Micah LeeJul 25, 2023
This is bad. Mastodon instances need tooling to automatically detect and ban abuse (or flag for manual review), and to automatically defederate from instances that don’t ban abuse 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
Show threadKunal Mehta

@micahflee the report correctly noted that these problematic instances aren't part of the main Fediverse that we are on: "in the case of child safety, Japan has significantly more lax laws related to CSAM which has resulted in a cultural divide where most users in Japan are segregated from the rest of the Fediverse"

I'm sure there are some instances that haven't properly blocked these instances yet, which is a problem! But PhotoDNA is far from a magic bullet, c.f. https://www.nytimes.com/2022/08/21/technology/google-surveillance-toddler-photo.html

A Dad Took Photos of His Naked Toddler for the Doctor. Google Flagged Him as a Criminal.

Google has an automated tool to detect abusive images of children. But the system can get it wrong, and the consequences are serious.

The New York Times
Jul 25, 2023 at 12:47amWeb