Not a good look for Mastodon - what can be done to automate the removal of CSAM?
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.
If I can try to summarize the main findings:
- 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.
4.1 Illustrated and Computer-Generated CSAM
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.
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? Because I don’t see how that could make sense
‘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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
CSAM includes depictions here.
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.
Mastodon is a piece of software. I don’t see anyone saying “phpBB” or “WordPress” has a massive child abuse material problem.
Has anyone in the history ever said “Not a good look for phpBB”? No. Why? Because it would make no sense whatsoever.
I feel kind of a loss for words because how obvious it should be. It’s like saying “paper is being used for illegal material. Not a good look for paper.”
What is the solution to someone hosting illegal material on an nginx server? You report it to the authorities. You want to automate it? Go ahead and crawl the web for illegal material and generate automated reports. Though you’ll probably be the first to end up in prison.
I get what you’re saying, but due to federated nature, those CSAMs can easily spread to many instances without their admins noticing them. Having even one CSAM in your server is a huge risk for the server owner.
I don’t see what a server admin can do about it other than defederate the instant they get reports. Otherwise how can they possibly know?
This could be a really big issue though. People can make instances for really hateful and disgusting crap but even if everyone defederates from them it’s still giving them a platform, a tiny tiny corner on the internet to talk about truly horrible topics.
Those corners will exist no matter what service they use and there is nothing Mastodon can do to stop this. There’s a reason there are public lists of instances to defederate. This content can only be prevented by domain providers and governments.
Thats a dumb argument, though.
phpbb is not the host or the provider. Its just something you download and install on your server, with the actual service provider (You, the owner of the server and operator of the phpbb forum) being responsible for its content and curation.
Mastadon/Twitter/social media is the host/provider/moderator.
Mastodon is the same as Phpbb in the example you gave though.
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.
Don’t bother with the bullshit clickbait article. Honestly, don’t give them the views.
The underlying study is good though, and worth reading.
This is one of the reasons I’m hesitant to start my own instance - the moderation load expands exponentially as you scale, and without some sort of automated tool to keep CSAM content from being posted in the first place, I can only see the problem increasing. I’m curious to see if anyone knows of lemmy or mastodon moderation tools that could help here.
That being said, it’s worth noting that the same Standford research team reviewed Twitter and found the same dynamic in play, so this isn’t a problem unique to Mastodon. The ugly thing is that Twitter has (or had) a team to deal with this, and yet:
“The investigation discovered problems with Twitter’s CSAM detection mechanisms and we reported this issue to NCMEC in April, but the problem continued,” says the team. “Having no remaining Trust and Safety contacts at Twitter, we approached a third-party intermediary to arrange a briefing. Twitter was informed of the problem, and the issue appears to have been resolved as of May 20.”
Research such as this is about to become far harder—or at any rate far more expensive—following Elon Musk’s decision to start charging $42,000 per month for its previously free API. The Stanford Internet Observatory, indeed, has recently been forced to stop using the enterprise-level of the tool; the free version is said to provide read-only access, and there are concerns that researchers will be forced to delete data that was previously collected under agreement.
So going forward, such comparisons will be impossible because Twitter has locked down its API. So yes, the Fediverse has a problem, the same one Twitter has, but Twitter is actively ignoring it while reducing transparency into future moderation.
If you run your instance behind cloudlare, you can enable the CSAM scanning tool which can automatically block and report known CSAMs to authorities if they’re uploaded into your server. This should reduce your risk as the instance operator.
https://developers.cloudflare.com/cache/reference/csam-scanning/
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.)
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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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.
Nothing you can do except go after server owners like usual. Has nothing to do with the fedi. Mastodon has nothing to do with either because anyone can pop up their own alternative server. This is one of many protocols they have or will use to distribute this stuff.
This just in: criminals are using the TCP protocol to distribute CP!!! What can the internet do to stop this? Oh yeah, go after server owners and groups like usual.
Things are a bit complicated in the fediverse. Sure, your instance might not host any pedo community, but if a user on your instance subscribe/interact with those community, the CSAMs might get federated into your instance without you noticing. There are tools to help you combat this, but as an instance owner you can’t just assume it’s not your problem if some other instance host pedo stuff.
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Who would’ve thought. A leftist/liberal/progressive platform would be rife with pedos.
