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Child Safety on Federated Social Media
(purl.stanford.edu)
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this post was submitted on 25 Jul 2023
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Why would someone downvote this post? We have a problem and it's in our best interest to fix that.
The report (if you can still find a working link) said that the vast majority of material that they found was drawn and animated, and hosted on one Mastodon instance out of Japan, where that shit is still legal.
Every time that little bit of truth comes up, someone reposts the broken link to the study, screaming about how it's the entire Fediverse riddled with child porn.
So basically we had a bad apple that was probably already defederated by everyone else.
Moreso an apple with controversial but not strictly CSAM material based in a country where it's content is legal. Actually, not even an apple; Lemmy and the fediverse aren't an entity. It's an open standard for anyone to use; you don't see the Modern Language Association being blamed for plagiarized essays written in MLA format, or the WHATWG being blamed because illegal sites are written in HTML, so it's not a fair comparison to say that Lemmy/the fediverse are responsible for what people do with their open standard either
It's Pawoo, Pixiv's (formerly) own instance, which is infamous for this kind of content, and those are still "just drawings" (unless some artists are using illegal real-life references).
They're using Generative AI to create photo realistic renditions now, and causing everyone who finds out about it to have a moral crisis.
Well, that's a very different and way more concerning thing...
... I mean ... idk ... If the argument is that the drawn version doesn't harm kids and gives pedos an outlet, is a ai generated version any different?
imo, the dicey part of the matter is "what amount of the AI's dataset is made up of actual images of children"
Shit that is a good point.
Here's a link to the report: https://stacks.stanford.edu/file/druid:vb515nd6874/20230724-fediverse-csam-report.pdf
It is from 2023-07-24, so there's a considerable chance it is not the one you were thinking about?
Nope, seems to be the one. They lump the entire Fediverse together, even though most of the shit they found was in Japan.
The report notes 112 non-Japanese items found, which is a problem, but not a world shaking issue. There may be issues with federation and deletion orders, which is also an issue, but not a massive world shaking one.
Really, what the report seems to be about is the fact that moderation is hard. Bad actors will work around any moderation you put in place, so it's a constant game of whack-a-mole. The report doesn't understand this basic fact and pretends that no one is doing any moderation, and then they add in Japan.
I can't seem to find the source for the report about it right now, but there's literal child porn being posted to Instagram. We don't see this kind of alarmist reports about it because it is not something new, foreign and flashy for the general public. All internet platforms are susceptible to this kind of misuse. The question is what moderation tools and strategies are in place to deal with that. Then there's stuff like on TOR where CSAM was used as a basis to discredit the use of the whole technology then it turned out that the biggest repository was an FBI honey pot operation.
Buried in this very report, they note that Instagram and Twitter have vastly more (self generated) child porn than the Fediverse. But that's deep into section 4, which is on page 8. No one is going to read that far into the report, they might get through the intro, which is all doom and gloom about decentralized content.
It's 4Chan's "9000 Penises" all over again
The study doesn't compare their findings to any other platform, so we can't really tell if those numbers are good or bad. They just state the absolute numbers, without really going into to much detail about their searching process. So no, you can't draw the conclusion that the Fediverse has a CSAM problem, at least not from this study.
Of course that makes you wonder why they bothered to publish such a lackluster and alarmistic study.
Pretty sure any quantity of CSAM that isnt zero is bad....
Yes, but you don't need a study to know that there will be some CSAM on the Fediverse. This is about whether using the Fediverse could make things worse, and just stating absolute numbers won't answer that question. What it does do is make it sound like the Fediverse is a magnet for CSAM, when in reality the opposite could be true.
Or to put it differently: If these numbers turn out to be lower than what you get on similar platforms, then this could actually be a good sign, even though they still aren't zero.
Its not our responsibility. As long as moderators are reporting it as they come across it and the fbi is looking into it then what more can be done? Google, Twitter, discord, Instagram, reddit have 10000x the amount of csam.
Because it's another "WON'T SOMEONE THINK OF THE CHILDREN" hysteria bait post.
They found 112 images of cp in the whole Fediverse. That's a very small number. We're doing pretty good.
It is not "in the whole fediverse", it is out of approximately 325,000 posts analyzed over a two day period.
And that is just for known images that matched the hash.
Quoting the entire paragraph:
How are the authors distinguishing between posts made by actual pedophiles and posts by law enforcement agencies known to be operating honeypots?
Still, that number should be zero.
In an ideal world sense, I agree with you - nobody should abuse children, so media of people abusing children should not exist.
In a practical sense, whether talking about moderation or law enforcement, a rate of zero requires very intrusive measures such as moderators checking every post before others are allowed to see it. There are contexts in which that is appropriate, but I doubt many people would like it for the Fediverse at large.
Because its literally nothing a normie would read through. And some thought lemmy had bad ui.
Because it's talking about a report without linking to any report. That's shouting into the void at best, clickbait at worst.
I was able to click and access the report fine
Because the solution sucks?