Mastodon's decentralized social network has a major CSAM problem | Hacker News Reader

Mastodon's decentralized social network has a major CSAM problem

engadget.com

10 pointsSanjayMehta15 comments

So a key fact from the comments after the paper was published I expect all the blogs to miss: I asked the author how many of the reported CSAM hits were blocked by servers that include a very common "bare minimum" blocklist for bad servers, and he checked and said 87%.

So the majority of the CSAM that they detected never reaches most of the fediverse. Furthermore, the methodology of the study relies on sorta Mastodon's firehose, which is instantaneous. That means the hits they catch are before moderators get a chance to handle them. In most of the remaining percentage, they likely get reported and blocked quickly.

So most of the fediverse is blocking the vast majority of this garbage already.

Sure, there's still a lot of work to do, and plenty of ideas how to improve moderation, but the fediverse doesn't have VCs. Donate to Mastodon if you want to help fund work on this stuff.

A misleading headline. Not too different from the last round of headlines that there are card carrying fascists in the fediverse. Both are true and they are blocked by all well run servers.

This is like the web and just like we don't say that HTTP has a X problem it doesn't make sense to say that open source software run by thousands of people across the world under different laws has any specific purpose or problem.

Improvements can be made to the software but bad admins can just rip that code out. Still I bet good instances will make changes.

No, society does. Blaming technology is stupid.

Saying "your car has a flat tire" isn't blaming your car, and saying "Mastodon has a CSAM problem" isn't blaming Mastodon.

This article seems to do a pretty fair job of pointing out that they investigate this issue on many platforms, but that they've seen higher rates of CSAM on Mastodon than others. They also specifically call out, accurately, that decentralized platforms have different challenges with addressing these problems when compared to a platform with a central arbiter.

A better analogy (not that I think car analogies map 1:1 to this) would be if the headline said "Ford has a nails-on-the-road problem". The headline implies way more ownership by the platform than is warranted and minimizes the actual problem, and it's tiring to see people try and pick things apart based on their worst possible uses.

Also the underlying report is mostly about servers in Japan where the laws are different and/or that are blocked by almost everyone else because they are toxic. As they should be, because the whole point is that servers can block badly run servers elsewhere.

You're right: if somebody did a study and found that, among cars on the road, Fords were statistically more likely to have their tires punctured by nails, despite operating on the same roads as other cars, I'd definitely consider it worth writing about and thinking critically about.

That's what's happening here.

Glad you were able to find such a bad interpretation, I hope it sustains you

A social network has a duty to take reasonable steps to ensure that bad people can’t easily conspire together to do their bad deeds. Society has a problem in that people engage in shitty behavior. One way societies combat this is by limiting the ability of like minded people from openly sharing the effects of their misdeeds.

Do you think it’s OK for a convention center to host a meeting where attendees are passing around photographs of CSAM to each other? Why treat the online world differently than the offline world in this regard?

Mastodon is both a social network, and a mere server software.

The social network side of Mastodon, connected around mastodon.social, has quite strong moderation, and they block other Mastodon instances for even lesser transgressions.

But anyone can run a Mastodon server disconnected from the trunk of the social network, and make their own fringe network. These instances are a problem, but it's Mastodon's fault as much as Apache and Nginx are responsible for serving CSAM.

It’s been a long time since I programmed and was up to date about these things. In my eyes Mastodon means “Twitter” without moderation. The lack of moderation would be a problem. I have an extreme view in the sense that I think humanity is not yet developed enough to have easy, cheap, anonymous community building at scale be a thing.

Thanks for the clarification. I’ll have think more about what I consider appropriate as far as it concerns Mastodon.

Is a townsquare a technology?

When it uses computers, networking protocols, the internet, etc. then it is a technology. The scale by which these virtual town squares can grow is something that sets them apart from real town squares. In a real town square people have to contend with societal views of what is socially acceptable. This provides a needed moderating influence. In a real town square one can’t be too inflammatory without fear of being attacked.

So you're just defining the difference between who defines the tech. As placed like Twitter absolutely can act like a typical townsquare.

The only real difference is if the tech has the necessary tools.

Distinguish real CSAM (everyone agree to ban) and generated "CSAM" (no child had abused for it, and the border between photorealistic or drawn, and age is a bit difficult) is important. IMO latter shouldn't be called "CSAM" to avoid confusion. Should we ban it is a different discussion.

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