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Stanford researchers find Mastodon has a massive child abuse material problem (www.theverge.com)

submitted 11 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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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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[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago (2 children)

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 agree, but who's going to pay for it? Those aren't just freely available additions to any application that you only need to toggle on.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago)

The researchers can't be taken seriously if they don't acknowledge that you can't force free software to do something you don't want it to.

Even if we started way down at the stack and we added a CSAM hash scanner to the Linux kernel, people would just fork the kernel and use their own build without it.

Same goes for nginx or any other web server or web proxy. Same goes for Tor. Same goes for Mastodon or any other Fedi/ActivityPub implementation.

It. Does. Not*. Work.

* Please, prove me wrong, I'm not all knowing, but short of total surveillance, I see no technical solution to this.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (1 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).

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago

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.