After reading it, I’m still unsure what all they consider to be CSAM and how much of each category they found. Here are what they count as CSAM categories as far as I can tell. No idea how much the categories overlap, and therefore no idea how many beyond the 112 PhotoDNA images are of actual children.
112 instances of known CSAM of actual children, (identified by PhotoDNA)
713 times assumed CSAM, based on hashtags.
1,217 text posts talking about stuff related to grooming/trading. Includes no actual CSAM or CSAM trading/selling on Mastodon, but some links to other sites?
Drawn and Computer-Generated images. (No quantity given, possibly not counted? Part of the 713 posts above?)
Self-Generated CSAM. (Example is someone literally selling pics of their dick for Robux.) (No quantity given here either.)
Personally, I’m not sure what the take-away is supposed to be from this. It’s impossible to moderate all the user-generated content quickly. This is not a Fediverse issue. The same is true for Mastodon, Twitter, Reddit and all the other big content-generating sites. It’s a hard problem to solve. Known CSAM being deleted within hours is already pretty good, imho.
Meta-discussion especially is hard to police. Based on the report, it seems that most CP-material by mass is traded using other services (chat rooms).
For me, there’s a huge difference between actual children being directly exploited and virtual depictions of fictional children. Personally, I consider it the same as any other fetish-images which would be illegal with actual humans (guro/vore/bestiality/rape etc etc).
If we took this to its logical conclusion, most popular games would be banned. How many JRPGs have underage protagonists? How many of those have some kind of love story going on in the background? What about FPS games where you’re depicted killing other people? What about fantasy RPGs where you can kill and control animals?
Things should always be legal unless there’s a clear victim. And communities should absolutely be allowed to filter out anything they want, even if it’s 100% legal. So the lack of clear articulation of the legal issues is very worrisome since it implies a moral obligation to remove legal but taboo content.
Seems odd that they mention Mastodon as a Twitter alternative in this article, but do not make any mention of the fact that Twitter is also rife with these problems, more so as they lose employees and therefore moderation capabilities. These problems have been around on Twitter for far longer, and not nearly enough has been done.
It points out that you upload to one server, and that server then sends the image to thousands of others. How do those thousands of others scan for this? In theory, using the PhotoDNA tool that large companies use, but then you have to send the every image to PhotoDNA thousands of times, once for each server (because how do you trust another server telling you it’s fine?).
The report provides recommendations on how servers can use signatures and public keys to trust scan results from PhotoDNA, so images can be federated with a level of trust. It also suggests large players entering the market (Meta, Wordpress, etc) should collaborate to build these tools that all servers can use.
Basically the original report points out the ease of finding CSAM on mastodon, and addresses the challenges unique to federation including proposing solutions. It doesn’t claim centralised servers have it solved, it just addresses additional challenges federation has.
Yeah I was mostly just complaining about the poor quality of mainstream tech articles. The original report is a much pretty read and brings up some great points.
“We got more photoDNA hits in a two-day period than we’ve probably had in the entire history of our organization of doing any kind of social media analysis, and it’s not even close,”
How do you have “probably” and “it’s not even close” in the same sentence?
Here’s the thing, and what I’ve been saying for a long time about The Fediverse:
I don’t care what platform you have, if it is sufficiently popular, you’re GOING to have CSAM. You’re going to have alt-right assholes. You’re going to have transphobia, you’re going to have racism and every other kind of discrimination.
People point fingers at Meta for “allowing” this but there’s no amount of money that can reasonably moderate 3 b-b-billion users. Meta, and probably every other platform that’s not Twitter or False social, does what they can about this.
Masto and Fedi admins need to be cognizant of the amount of users on their instances and need to have a sufficient number of moderators to manage those users. If they don’t have them, they need to close registrations.
But ultimately the Fediverse can also create safe-havens for these sorts of things. Making it easy to set up a discriminatory network that has no outside moderation. This is the downside of free speech.
Ultimately, it’s software. Even if my home instance does a good job of enforcing it’s CoC, and every instance it federated with does as well, someone else can spin up their own instance, load up on whatever, and I’ll never know or even be aware if it’s never federated with my instance.
No, cause then you end up with a case like the guy who lost 15+ years of emails, his phone number, all his photos, his contacts, and everything else he had tied to a google account, because Googles automated detection triggered on a naked photo of their baby, that they sent to the doctor during covid, that the doctor requested, about a rash on the babies diaper area… and no amount of common sense would stay their hand or reverse their ignorant judgement that this man was a child pornographer, and even called the police on him.
But how that platform deals with/fights it is what makes the platform good or bad.
Take Facebook for example in horrible… Facebook is rife with the stuff, and it regularly gets reported… and nothing happens. To the point that a Reporter once confronted them about it during an interview, and Facebook proved it did have the capability to contact law enforcement… by calling them on the reporter who showed them the evidence of it on their platform.
Child abuse laws “exclude anime” for the same reason animal cruelty laws “exclude lettuce.” Drawings are not children.
Drawings are not real.
Half the goddamn point of saying CSAM instead of CP is to make clear that Bart Simpson doesn’t count. Bart Simpson is not real. It is fundamentally impossible to violate Bart Simpson’s rights, because he doesn’t fucking exist. There is nothing to protect him from. He cannot be harmed. He is imaginary.
This cannot be a controversial statement. Anyone who can’t distinguish fiction from real life has brain problems.
You can’t rape someone in MS Paint. Songs about murder don’t leave a body. If you write about robbing Fort Knox, the gold is still there. We’re not about to arrest Mads Mikkelsen for eating people. It did not happen. It was not real.
If you still want to get mad at people for jerking off to the wrong fantasies, that is an entirely different problem from photographs of child rape.
Everyone except you still very much includes drawn & AI pornographic depictions of children within the basket of problematic content that should get filtered out of federated instances so thank you very much but I’m not sure your point changed anything.
If you don’t think images of actual child abuse, against actual children, is infinitely worse than some ink on paper, I don’t care about your opinion of anything.
You can be against both. Don’t ever pretend they’re the same.
He invented the stupid take he’s fighting against. Nobody equated “ink on paper” with “actual rape against children”.
The bar to cross to be filtered out of the federation isn’t rape. Lolicon is already above the threshold, it’s embarrassing that he doesn’t realize that.
I don’t think the OP ever said the bar was rape, the OP said the article and the person they responded to are treating drawn depictions of imaginary children the same as depictions of actual children. Those are not the same thing at all, yet many people seem to combine them (apparently including US law as of the Protect Act of 2003).
Some areas make a distinction (e.g. Japan and Germany), whereas others don’t. Regardless of the legal status in your area, the two should be treated separately, even if that means both are banned.
“treating them the same” => The threshold for being refused entry into mainstream instances is just already crossed at the lolicon level.
From the perspective of the fediverse, pictures of child rape and lolicon should just both get you thrown out. That doesn’t mean you’re “treating them the same”. You’re just a social network. There’s nothing you can do above defederating.
We’re not just talking about ‘ew gross icky’ exclusion from a social network. We’re talking about images whose possession is a felony. Images that are unambiguously the product of child rape.
This paper treats them the same. You’re defending that false equivalence. You need to stop.
Who places the bar for “exclusion from a social network” at felonies? Any kind child porn has no place on the fediverse, simulated or otherwise. That doesn’t mean they’re equal offenses, you’re just not responsible for carrying out anything other than cleaning out your porch.
Some confused arguments reveal confused people. Some terrible arguments reveal terrible people. For example: I don’t give two fucks what Nazis think. Life’s too short to wonder which subjects they’re not facile bastards about.
If someone’s motivation for making certain JPEGs hyper-illegal is “they’re icky” - they’ve lost benefit of the doubt. Because of their decisions, I no longer grant them that courtesy.
Perhaps. But pretty much everyone has a stupid take on something.
There’s obviously a limit there, but most people can be reasoned with. So instead of jumping to a conclusion, attempt a dialogue first until they prove that they can’t be reasoned with. This is especially true on SM where, even if you can’t convince the person you’re talking with, you may just convince the next person to come along.
Telling someone why they’re a stupid bastard for the sake of other people is not exactly a contradiction. You know what doesn’t do observers any good? “Debating” complete garbage, in a way that lends it respect and legitimacy. Sometimes you just need to call bullshit.
Some bullshit is so blatant that it’s a black mark against the bullshitter.
Everybody understands there’s no real kid involved. I still don’t see an issue reporting it to authorities and all the definitions of CSAM make a point of including simulated and illustrated forms of child porn.
What’s the point of reporting it to authorities? It’s not illegal, nor should it be because there’s no victim, so all reporting it does is take up valuable time that could be spent tracking down actual abuse.
It’s illegal in a lot of places including where I live.
In the US you have the protect act of 2003
(a) In General.—Any person who, in a circumstance described in subsection (d), knowingly produces, distributes, receives, or possesses with intent to distribute, a visual depiction of any kind, including a drawing, cartoon, sculpture, or painting, that—
(1)
(A) depicts a minor engaging in sexually explicit conduct; and
(B) is obscene; or
(2)
(A) depicts an image that is, or appears to be, of a minor engaging in graphic bestiality, sadistic or masochistic abuse, or sexual intercourse, including genital-genital, oral-genital, anal-genital, or oral-anal, whether between persons of the same or opposite sex; and
(B) lacks serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value;
or attempts or conspires to do so, shall be subject to the penalties provided in section 2252A(b)(1), including the penalties provided for cases involving a prior conviction.
Definitions of CSAM definitely do not include illustrated and simulated forms. They do not have a victim and therefore cannot be abuse. I agree that it should not be allowed on public platforms, hence why all instances hosting it should be defederated. Despite this, it is not illegal, so reporting it to authorities is a waste of time for you and the authorities who are trying to remove and prevent actual CSAM.
CSAM definitions absolutely include illustrated and simulated forms. Just check the sources on the wikipedia link and climb your way up, you’ll see “cartoons, paintings, sculptures, …” in the wording of the protect act
They don’t actually need a victim to be defined as such
That Wikipedia broader is about CP, a broader topic. Practically zero authorities will include illustrated and simualated forms of CP in their definitions of CSAM
Oh no, what you describe is definitely illegal here in Canada. CSAM includes depictions here. Child sex dolls are illegal. And it should be that way because that stuff is disgusting.
Child rape cannot include drawings. You can’t sexually assault a fictional character. Not “you musn’t.” You can’t.
If you think the problem with child rape amounts to ‘ew, gross,’ fuck you. Your moral scale is broken, if there’s not a vast gulf between those two bad things.
Oh, wait, Japanese in the other comment, now I get it. This conversation is a about AI Loli porn.
Pfft, of course, that’s why no one is saying the words they mean, because it suddenly becomes much harder to take the stance since hatred towards Loli Porn is not universal.
I mean, I think it’s disgusting, but I don’t think it should be illegal. I feel the same way about cigarettes, 2 girls 1 cup, and profane language. It’s absolutely not for me, but that shouldn’t make it illegal.
As long as there’s no victim, knock yourself out with whatever disgusting, weird stuff you’re into.
There’s nothing to “cover.” They’re talking about illustrations of bad things, alongside actual photographic evidence of actual bad things actually happening. Nothing can excuse that.
No shit they are also discussing actual CSAM alongside… drawings. That is the problem. That’s what they did wrong.
Computer-generated (e.g…, Stable Diffusion) child porn is not criminalized in Japan, and so many Japanese Mastodon servers don’t remove it
Porn involving real children is removed, but not immediately, as it depends on instance admins to catch it, and they have other things to do. Also, when an account is banned, the Mastodon server software is not sending out a “delete” for all of their posted material (which would signal other instances to delete it)
Problem #2 can hopefully be improved with better tooling.
I don’t know what you do about problem #1, though.
One option would be to decide that the underlying point of removing real CSAM is to avoid victimizing real children; and that computer-generated images are no more relevant to this goal than Harry/Draco slash fiction is.
And are you able to offer any evidence to reassure us that simulated child pornography doesn’t increase the risk to real children as pedophiles become normalised to the content and escalate (you know, like what already routinely happens with regular pornography)?
Or are we just supposed to sacrifice children to your gut feeling?
Would you extend the same evidence-free argument to fictional stories, e.g. the Harry/Draco slash fiction that I mentioned?
For what it’s worth, your comment has already caused ten murders. I don’t have to offer evidence, just as you don’t. I don’t know where those murders happened, or who was murdered, but it was clearly the result of your comment. Why are you such a terrible person as to post something that causes murder?
I have no problem saying that writing stories about two children having gay sex is pretty fucked in the head, along with anyone who forms a community around sharing and creating it.
But it’s also not inherently abuse, nor is it indistinguishable from reality.
You’re advocating that people just be cool with photo-realistic images of children, of any age, being raped, by any number of people, in any possible way, with no assurances that the images are genuinely “fake” or that pedophiles won’t be driven to make it a reality, despite other pedophiles cheering them on.
I was a teenage contrarian psuedo-intellectual once upon a time too, but I never sold out other peoples children for something to jerk off too.
Awful pearl-clutchy for someone advocating for increased community support for photorealistic images of children being raped.
Which do you think is more acceptable to Lemmy in general? Someone saying “fuck”, or communities dedicated to photorealistic images of children being raped?
Maybe I’m not the one who should be changing their behavior.
In which case, admins should err on the side of caution and remove something that might be illegal.
I personally would prefer to have nothing remotely close to CSAM, but as long as children aren’t being harmed in any conceivable way, I don’t think it would be illegal to post art containing children. But communities should absolutely manage things however they think is best for their community.
In other words, I don’t think #1 is a problem at all, imo things should only be illegal if there’s a clear victim.
So if I’m understanding right, based on their recommendations this will all be addressed as more moderation and QOL tools are introduced as we move further down the development roadmap?
As does most successful open source software. It’s more of a "this is where we’d like to see things go long term, but that in no way restricts contributions, it merely helps communicate the ideas of the core contributors.
I know that people like to dump on Cloudflare, but it’s incredibly easy to enable a built-in CSAM scanner with CloudFlare.
On that note, I’d like to see built-in moderation tools using something like PDQ and TMK+PDQF and a shared hashtable of CSAM and other material that may be outlawed or desirable to filter out in different regions (e.g. terrorist content, Nazi content in Germany, etc.)
It looks like it scans and flags on the outbound (user download of the image), so as long as it sits in front of your instance, it should work just fine.
You’re still responsible for removing the material, complying with any preservation requirements, and any other legal obligations, and notifying CloudFlare that it’s been removed.
It would be ideal if it could block on upload, so the material never makes it to your instance, but that would likely be something else like integration with PhotoDNA or something similar.
I don’t want much, I just want deletion to be propagated reliably across the fediverse. If someone got banned for CSAM and their contents purged, I want those action propagated across all federated instances. I can’t even delete my comment reliably here on Lemmy since many instances doesn’t seem to get the deletion requests.
People are wary about how internet got more and more centralized behind cloudlare. If you’re ever getting caught in cloudlare’s captcha hell because they flag your IP as suspicious, you’ll get wary too because you suddenly realized how big cloudlare now when half of the internet suddenly ask you to solve cloudlare captcha.
But, no, however the sentiment makes sense and as I am trying to disperse / decentralize most everything I can these days, including getting away from Google services, for example, this does make sense as well.
Lemmy.world had to start using CloudFlare because some script kiddies were DDOSing it. Some people were complaining that it encourages centralization, etc.
Personally, I love it. The service you get even at the lowest level of payment ($20/mo) is great. And what you get for free can’t be compared.
The article points out that the strength of the Fediverse is also it’s downside. Federated moderation makes it challenging to consistently moderate CSAM.
We have seen it even here with the challenges of Lemmynsfw. In fact they have taken a stance that CSAM like images with of age models made to look underage is fine as long as there is some dodgy ‘age verification’
The idea is that abusive instances would get defederated, but I think we are going to find that inadequate to keep up without some sort of centralized reporting escalation and ai auto screening.
The problem with screening by AI is there’s going to be false positives, and it’s going to be extremely challenging and frustrating to fight them. Last month I got a letter for a speeding infraction that was automated: it was generated by a camera, the plate read in by OCR, the letter I received (from “Seat Pleasant, Maryland,” lol) was supposedly signed off by a human police officer, but the image was so blurry that the plate was practically unreadable. Which is what happened: it got one of the letters wrong, and I got a speeding ticket from a town I’ve never been to, had never even heard of before I got that letter. And the letter was full of helpful ways to pay for and dispense with the ticket, but to challenge it I had to do it it writing, there was no email address anywhere in the letter. I had to go to their website and sift through dozens of pages to find one that had any chance of being able to do something about it, and I made a couple of false steps along the way. THEN, after calling them up and explaining the situation, they apologized and said they’d dismiss the charge–which they failed to do, I got another letter about it just TODAY saying a late fee had now been tacked on.
And this was mere OCR, which has been in use for multiple decades and is fairly stable now. This pleasant process is coming to anything involving AI as a judging mechanism.
When I lived in Clarksville, they had intersection cameras to ticket anyone that ran a red light. Couple problems with it.
Drivers started slamming on their brakes; causing more accidents
The city outsourced the cameras, so they received only pennies on the dollar for every ticket.
I think they eventually removed them, but I can’t recall. I visited last September to take a class for work, and I didn’t see any cameras, so they might be gone.
Wait…so the company that supplied the cameras wasn’t even from the U.S.?
Wow…this just gets more insane the more I learn about it. As conservative as Tennessee can be, they first outsourced their law enforcement for a return of pennies on the dollar to the city, AND the taxpayers ended up subsidizing a foreign company.
THEN, after calling them up and explaining the situation, they apologized and said they’d dismiss the charge–which they failed to do
That sounds about right. When I was in college I got a speeding ticket halfway in between the college town and the city my parents lived in. Couldn’t afford the fine due to being a poor college student, and called the court and asked if an extension was possible. They told me absolutely, how long do you need, and then I started saving up. Shortly before I had enough, I got a call from my Mom that she had received a letter saying there was a bench warrant for my arrest over the fine
So what im reading is they didnt actually look at any images, they found hashtags, undisclosed hashtags at that. So basically we’ve no idea what they think they found, for all we know cartoon might’ve been one of the tags
Well, terrorists became boring, and they still want the loony wing of the GOP’s clicks, so best to back off on Nazis and pro-Russians, leaving pedophiles as the safest bet.
I’m not actually going to read all that, but I’m going to take a few guesses that I’m quite sure are going to be correct.
First, I don’t think Mastodon has a “massive child abuse material” problem at all. I think it has, at best, a “racy Japanese style cartoon drawing” problem or, at worst, an “AI generated smut meant to look underage” problem. I’m also quite sure there are monsters operating in the shadows, dogwhistling and hashtagging to each other to find like minded people to set up private exchanges (or instances) for actual CSAM. This is no different than any other platform on the Internet, Mastodon or not. This is no different than the golden age of IRC. This is no different from Tor. This is no different than the USENET and BBS days. People use computers for nefarious shit.
All that having been said, I’m equally sure that this “research” claims that some algorithm has found “actual child porn” on Mastodon that has been verified by some “trusted third part(y|ies)” that may or may not be named. I’m also sure this “research” spends an inordinate amount of time pointing out the “shortcomings” of Mastodon (i.e. no built-in “features” that would allow corporations/governments to conduct what is essentially dragnet surveillance on traffic) and how this has to change “for the safety of the children.”
The content in question is unfortunately something that has become very common in recent months: CSAM (child sexual abuse material), generally AI-generated.
AI is now apparently generating entire children, abusing them, and uploading video of it.
Of course they’re counting “CSAM-like” in the stats, otherwise they wouldn’t have any stats at all. In any case, they don’t really care about child abuse at all. They care about a platform existing that they haven’t been able to wrap their slimy tentacles around yet.
Halfway there. The PDF lists drawn 2D/3D, AI/ML generated 2D, and real-life CSAM. It does highlight the actual problem of young platforms with immature moderation tools not being able to deal with the sudden influx of objectional content.
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Direct link to the (short) report this article refers to:
https://stacks.stanford.edu/file/druid:vb515nd6874/20230724-fediverse-csam-report.pdf
https://purl.stanford.edu/vb515nd6874
After reading it, I’m still unsure what all they consider to be CSAM and how much of each category they found. Here are what they count as CSAM categories as far as I can tell. No idea how much the categories overlap, and therefore no idea how many beyond the 112 PhotoDNA images are of actual children.
Personally, I’m not sure what the take-away is supposed to be from this. It’s impossible to moderate all the user-generated content quickly. This is not a Fediverse issue. The same is true for Mastodon, Twitter, Reddit and all the other big content-generating sites. It’s a hard problem to solve. Known CSAM being deleted within hours is already pretty good, imho.
Meta-discussion especially is hard to police. Based on the report, it seems that most CP-material by mass is traded using other services (chat rooms).
For me, there’s a huge difference between actual children being directly exploited and virtual depictions of fictional children. Personally, I consider it the same as any other fetish-images which would be illegal with actual humans (guro/vore/bestiality/rape etc etc).
If we took this to its logical conclusion, most popular games would be banned. How many JRPGs have underage protagonists? How many of those have some kind of love story going on in the background? What about FPS games where you’re depicted killing other people? What about fantasy RPGs where you can kill and control animals?
Things should always be legal unless there’s a clear victim. And communities should absolutely be allowed to filter out anything they want, even if it’s 100% legal. So the lack of clear articulation of the legal issues is very worrisome since it implies a moral obligation to remove legal but taboo content.
Don’t bother with the bullshit clickbait article. Honestly, don’t give them the views.
The underlying study is good though, and worth reading.
https://purl.stanford.edu/vb515nd6874
Tell them to look into their government and politicians.
This is a serious problem… True or false either way…
I bet theres more CP hosted by Bing.
Who would’ve thought. A leftist/liberal/progressive platform would be rife with pedos.
Seems odd that they mention Mastodon as a Twitter alternative in this article, but do not make any mention of the fact that Twitter is also rife with these problems, more so as they lose employees and therefore moderation capabilities. These problems have been around on Twitter for far longer, and not nearly enough has been done.
The actual report is probably better to read.
It points out that you upload to one server, and that server then sends the image to thousands of others. How do those thousands of others scan for this? In theory, using the PhotoDNA tool that large companies use, but then you have to send the every image to PhotoDNA thousands of times, once for each server (because how do you trust another server telling you it’s fine?).
The report provides recommendations on how servers can use signatures and public keys to trust scan results from PhotoDNA, so images can be federated with a level of trust. It also suggests large players entering the market (Meta, Wordpress, etc) should collaborate to build these tools that all servers can use.
Basically the original report points out the ease of finding CSAM on mastodon, and addresses the challenges unique to federation including proposing solutions. It doesn’t claim centralised servers have it solved, it just addresses additional challenges federation has.
Yeah I was mostly just complaining about the poor quality of mainstream tech articles. The original report is a much pretty read and brings up some great points.
deleted by creator
How do you have “probably” and “it’s not even close” in the same sentence?
Here’s the thing, and what I’ve been saying for a long time about The Fediverse:
I don’t care what platform you have, if it is sufficiently popular, you’re GOING to have CSAM. You’re going to have alt-right assholes. You’re going to have transphobia, you’re going to have racism and every other kind of discrimination.
People point fingers at Meta for “allowing” this but there’s no amount of money that can reasonably moderate 3 b-b-billion users. Meta, and probably every other platform that’s not Twitter or False social, does what they can about this.
Masto and Fedi admins need to be cognizant of the amount of users on their instances and need to have a sufficient number of moderators to manage those users. If they don’t have them, they need to close registrations.
But ultimately the Fediverse can also create safe-havens for these sorts of things. Making it easy to set up a discriminatory network that has no outside moderation. This is the downside of free speech.
Heck, Truth Social uses Mastodon, IIRC.
Ultimately, it’s software. Even if my home instance does a good job of enforcing it’s CoC, and every instance it federated with does as well, someone else can spin up their own instance, load up on whatever, and I’ll never know or even be aware if it’s never federated with my instance.
I think it uses SOME code
This is a prime use case for AI technology
“Now you have two problems.”
Thanks for reminding me of this masterpiece of writing about management of social networks
No, cause then you end up with a case like the guy who lost 15+ years of emails, his phone number, all his photos, his contacts, and everything else he had tied to a google account, because Googles automated detection triggered on a naked photo of their baby, that they sent to the doctor during covid, that the doctor requested, about a rash on the babies diaper area… and no amount of common sense would stay their hand or reverse their ignorant judgement that this man was a child pornographer, and even called the police on him.
Yes, it will be an issue on any platform.
But how that platform deals with/fights it is what makes the platform good or bad.
Take Facebook for example in horrible… Facebook is rife with the stuff, and it regularly gets reported… and nothing happens. To the point that a Reporter once confronted them about it during an interview, and Facebook proved it did have the capability to contact law enforcement… by calling them on the reporter who showed them the evidence of it on their platform.
I already addressed this in the comment you replied to.
https://stacks.stanford.edu/file/druid:vb515nd6874/20230724-fediverse-csam-report.pdf
I’d suggest that anyone who cares about the issue take the time to read the actual report, not just drama-oriented news articles about it.
Stopped reading.
Child abuse laws “exclude anime” for the same reason animal cruelty laws “exclude lettuce.” Drawings are not children.
Drawings are not real.
Half the goddamn point of saying CSAM instead of CP is to make clear that Bart Simpson doesn’t count. Bart Simpson is not real. It is fundamentally impossible to violate Bart Simpson’s rights, because he doesn’t fucking exist. There is nothing to protect him from. He cannot be harmed. He is imaginary.
This cannot be a controversial statement. Anyone who can’t distinguish fiction from real life has brain problems.
You can’t rape someone in MS Paint. Songs about murder don’t leave a body. If you write about robbing Fort Knox, the gold is still there. We’re not about to arrest Mads Mikkelsen for eating people. It did not happen. It was not real.
If you still want to get mad at people for jerking off to the wrong fantasies, that is an entirely different problem from photographs of child rape.
Okay, thanks for the clarification
Everyone except you still very much includes drawn & AI pornographic depictions of children within the basket of problematic content that should get filtered out of federated instances so thank you very much but I’m not sure your point changed anything.
If you don’t think images of actual child abuse, against actual children, is infinitely worse than some ink on paper, I don’t care about your opinion of anything.
You can be against both. Don’t ever pretend they’re the same.
Hey, just because someone has a stupid take on one subject doesn’t mean they have a stupid take on all subjects. Attack the argument, not the person.
He invented the stupid take he’s fighting against. Nobody equated “ink on paper” with “actual rape against children”.
The bar to cross to be filtered out of the federation isn’t rape. Lolicon is already above the threshold, it’s embarrassing that he doesn’t realize that.
I don’t think the OP ever said the bar was rape, the OP said the article and the person they responded to are treating drawn depictions of imaginary children the same as depictions of actual children. Those are not the same thing at all, yet many people seem to combine them (apparently including US law as of the Protect Act of 2003).
Some areas make a distinction (e.g. Japan and Germany), whereas others don’t. Regardless of the legal status in your area, the two should be treated separately, even if that means both are banned.
“treating them the same” => The threshold for being refused entry into mainstream instances is just already crossed at the lolicon level.
From the perspective of the fediverse, pictures of child rape and lolicon should just both get you thrown out. That doesn’t mean you’re “treating them the same”. You’re just a social network. There’s nothing you can do above defederating.
We’re not just talking about ‘ew gross icky’ exclusion from a social network. We’re talking about images whose possession is a felony. Images that are unambiguously the product of child rape.
This paper treats them the same. You’re defending that false equivalence. You need to stop.
Who places the bar for “exclusion from a social network” at felonies? Any kind child porn has no place on the fediverse, simulated or otherwise. That doesn’t mean they’re equal offenses, you’re just not responsible for carrying out anything other than cleaning out your porch.
Some confused arguments reveal confused people. Some terrible arguments reveal terrible people. For example: I don’t give two fucks what Nazis think. Life’s too short to wonder which subjects they’re not facile bastards about.
If someone’s motivation for making certain JPEGs hyper-illegal is “they’re icky” - they’ve lost benefit of the doubt. Because of their decisions, I no longer grant them that courtesy.
Demanding pointless censorship earns my dislike.
Equating art with violence earns my distrust.
Perhaps. But pretty much everyone has a stupid take on something.
There’s obviously a limit there, but most people can be reasoned with. So instead of jumping to a conclusion, attempt a dialogue first until they prove that they can’t be reasoned with. This is especially true on SM where, even if you can’t convince the person you’re talking with, you may just convince the next person to come along.
Telling someone why they’re a stupid bastard for the sake of other people is not exactly a contradiction. You know what doesn’t do observers any good? “Debating” complete garbage, in a way that lends it respect and legitimacy. Sometimes you just need to call bullshit.
Some bullshit is so blatant that it’s a black mark against the bullshitter.
Step up the reading comprehension please
I understand what you’re saying and I’m calling you a liar.
You mean to say I’m wrong or you actually mean liar?
‘Everyone but you agrees with me!’ Bullshit.
‘Nobody wants this stuff that whole servers exist for.’ Self-defeating bullshit.
‘You just don’t understand.’ Not an argument.
They are not saying it shouldn’t be defederated, they are saying reporting this to authorities is pointless and that considering CSAM is harmful.
Everybody understands there’s no real kid involved. I still don’t see an issue reporting it to authorities and all the definitions of CSAM make a point of including simulated and illustrated forms of child porn.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Child_pornography
What’s the point of reporting it to authorities? It’s not illegal, nor should it be because there’s no victim, so all reporting it does is take up valuable time that could be spent tracking down actual abuse.
It’s illegal in a lot of places including where I live.
In the US you have the protect act of 2003
Linked to the obscenity doctrine
https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/1466A
Wow, that’s absolutely ridiculous, thanks for sharing! That would be a very unpopular bill to get overturned…
I guess it fits with the rest of the stupidly named bills. It doesn’t protect anything, it just prosecutes undesirable behaviors.
Definitions of CSAM definitely do not include illustrated and simulated forms. They do not have a victim and therefore cannot be abuse. I agree that it should not be allowed on public platforms, hence why all instances hosting it should be defederated. Despite this, it is not illegal, so reporting it to authorities is a waste of time for you and the authorities who are trying to remove and prevent actual CSAM.
CSAM definitions absolutely include illustrated and simulated forms. Just check the sources on the wikipedia link and climb your way up, you’ll see “cartoons, paintings, sculptures, …” in the wording of the protect act
They don’t actually need a victim to be defined as such
That Wikipedia broader is about CP, a broader topic. Practically zero authorities will include illustrated and simualated forms of CP in their definitions of CSAM
Oh no, what you describe is definitely illegal here in Canada. CSAM includes depictions here. Child sex dolls are illegal. And it should be that way because that stuff is disgusting.
Literally impossible.
Child rape cannot include drawings. You can’t sexually assault a fictional character. Not “you musn’t.” You can’t.
If you think the problem with child rape amounts to ‘ew, gross,’ fuck you. Your moral scale is broken, if there’s not a vast gulf between those two bad things.
Oh, wait, Japanese in the other comment, now I get it. This conversation is a about AI Loli porn.
Pfft, of course, that’s why no one is saying the words they mean, because it suddenly becomes much harder to take the stance since hatred towards Loli Porn is not universal.
I mean, I think it’s disgusting, but I don’t think it should be illegal. I feel the same way about cigarettes, 2 girls 1 cup, and profane language. It’s absolutely not for me, but that shouldn’t make it illegal.
As long as there’s no victim, knock yourself out with whatever disgusting, weird stuff you’re into.
You should keep reading then, because they cover that later.
What does that even mean?
There’s nothing to “cover.” They’re talking about illustrations of bad things, alongside actual photographic evidence of actual bad things actually happening. Nothing can excuse that.
No shit they are also discussing actual CSAM alongside… drawings. That is the problem. That’s what they did wrong.
If I can try to summarize the main findings:
Problem #2 can hopefully be improved with better tooling. I don’t know what you do about problem #1, though.
Such a signal exists in the ActivityPub protocol, so I wonder why it’s not being used.
One option would be to decide that the underlying point of removing real CSAM is to avoid victimizing real children; and that computer-generated images are no more relevant to this goal than Harry/Draco slash fiction is.
And are you able to offer any evidence to reassure us that simulated child pornography doesn’t increase the risk to real children as pedophiles become normalised to the content and escalate (you know, like what already routinely happens with regular pornography)?
Or are we just supposed to sacrifice children to your gut feeling?
Would you extend the same evidence-free argument to fictional stories, e.g. the Harry/Draco slash fiction that I mentioned?
For what it’s worth, your comment has already caused ten murders. I don’t have to offer evidence, just as you don’t. I don’t know where those murders happened, or who was murdered, but it was clearly the result of your comment. Why are you such a terrible person as to post something that causes murder?
I have no problem saying that writing stories about two children having gay sex is pretty fucked in the head, along with anyone who forms a community around sharing and creating it.
But it’s also not inherently abuse, nor is it indistinguishable from reality.
You’re advocating that people just be cool with photo-realistic images of children, of any age, being raped, by any number of people, in any possible way, with no assurances that the images are genuinely “fake” or that pedophiles won’t be driven to make it a reality, despite other pedophiles cheering them on.
I was a teenage contrarian psuedo-intellectual once upon a time too, but I never sold out other peoples children for something to jerk off too.
If you want us to believe its harmless, prove it.
You keep making up weird, defamatory accusations. Please stop. This isn’t acceptable behavior here.
Awful pearl-clutchy for someone advocating for increased community support for photorealistic images of children being raped.
Which do you think is more acceptable to Lemmy in general? Someone saying “fuck”, or communities dedicated to photorealistic images of children being raped?
Maybe I’m not the one who should be changing their behavior.
Well the simple answer is that it doesn’t have to be illegal to remove it.
The legal question is a lot harder, considering AI image generation has reached levels that are almost indistinguishable from reality.
In which case, admins should err on the side of caution and remove something that might be illegal.
I personally would prefer to have nothing remotely close to CSAM, but as long as children aren’t being harmed in any conceivable way, I don’t think it would be illegal to post art containing children. But communities should absolutely manage things however they think is best for their community.
In other words, I don’t think #1 is a problem at all, imo things should only be illegal if there’s a clear victim.
So if I’m understanding right, based on their recommendations this will all be addressed as more moderation and QOL tools are introduced as we move further down the development roadmap?
What development roadmap? You’re not a product manager and this isn’t a Silicon Valley startup.
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As does most successful open source software. It’s more of a "this is where we’d like to see things go long term, but that in no way restricts contributions, it merely helps communicate the ideas of the core contributors.
I know that people like to dump on Cloudflare, but it’s incredibly easy to enable a built-in CSAM scanner with CloudFlare.
On that note, I’d like to see built-in moderation tools using something like PDQ and TMK+PDQF and a shared hashtable of CSAM and other material that may be outlawed or desirable to filter out in different regions (e.g. terrorist content, Nazi content in Germany, etc.)
Does the CSAM scanner hook into lemmy properly though?
It looks like it scans and flags on the outbound (user download of the image), so as long as it sits in front of your instance, it should work just fine.
You’re still responsible for removing the material, complying with any preservation requirements, and any other legal obligations, and notifying CloudFlare that it’s been removed.
It would be ideal if it could block on upload, so the material never makes it to your instance, but that would likely be something else like integration with PhotoDNA or something similar.
I don’t want much, I just want deletion to be propagated reliably across the fediverse. If someone got banned for CSAM and their contents purged, I want those action propagated across all federated instances. I can’t even delete my comment reliably here on Lemmy since many instances doesn’t seem to get the deletion requests.
Wait, why do people like to dump on CloudFlare? I must be out of the loop.
People are wary about how internet got more and more centralized behind cloudlare. If you’re ever getting caught in cloudlare’s captcha hell because they flag your IP as suspicious, you’ll get wary too because you suddenly realized how big cloudlare now when half of the internet suddenly ask you to solve cloudlare captcha.
Got it. Damn. I just switched some services to CloudFlare DNS today…now I guess I’ll change them back.
Are you so easily swayed by a single post from a rando internet person?
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Absolutely.
But, no, however the sentiment makes sense and as I am trying to disperse / decentralize most everything I can these days, including getting away from Google services, for example, this does make sense as well.
He actually looks at others’ opinions and weighs the pros and cons unlike almost everyone here on lemmy.
Lemmy.world had to start using CloudFlare because some script kiddies were DDOSing it. Some people were complaining that it encourages centralization, etc.
Personally, I love it. The service you get even at the lowest level of payment ($20/mo) is great. And what you get for free can’t be compared.
The article points out that the strength of the Fediverse is also it’s downside. Federated moderation makes it challenging to consistently moderate CSAM.
We have seen it even here with the challenges of Lemmynsfw. In fact they have taken a stance that CSAM like images with of age models made to look underage is fine as long as there is some dodgy ‘age verification’
The idea is that abusive instances would get defederated, but I think we are going to find that inadequate to keep up without some sort of centralized reporting escalation and ai auto screening.
How do you plan to train the AI to recognise CP?
The problem with screening by AI is there’s going to be false positives, and it’s going to be extremely challenging and frustrating to fight them. Last month I got a letter for a speeding infraction that was automated: it was generated by a camera, the plate read in by OCR, the letter I received (from “Seat Pleasant, Maryland,” lol) was supposedly signed off by a human police officer, but the image was so blurry that the plate was practically unreadable. Which is what happened: it got one of the letters wrong, and I got a speeding ticket from a town I’ve never been to, had never even heard of before I got that letter. And the letter was full of helpful ways to pay for and dispense with the ticket, but to challenge it I had to do it it writing, there was no email address anywhere in the letter. I had to go to their website and sift through dozens of pages to find one that had any chance of being able to do something about it, and I made a couple of false steps along the way. THEN, after calling them up and explaining the situation, they apologized and said they’d dismiss the charge–which they failed to do, I got another letter about it just TODAY saying a late fee had now been tacked on.
And this was mere OCR, which has been in use for multiple decades and is fairly stable now. This pleasant process is coming to anything involving AI as a judging mechanism.
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When I lived in Clarksville, they had intersection cameras to ticket anyone that ran a red light. Couple problems with it.
I think they eventually removed them, but I can’t recall. I visited last September to take a class for work, and I didn’t see any cameras, so they might be gone.
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Wait…so the company that supplied the cameras wasn’t even from the U.S.?
Wow…this just gets more insane the more I learn about it. As conservative as Tennessee can be, they first outsourced their law enforcement for a return of pennies on the dollar to the city, AND the taxpayers ended up subsidizing a foreign company.
Personally, I’m not that surprised by it
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That sounds about right. When I was in college I got a speeding ticket halfway in between the college town and the city my parents lived in. Couldn’t afford the fine due to being a poor college student, and called the court and asked if an extension was possible. They told me absolutely, how long do you need, and then I started saving up. Shortly before I had enough, I got a call from my Mom that she had received a letter saying there was a bench warrant for my arrest over the fine
So what im reading is they didnt actually look at any images, they found hashtags, undisclosed hashtags at that. So basically we’ve no idea what they think they found, for all we know cartoon might’ve been one of the tags
According to corporate news everything outside of the corporate internet is pedophiles.
Well, terrorists became boring, and they still want the loony wing of the GOP’s clicks, so best to back off on Nazis and pro-Russians, leaving pedophiles as the safest bet.
Nazis not being the go-to target for a poisoning the well approach worries me in many different levels
Agreed. I’m in my 40s, and I’ve never seen anywhere near the level of subsurface signaling and intentional complacency we’re experiencing now.
I’m not actually going to read all that, but I’m going to take a few guesses that I’m quite sure are going to be correct.
First, I don’t think Mastodon has a “massive child abuse material” problem at all. I think it has, at best, a “racy Japanese style cartoon drawing” problem or, at worst, an “AI generated smut meant to look underage” problem. I’m also quite sure there are monsters operating in the shadows, dogwhistling and hashtagging to each other to find like minded people to set up private exchanges (or instances) for actual CSAM. This is no different than any other platform on the Internet, Mastodon or not. This is no different than the golden age of IRC. This is no different from Tor. This is no different than the USENET and BBS days. People use computers for nefarious shit.
All that having been said, I’m equally sure that this “research” claims that some algorithm has found “actual child porn” on Mastodon that has been verified by some “trusted third part(y|ies)” that may or may not be named. I’m also sure this “research” spends an inordinate amount of time pointing out the “shortcomings” of Mastodon (i.e. no built-in “features” that would allow corporations/governments to conduct what is essentially dragnet surveillance on traffic) and how this has to change “for the safety of the children.”
How right was I?
I’m not going to read all that. You were probably pretty right.
AI is now apparently generating entire children, abusing them, and uploading video of it.
Or, they are counting “CSAM-like” images as CSAM.
Of course they’re counting “CSAM-like” in the stats, otherwise they wouldn’t have any stats at all. In any case, they don’t really care about child abuse at all. They care about a platform existing that they haven’t been able to wrap their slimy tentacles around yet.
Halfway there. The PDF lists drawn 2D/3D, AI/ML generated 2D, and real-life CSAM. It does highlight the actual problem of young platforms with immature moderation tools not being able to deal with the sudden influx of objectional content.
…If you read it then you’d know if you’re rig
Isn’t this tech predominantly used by left leaning people? 🤔