Not a good look for Mastodon - what can be done to automate the removal of CSAM?

  • Arotrios@kbin.social
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    1 year ago

    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.

      • Arotrios@kbin.social
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        1 year ago

        Nah, not intimidated. More that I ran a sizeable forum in the past and I know what what a pain in the ass this kind of content can be to deal with. That’s why I was asking about automated tools to deal with it. The forum I ran got targeted by a bunch of Turkish hackers, and their one of their attack techniques involved a wave of spambot accounts trying to post crap content. I wasn’t intimidated (fought them for about two years straight), but by the end of it I was exhausted to the point where it just wasn’t worth it anymore. An automated CSAM filter would have made a huge difference, but this was over a decade ago and those tools weren’t around.