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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/technology@beehaw.org
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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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[–] 13 points 3 years ago* (last edited 3 years ago) (5 children)

I agree, but who’s going to pay for it?

How about police/the tax payer?

If university researchers can find the stuff, then police can find it too. There should be an established way to flag the user (or even the entire instance) so that content can be removed from the fediverse while simultaneously asking for all data that is available to try to catch the criminals.

And of course, if regular users come across anything illegal they will report it too, and it should be removed quickly (I'd hope immediately in many cases, especially if the post was by a brand new/untrusted account).

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  • [–] 8 points 3 years ago (4 children)

    A decentralised platform like the Fediverses won't easily work with nation states and their taxes. Even with Wikipedia today, it's not funded directly via any government - but rather by certain universities giving some money to it + all the private doners.

    And even if we get that working, power politics will mess this up like so often when things actually get troublesome.

    It might be interesting to explore cryptocurrencies as for donations here though. They do have international liquidity and they can't be misused foe power politics.

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  • [–] 4 points 3 years ago* (last edited 3 years ago) (3 children)

    I'm not suggesting Beehaw/etc should be government funded. Rather I'm suggesting it's already possible for basically anyone in the fediverse to report a post as needing urgent moderator attention.

    I think there will be tax payer funded efforts, donation funded efforts, volunteers, etc that are unaffiliated with any specific instance but go through major instances and hit the report button where they consider it to be appropriate — not just manually with people but also with automated tools such as searching for images by a hash of their contents or maybe even running messages through a Large Language Model to check if it is, for example, a form of targeted harassment.

    And yes, the report feature will be abused. That's unavoidable and needs to be taken into account when deciding how to respond to a report. An algorithm could easily prioritise reports based on the history of past reports made by the same person / organisation.

    Stack Exchange has a pretty good system - decisions by individuals are not trusted. Rather those trigger a review by a randomly selected (and trusted) individual to get a second opinion. And even after a decision has been made and an action has been taken (ban a user, etc) there's often a third or even fourth review. And there are processes to appeal and question decisions.

    It's not an easy problem to solve, but as the creator of mastodon said - many hands make light work. The fediverse can some day have a billion people doing moderation tasks - where even simple acts like hitting the upvote button become part of the moderation system (upvote would imply that this account holder tends to make valuable contributions to the community, and should make the moderation system less likely to come down with a ban hammer).

    And I also think there is scope for some communities to be entirely government funded. For example I'd love for every city in the world to run an offical community, with official local government anouncements as well as moderated discussions relevant to people who live in or are visiting the city.

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  • [–] 1 point 3 years ago (2 children)

    I am exactly doubting your suggestion of tax paid donations. I don't think this will happen, unless we actually come together and try to actually enforce this on the political level in various countries.

    After all, open source software is an essential and critical foundation since many decades - but I'm not sure, whether there is any government that has made a pledge to donate a certain amount of money per year into the development and funding of such general purpose software. (Maybe I'm wrong though.)

    Before the fediverse can get any public funding, we need to make some political efforts. the UN is the largest such institution - and it took all the fiasco with the 2 world war to get many countries pledge to donate to it every year...

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  • [–] 3 points 3 years ago*

    I’m not sure, whether there is any government that has made a pledge to donate a certain amount of money per year into the development and funding of such general purpose software

    Tor (The Onion Router) was invented by a United States Naval Intelligence Unit. They released the source code as open source and handed control over to the EFF but several US Government agencies continued to provide substantial funding (especially the Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights and Labor Affairs). As far as I know they continue to fund it.

    There are definitely examples of Governments funding open source software, especially things that are as valuable as a social network.

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  • [–] 2 points 3 years ago* (last edited 3 years ago)

    I am exactly doubting your suggestion of tax paid donations. I don’t think this will happen, unless we actually come together and try to actually enforce this on the political level in various countries.

    I meant private donations, which are already happening.

    I think tax revenue would be spent on government employees looking over content in search of evidence of crimes/etc, which I'm sure is also already happening. I hope they don't just look - they should be reporting whatever they find.

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