is that it is after-the-fact and depends on moderators and admins. There will inevitably be a backlog (pointed out in the article). With enough community reports, could there be a holding-cell style mechanism in federated networks? I think there is space to explore this deeper, and the study does the useful job of pointing out liabilities in the current state-of-the-art.
Another way to look at it is: How would you solve this problem with email?
The reality is, there is no way to solve the problem of moderation across disparate servers without some unified point of contact. With any form of federation, your options are:
The reality is, any federated system is gonna have these issues, and as long as the protocol is open, anyone can implement any instance on top of it they want. It would be wonderful to solve this issue “properly”, but it’s like dealing with encryption. You can’t force bad people to play by the rules, and any attempt to do so breaks the fundamental purpose of these systems.
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Agreed. It’s not the solution.
On this I disagree. There are many fundamental differences. Email is private, while federated social media is public. Email is one-to-one primarily, or one-to-few. Soc media is broadcast style. The law would see it differently, and the abuse potential is also different. @[email protected] also used e-mail as a parallel and I don’t think that model works well.
I agree for myself, but that wouldn’t shield a lay user. I can recommend that a parent sign up for reddit, because I know what they’ll see on the frontpage. Asking them to moderate for themselves can be tricky. As an example, if people could moderate content themselves we wouldn’t have climate skeptics and holocaust deniers. There is an element of housekeeping to be done top-down for a platform to function as a public service, which is what I assume Lemmy wants to be.
Otherwise there’s always the danger of it becoming an wild-west platform that’ll attract extremists more than casual users looking for information.
Good point.
The way I see it this will inevitably lead to concentration of users, defeating the purpose of federation. One or two servers will be seen as ‘safe’ and people will recommend that to their friends and family. What stops those two instances from becoming the reddit of 20 years from now? We’ve seen what concentration of power in a few internet companies has done to the Internet itself, why retread the same steps?
Again I may be very naive, but I think with the big idea that is federation, what is sorely lacking is a robust federated moderation protocol.
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I share and promote this attitude. If I must be honest it feels a little hopeless: it seems that since the 1970s or 1980s humanity has been going down the drain. I fear “fediverse wars”. It’s 2023 and we basically have a World War III going on, illiteracy and misinformation steadily increase, corporations play the role of governments, science and scientific truth have become anti-Galilean based on “authorities” and majority votes, and natural stupidity is used to train artificial intelligence. I just feel sad.
But I don’t mean to be defeatist. No matter the chances we can fight for what’s right.
This is exactly what I thought. The story here is that the human race has a massive child abuse material problem.
The problem is even bigger: some places (ejem Reddit) you will get deplatformed for explaining and documenting why there is a problem.
(even here, I’ll censor myself, and hopefully restrict to content not too hard to moderate)
Is it, though?
Over the last year, I’ve seen several reports on TV of IRL group abuse of children, by other children… which left everyone scratching their heads as to what to do since none of the perpetrators are legally imputable.
During that same time, I’ve seen exactly 0 (zero) instances of CSAM on the Internet.
Sounds to me like IRL has a major CSAM, and general sex abuse, problem.