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.
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.
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).
One way to do this is to block hashes. This is a slippery slope though because it could be used maliciously. Only way to do this and protect freedom of information is to make this fully open source.
Block hash lists then? Something like a community driven hashlist for CSAM would work, of the majority of federated instances report it as that type then it would get added to the list. Instances could then choose what lists they wanted to block.
…instances could also show what lists they subscribe to so they users could see what sort of moderation they choose
This is kind of problematic… By creating a community driven hashlist that is freely shared, you’ve also kind of created an index of CSAM content that could easily be extrapolated for people actively looking to find/share that content.
Surely a list of hashes wouldn’t be that useful?
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only if they are crypto hashes (hash functions that back btc, ltc, other cryptos) as they are irreversible*
*i wont explain, use your internet in the pocket
Super useful, it’s very similar to how magnet links for torrenting works. I know of a few less popular file sharing services that can act and search for files based on hash alone.
A lot of other areas online make use of hashes as identifiers already too. If you search for a hash of a file you’ve downloaded, just the hash and nothing else, there’s a very good chance you’ll get multiple results.
Doesn’t anyone looking for that material already know what to look for?
Image hashes? That could work. It could be a simple system like uBlock where you import filter lists to your instance and they’re easy to disable if their caretakers fill them with garbage data.
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.