Hello everyone,
We unfortunately have to close the !lemmyshitpost community for the time being. We have been fighting the CSAM (Child Sexual Assault Material) posts all day but there is nothing we can do because they will just post from another instance since we changed our registration policy.
We keep working on a solution, we have a few things in the works but that won’t help us now.
Thank you for your understanding and apologies to our users, moderators and admins of other instances who had to deal with this.
Edit: @[email protected] the moderator of the affected community made a post apologizing for what happened. But this could not be stopped even with 10 moderators. And if it wasn’t his community it would have been another one. And it is clear this could happen on any instance.
But we will not give up. We are lucky to have a very dedicated team and we can hopefully make an announcement about what’s next very soon.
Edit 2: removed that bit about the moderator tools. That came out a bit harsher than how we meant it. It’s been a long day and having to deal with this kind of stuff got some of us a bit salty to say the least. Remember we also had to deal with people posting scat not too long ago so this isn’t the first time we felt helpless. Anyway, I hope we can announce something more positive soon.
I hope the devs take this seriously as an existential threat to the fediverse. Lemmyshitpost was one of the largest communities on the network both in AUPH and subscribers. If taking the community down is the only option here, that’s extremely insufficient and bodes death for the platform at the hands of uncontrolled spam.
It doesn’t bode well.
Lemmy is new for all of us. I don’t see any other solution right now. You got some ideas how to handle it better?
I think better mod tools are needed but it will take time. Doesn’t mean the platform will die, but means we may have to deal with some stuff like this.
It’s a hard problem but it absolutely is an existential risk. Spam is an existential risk. A platform that collapses under spam will either remain too small to be irrelevant or collapse from unusability. I’m sorry but I don’t think your response completely grasps the number of forums, social media sites, wikis, etc. that have been completely crushed by spam.
I admit I haven’t kept track of that, true.
Solution now. Better solution later.
That’s what I’m hoping - we can’t just burn down any community with spam
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Are you seriously conflating my position with arguing that CSAM should be allowed?
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What praytell the fuck do you mean by this term specifically
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So 4chan has this problem a lot but they are also based in the US where its most definitely illegal and they IP ban people and I think for the most part it works. It did suck though - I don’t go on there anymore but in the last few years I did, if I was on mobile, I would often get hit with a region ban because so many people in that area were banned that they just decided to block an entire IP region to prevent anyone else posting illegal content.
maybe look into IP and region banning to prevent someone from just making new accounts.
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Region banning would prevent anyone in the area from posting. I even mentioned that I use to come across bans for other people. In the case of 4chan, when they region ban, its possible someone else will be prevented from posting.
Now, if you want to talk about legality in other countries - that’s a different discussion. The internet is open to the WORLD. And all I would be comfortable confirming is that it’s definitely illegal in the US where I am. I’m not gonna get into other countries where it might not be illegal. I don’t know enough about those places to be able to tell you more.
Basically a region ban would be similar to just pulling that instance down. Preventing whatever region that person was posting in would prevent them from posting as well as making local accounts to try and post more.
When I would be downtown where I live, and got a ban that wasn’t meant for me, but I was in the region that was banned, I was able to appeal my ban. In order to appeal, you have to be good at using your words because a person has to sit there and read the appeal to make the decision to unban or not. Mine always went through but I also am capable of talking things out and I’m smart enough to know when to properly explain myself.
Other people didn’t get their appeals and I would see them complain about it elsewhere.
Anyway, you don’t need to condescend to me. I’m not against what you’re saying. I agree with a lot of what you said in other comments.
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Right, it’s definitely not an easy fix and Lemmy doesn’t even operate the way other sites do but today I’m learning that using these instances seems to be easily exploitable.
The reason I mentioned region banning is because it definitely worked. There weren’t people uploading 10000 images of CSA cause if you tried to, you’d get banned so hard that you’d ruin it for other people posting near by.
I agree. Honestly, if I was in charge in anyway - those countries just wouldn’t be allowed access. And that does happen. I use to work for an app where we had people working in the Philippines who couldn’t access the app itself. We had to just give them info and they would feed it to the customers. And it was because their country is blocked from viewing the app in the first place. They’re just straight up not allowed to use it there.
Like I’m totally with you. Fuck MAPs, fuck all of em. If some archaic country still participates in something that is obviously harmful to people - yeah, impose these laws on them. Tell them to fuck off until they stop this shit.
And lets be real. It’s gonna be years before they ever stop.
How does an IP Ban work when this attack came through a different, legitimate, federated Lemmy server?
I don’t think the comment above was trying to express dissatisfaction towards Lemmy’s hosts for failure to respond. They’re simply stating that the way things are all set up, much as we might like it, has serious problems - ones that may end up being considered unsolvable. As you said, we might be heading for an eventual plug pull.
It’s like pointing out that cars produce fossil fuel exhaust. It sucks, and we’re seeing it as unsustainable, but there’s no convenient alternative yet.
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I feel like you didn’t actually read their comment before posting, [email protected]
It has nothing to do with Lemmyshitpost being their “favorite community” and they never mentioned “investing” or “value”. That’s all from you. Stop strawmanning their position. They were criticizing the ease with which entire communities can be taken down by single individuals. Additionally, it seems you are contradicting your own post from 20 minutes prior to your current comment. Perhaps you responded to the wrong comment?
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They aren’t asking devs to be admins or for admins to be devs. They specifically called out the developers because code exists to filter child sexual abuse material, disseminated by organizations such as the FBI and law enforcement, which can be implemented for image uploading.
NOBODY in this comment section is advocating for uploading fucking child sexual abuse material. That is a strawman you are setting up. Nobody is advocating for allowing the uploading of child sexual abuse material, or for the “material to be up on lemmy instances”. NOBODY is suggesting that a single instance going down is “the world is ending”. NOBODY is asking for “100’s of mods to specifically address this one user’s posting of CSAM”.
You’re setting up a strawman argument nobody is proposing. The criticism is that, at this moment, the developers of Lemmy have not implemented a method for automatically vetting uploaded images for CSAM without requiring “100’s of mods”, which is what resulted in the condition that “taking the community down is the only option here”.
Perhaps the wording of the original post was not precise and accurate enough for your full and complete understanding of the intent and meaning behind it. In this post, I have attempted to elucidate that intent and meaning to a degree which I hope is understandable to you.
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As another commenter posted below:
As far as I am aware, every major site does use it in addition to manual vetting for any flagged “borderline” or “uncertain” results caught up in the filter.
Db0 even created a tool for Lemmy:
https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/2896209
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This is just a matter of confirmation bias from your side now. You stubbornly refuse to accept factual information very helpfully delivered to you by users who have many better things to do than respond to your inquiries, and you dogmatically refuse to acknowledge that there are advanced and reliable automation tools available for the use case in question. And while you do all that, you belittle the other users in the community by referring to your supposedly superior knowledge and experience, however somehow failing to provide any data or secondary sources to back up your claims.
They absolutely can, and every forum under the sun has tools and extensions to help with this. Fucking 4chan has code specifically dedicated to deal with CSAM. You have no clue what you’re talking about.
Replace this with [email protected], or [email protected], or [email protected]. “Oh no, users can’t read the entire site” yes that is the definition of the end of the site.
You’re not seeing that this isn’t a lemmyshitpost issue, it’s an “any popular community on lemmy” issue. Snarkily taking potshots at lemmyshitpost as a community doesn’t change it.
It’s not “not an option”, it’s the last resort. It’s like saying that your only option to seeing a roach in your apartment is to burn the whole building down. Because doing it means you don’t have a community anymore, and without communities the site has no purpose.
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Are you being intentionally dense or do you not understand that it’s my point? If someone can flood lemmy with CSAM so easily that the only way to stop it is a site shutdown, then there are not sufficient mitigation measures in place.
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it’s true, if I remember correctly, tumblr was removed from the App Store because of CSA issues. I could be remembering wrong and maybe it was the Google Play Store.
have you ever talked to janitors and mods on 4chan? Good luck getting any info out of them.
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I’m not the other person you responded to and I never claimed to have an apps or links.
I’m just telling you how this works on 4chan. I’m aware that’s not the entire internet obviously - your sarcasm needs work considering we are both here on Lemmy, ie, not 4chan.
If anyone on there is using these programs/apps/whatever, they’re not just gonna tell other people about them.
And as far as I know, I haven’t been on 4chan in like 3 years not but they region ban for CSAM.
Everyone got your sarcasm. We just think the Lemmyverse has no chance when it’s flooded with child porn
I’m a victim of CSAM and my dad exploited me for several websites.
I get being upset about this. But it’s not the end of the world for a site. Lemmy is still totally fine and I have been using it without seeing any CSAM and the only knowledge I even have of this is from posts like OP’s.
Like this isn’t a good time to be just down on the site and pessimistic.
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People are downvoting you because you’re acting like a dick.
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People have been, but you’re not truly listening, Internet Warrior.
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I’m over 50, but you keep doing you, Internet Warrior, as it just proves my point.
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Well, lets see …
That sounds to you like a sentence a young person would say, punctuation and all?
I agree with a lot of what you said and upvoted you but you really need to just stop calling people pedos for disagreeing with you.
I’m a victim of CSAM myself and you can take a look through my comment history where I talked about it in depth more. I hate pedos just as much as you do but going around calling people pedos isn’t going to do anything but upset people.
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I mean, I think people are downvoting you for other reasons.
Obviously I agree with you that CSAM is bad. It happened to me and ruined my fucking life for like all of my teen years and then most of my early 20s.
But calling people names is pointless. Especially when it comes off like a baseless accusation.
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Yeah I get that for sure. I mean, if I knew someone was some kind of MAP idiot who was trying to fight for the rights of pedos, I’d call them names too. Idiot seems fitting for that lol
You’re completely misinterpreting everything we said. If we would shutdown every site with CSAM, the internet wouldn’t exist. We don’t disagree that CSAM isn’t a problem. We disagree with your solution.
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Sorry let me word this correctly: social media wouldn’t exist.
No your solution is to permanently shut down Lemmy since there is the possibility of being CSAM on one instance. The community it’s posted in doesn’t matter. They can just keep spamming CSAM and the mods can’t do anything about it except shutting down the instance/community. Unless there are better tools to moderate. That’s basically what everyone wants. We want better tools and more automation so the job gets easier. It’s better to have a picture removed because of CSAM that is wrongly flagged than not removing one that is CSAM.
The problem is that it won’t stop and that it will happen again.
You’re wrong at step 2 The posters Might’ve used Tor which basically makes it impossible to identify them. Also in most cases LE doesn’t do shit. So the spamming won’t stop (unless someone other than LE does something against it). We can’t only relay on LE to do their job. We need better moderation tools.
Also even if the community is turned back on, what’s stopping someone from doing it again? This time maybe a whole instance?
It’s simply too easy to spam child porn everywhere. One instance of CP is much easier to moderate than thousands.
Fyi, admins have the protection of federal law to not be held responsible, as long as they take action when it happens.
They have very low to zero legal risk, as long as they’re doing their job.
IANAL, but I can read laws.
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You misunderstood what I meant by the part that you highlighted of my comment.
I’m speaking of Safe Harbor provisions, not having to take active DCMA actions. They’re two very different things.
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I have a recurring donation to the instance, but that’s aside the point.
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