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.
Maybe my comment wasn’t clear or you misread it. It wasn’t meant to be sarcastic. Obviously there’s a problem and we want (not just need) to do something about it. But it’s also important to be careful about how the problem is presented - and manipulated - and about how fingers are pointed. One can’t point a finger at “Mastodon” the same way one could point it at “Twitter”. Doing so has some similarities to pointing a finger at the http protocol.
Edit: see for instance the comment by @[email protected] to this post.
Understood, thanks. Yes I did misread it as sarcasm. Thanks for clearing that up :)
However I disagree with @[email protected] in that Lemmy, and the Fediverse, are interfaced with as monolithic entities. Not just by people from the outside, but even by its own users. There are people here saying how they love the community on Lemmy for example. It’s just the way people group things, and no amount of technical explanation will prevent this semantic grouping.
For example, the person who was arrested for CSAM recently was running a Tor exit node, but that didn’t help his case. As shiri pointed out, defederation works for black-and-white cases. But what about in cases like disagreement, where things are a bit more gray? Like hard political viewpoints? We’ve already seen the open internet devolve into bubbles with no productive discourse. Federation has a unique opportunity to solve that problem starting from scratch, and learning from previous mistakes. Defed is not the solution, it isn’t granular enough for one.
Another problem defederation is that it is after-the-fact and depends on moderators and admins. There will inevitably be a backlog (pointed out in the article). With enough community reports, could there be a holding-cell style mechanism in federated networks? I think there is space to explore this deeper, and the study does the useful job of pointing out liabilities in the current state-of-the-art.
Another way to look at it is: How would you solve this problem with email?
The reality is, there is no way to solve the problem of moderation across disparate servers without some unified point of contact. With any form of federation, your options are:
The reality is, any federated system is gonna have these issues, and as long as the protocol is open, anyone can implement any instance on top of it they want. It would be wonderful to solve this issue “properly”, but it’s like dealing with encryption. You can’t force bad people to play by the rules, and any attempt to do so breaks the fundamental purpose of these systems.