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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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[-] lohrun@fediverse.boo 41 points 1 year ago

One of the problems with the fediverse is that each server keeps its own copy of the content. It is definitely a worry that bad actors push content to federated servers to get them taken down due to the content they now are storing.

[-] JCPhoenix@beehaw.org 13 points 1 year ago

What's the reason for that? Caching purposes?

[-] deksesuma@beehaw.org 16 points 1 year ago

General idea is that if there is only one copy, taking something down is knocking that server out of service.

I think so. My Lemmy instance for example is currently storing several gigabytes of images in my cloud buckets, but with my 4 users I'm reasonably confident it didn't all come from us.

[-] Lloir@lemmy.0x3d.uk 1 points 1 year ago

This is why I disabled that feature on my Lemmy instance.

[-] BlameThePeacock@lemmy.ca 3 points 1 year ago

Yes it's a caching thing.

this post was submitted on 24 Jul 2023
232 points (100.0% liked)

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