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.

    • wanderingmagus@lemm.ee
      191·
      1 year ago

      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?

        • wanderingmagus@lemm.ee
          11·
          1 year ago

          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.

        • utopianfiat@lemmy.worldEnglish
          7·
          1 year ago

          The developers who build lemmy aren’t able to put in CSAM blocking code. That’s not how this works.

          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.

          Oh no! Users can’t read lemmyshitpost and now the world is ending.

          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.

          Turning off the community is a viable option

          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.

            • utopianfiat@lemmy.worldEnglish
              7·
              1 year ago

              Replace a site with CSAM and you’ll find it’s not a site you’ll want to go to in the first place.

              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.

                • cubedsteaks@lemmy.today
                  2·
                  1 year ago

                  Yes, this is the Internet. Take your statement and replace “lemmy” with “reddit” “facebook” “9gag” “imgur” etc… No site has “sufficient mitigation measures in place” as CSAM continues to flood the internet.

                  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.

            • cubedsteaks@lemmy.today
              2·
              1 year ago

              Cool, name them and give me links then. I could not find such on the internet. There is software that tries to detect this, but even youtube’s algorithm is incorrectly flagging fully clothed 30 year old women as children.

              have you ever talked to janitors and mods on 4chan? Good luck getting any info out of them.

                • cubedsteaks@lemmy.today
                  4·
                  1 year ago

                  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.

      • cubedsteaks@lemmy.today
        2·
        1 year ago

        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.

        • Cosmic Cleric@lemmy.worldEnglish
          31·
          1 year ago

          If you’re a pedophile and disagree with me - instead of downvoting, why not explain yourself?

          People have been, but you’re not truly listening, Internet Warrior.

        • cubedsteaks@lemmy.today
          2·
          1 year ago

          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.

            • cubedsteaks@lemmy.today
              2·
              1 year ago

              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.

            • newIdentity@sh.itjust.works
              1·
              1 year ago

              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.

                • newIdentity@sh.itjust.works
                  1·
                  1 year ago

                  You are wrong. My site doesn’t have CSAM. Lots of other sites don’t have CSAM. The internet isn’t just for CSAM. You must be smarter than this.

                  Sorry let me word this correctly: social media wouldn’t exist.

                  My solution to turn off communities while the CSAM issue is cleaned up? What about those solutions do you disagree with?

                  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.

                  I’d bet money that the following will happen:

                  1. community gets turned off
                  2. csam gets deleted, posters are identified, information turned over to law enforcement
                  3. community gets turned back on.

                  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.

    • Cosmic Cleric@lemmy.worldEnglish
      5·
      1 year ago

      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.