Mastodawn

Cameron MacLeod Jul 24, 2023

🧵 1/5 If you've seen a headline about Mastodon & child abuse material (yikes!), some comments:

1. Mastodon is just software, not a company or a place, so this is like saying 'lots of child abusers use MS Office'
2. These sites appear in many blocklists and the admins of many Mastodon servers block them, so that crap never travels to your neighbourhood.
3. This is primarily in Japan.
4. Still bad, moderation and blocking are important areas to build up.

Link to article: https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2023/07/24/twitter-rival-mastodon-rife-with-child-abuse-material-study-finds/

Twitter rival Mastodon rife with child-abuse material, study finds

The report raises safety questions about alternative social media sites.

The Washington Post

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Jeff Moe

@c_9

“Investment in one or more centralized clearinghouses for performing content scanning (as well as investment in moderation tooling) would be beneficial to the Fediverse as a whole,” Thiel and co-author Renée DiResta wrote referring to the so-called federated universe of platforms.

AFAICT, one of the authors of that study has also done their own disinfo campaigns:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Birmingham_(disinformation_campaign)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yonder_(company)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ren%C3%A9e_DiResta

Twitter rival Mastodon rife with child-abuse material, study finds

Project Birmingham (disinformation campaign) - Wikipedia