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Stanford researchers find Mastodon has a massive child abuse material problem (www.theverge.com)
submitted 3 years ago by to c/fediverse@lemmy.ml
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cross-posted from: https://beehaw.org/post/6795142

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.

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[–] 5 points 3 years ago (5 children)

This is something I have worried about for a while. The core concept of the fediverse makes stuff like this really easy to do and there’s not really a solution. I guess government agencies just need to be on the lookout for it?

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  • [–] 12 points 3 years ago (2 children)

    There isn't except going for server owners or infiltrating groups like they already do. Same can be said about encryption or even TCP protocol is being used to distribute CP. You simply can't add CSAM protection for everything, nor should you. That leads to a surveillance state.

    It's an unfortunate byproduct of privacy that it will be used for evil, but that doesn't mean we get rid of security. That's how fascism begins.

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  • [–] 3 points 3 years ago (1 child)

    I was literally just thinking about this and I think you're right

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  • [–] 1 point 3 years ago

    Yeah and this is one of the strong arguments used by governments to banned encryption as well. Or try to implement backdoors which are fundamentally broken as a concept and just straight up breaks encryption. Obviously we all know that's bad. We also have to recognize these privacy and security things we advocate do in fact enable criminals. Still, that's okay as they can be handled by other methods, and the right to privacy should be more important.

    You could make the same argument with guns and cars, they can be extremely powerful weapons for bad actors. That does happen to, we have mass shootings and all sorts of crime with cars. But despite that, we still allow everyone to have these things. Well with guns, that's more debatable, but you get what I mean lol.

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