Dear Lemmy.world Community,
Recently posts were made to the AskLemmy community that go against not just our own policies but the basic ethics and morals of humanity as a whole. We acknowledge the gravity of the situation and the impact it may have had on our users. We want to assure you that we take this matter seriously and are committed to making significant improvements to prevent such incidents in the future. Considering I’m reluctant to say exactly what these horrific and repugnant images were, I’m sure you can probably guess what we’ve had to deal with and what some of our users unfortunately had to see. I’ll add the thing we’re talking about in spoilers to the end of the post to spare the hearts and minds of those who don’t know.
Our foremost priority is the safety and well-being of our community members. We understand the need for a swift and effective response to inappropriate content, and we recognize that our current systems, protocols and policies were not adequate. We are immediately taking immediate steps to strengthen our moderation and administrative teams, implementing additional tools, and building enhanced pathways to ensure a more robust and proactive approach to content moderation. Not to mention ensuring ways that these reports are seen more quickly and succinctly by mod and admin teams.
The first step will be limiting the image hosting sites that Lemmy.world will allow. We understand that this can cause frustration for some of our users but we also hope that you can understand the gravity of the situation and why we find it necessary. Not just to protect all of our users from seeing this but also to protect ourselves as a site. That being said we would like input in what image sites we will be whitelisting. While we run a filter over all images uploaded to Lemmy.world itself, this same filter doesn’t apply to other sites which leads to the necessity of us having to whitelist sites.
This is a community made by all of us, not just by the admins. Which leads to the second step. We will be looking for more moderators and community members that live in more diverse time zones. We recognize that at the moment it’s relatively heavily based between Europe and North America and want to strengthen other time zones to limit any delays as much as humanly possible in the future.
We understand that trust is essential, especially when dealing with something as awful as this, and we appreciate your patience as we work diligently to rectify this situation. Our goal is to create an environment where all users feel secure and respected and more importantly safe. Your feedback is crucial to us, and we encourage you to continue sharing your thoughts and concerns.
Every moment is an opportunity to learn and build, even the darkest ones.
Thank you for your understanding.
Sincerely,
The Lemmy.world Administration
spoiler
CSAM
What is the complete correct response for users to carry out if they spot CP?
Is just the report button on the post good enough? Is there some kind of higher level report for bigger-than-just-one-instance shit that threatens Lemmy as a whole? Should we call the FBI or some shit?
I haven’t come across any here, but if I do, I’d like to be able to aid in swift action against not only the post/account in question, but against the actual person running it.
You can always report casm to the FBI. You don’t need a mod’s guidance to do so.
Otherwise report and block.
Report and block should be a correct respond.
Edit: actually also report the user to the instance admin where the user from.
In theory, reporting to the community moderators should be enough for users. It would then be the responsibility of thost moderators to report it to the instance admin, and then the admins responsibility to report it to the instance’s local law enforcement. They will then handle it appropriately.
However, sometimes community moderators are corrupt and will ignore reports and even ban users for reporting instance rule breaking content. In those cases, the user must report directly to the instance admin. As you can imagine, instance admins also can be corrupt and therefore the user must report to law enforcement.
But typically the first scenario is sufficient.
FYI: admins can see all reports. We currently have a tool running that scans for posts that are reported a lot, which will then notify people who can do something about it.
That seems too slow. Sibling comment by admin is reassuring here.
Wow holy mother of lemmy politics . Really ? I finally found someone like me .
Because it’s related, shitposting@lemmyworld needs you! At least, far as I can tell. That’s what it says anyway.
A user from lemy.lol did the deed there about 4 hours ago and nothing happened since.We could use some tools to report a user directly instead of just blocking them. And if it doesn’t already exist, a common report log or something like that so that the mods and admins can work together on this.
Maybe an option across federated instances for admins to mark and hide posts for review, to at least get rid of the danger for regular users. Or an automated system that allows for multiple user reports and to hide a post for review.
Well thanks for the spoiler thing, but I don’t even know what the acronym (is it even an acronym?) means anyway and now I’m too afraid to do a web search for it 😅
Well, maybe it’s better that way.
::: CSAM is child sexual abuse material I believe. So yeah, better not to look it up. :::
I’m pretty convinced the initialism was created so that people could Google it in an academic context without The Watchers thinking they were looking for the actual content.
You may be correct although it seems like pretty dumb reasoning. I doubt any of those cretins would search the words “child sexual abuse material.” That would require acknowledging the abuse part of it.
I think you may have misunderstood. The entire point is to have an academic term that would never be used as a search by one of those inhuman lowlifes.
I don’t mean to be pedantic, so I hope my meaning came across well enough…
I think my point is that the acronym exists because of the search term, not the other way around. And it’s pretty laughable that the academic term has to be distilled down to an acronym because it is otherwise considered a trigger word.
They already use codewords when chatting about it. I forget what the more advanced ones were beyond “CP”, but there’s a Darknet Diaries episode or two that go over it. In particular, the one about Kik. He interviews a guy who used to trade it on that platform.
CSAM is meant to differentiate between child porn, which also includes things like cartoons of children, with actual children being abused. Law enforcement have limited resources so they want to focus on where they can do the most good.
The initialism was created to focus the efforts of law enforcement. They have limited resources, so they want to address actual children being abused, rather than Japanese cartoons. Both are child porn, but CSAM involves real children.
Your spoiler didn’t work, apparently you need to write spoiler twice.
The second “spoiler” is actually text for the spoiler.
This is customisable text
::: spoiler This is customisable textTy, buy it still seems like you need something there - at least for some apps.
Yes, I don’t think it works with nothing there. It needs something, but it can be pretty much any text (so long as the first word is spoiler)
Works in my app :P I really wish stuff like this were more standardized across the platform. Not really much point in spoilering it now since everyone is chatting about it.
thanks for the info!
It’s safe to look things up!
Looking up the name of a crime does not mean that you’re doing that crime.
If you look up “bank robbery” that doesn’t make you guilty of bank robbery. It doesn’t even mean you’re trying to rob a bank, or even want to rob a bank. You could want to know how bank robbers work. You could be interested in being a bank guard or security engineer. You could be thinking of writing a heist story. You could want to know how safe your money is in a bank: do they get robbed all the time, or not?
Please, folks, don’t be afraid to look up words. That’s how you learn stuff.
To be fair… Also how you end up on a list.
I’ll just say illegal content involving minors.
Thank you for the transparency! Much appreciation to the volunteers who have had to unfortunately handle this.
That being said we would like input in what image sites we will be whitelisting
Although I am from another instance I did want to suggest some common hosts, while I use Imgbox personally I often see Imgur and Catbox used quite a bit.
Catbox actually appears to actually be a generic temporary file host though, rather than a dedicated image host
Lots of posts on the site come from files.catbox.moe and litterbox.catbox.moe – so I’d probably leave those whitelisted. He has terms against gore, csam, etc - but I don’t know if he has any kind of active filtration. It’s just a dude running a site; but often times it’s just really easy to upload there.
You guys should use this if possible: https://blog.cloudflare.com/the-csam-scanning-tool
Catbox admin should be given one month to implement one of the several free CSAM filters available. If they have not done so in a month, it’s clear they’re not a safe resource.
Just FYI, this tool seems to only be available if you live in the US. I tried to apply for my own instance, located in Europe, and my request was denied after a lengthy and frankly tiresome “verification process”. This sucks.
I’ve also noticed many links are to catbox but… Am I the only one who can’t ever load those? I’ve never actually had a link to that host work.
It’s sporadic for me. Sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn’t. I don’t exactly change anything either and it doesn’t seem to be traffic based.
This can only be activated when you are in the USA! So a no go for us.
Reached out:
Any response?
No, just bumped the email chain thanks to you :)
I host all my images privately on https://share.jackgreenearth.org. Can you please whitelist that? I promise it’s safe.
I mean, sure you’re probably a good guy but I don’t think it’s a great idea to whitelist personal hosts
I’m the only one with access to uploading to it. You can always just unwhitelist it later if I break your rules - which I don’t intend to.
But that just requires more effort and more work for the moderators. It’s better to stick with other platforms that already specialise in image hosting who will moderate their content themselves too.
Quick sidenote: there are thousands of fediverse servers at this point and nobody can control the image hosts they use. I think what makes sense is to make ones own instance and federate with world, as a lot of us do.
Content moderation is a never-ending battle It gets difficult to enforce the larger your user base becomes. I really hope we can keep this community safe
Where do they even find child pornography?
As an Admin for another instance who had to clear some of it out, but not wanting to go into specifics, a spammer doesn’t necessarily have to in order to cause consternation. If they posted legal porn without the original context and then gave it a title saying it’s CSAM then it has the same effect without having to actually download imagery that would get you thrown in jail. And that’s what I tell myself so I can sleep at night.
As an instance that doesn’t allow NSFW material it’s easy enough to see it’s NSFW and get rid of it without having to go into forensic details. I have no idea how those running NSFW manage, because they have the opposite problem (potentially illegal material masquerading as legal porn) and I don’t want to know. However, anyone frequenting those instances need to have that in mind.
Nice try. That is something either an emerging pedo or an fbi agent would say.
… Or just someone interested academically because it seems everyone’s banning it left right and center, so I’m just logically interested in how they even manage to get it.
You got something to hide, bud?
Ill adults and poor kids generate and sell CSAM. Common to advertise on IG, sell on TG. Huge problem as that Stanford report shows.
Telegram got right on it (not). Fuckers.
I meant what websites.
As screenshotted, linked, and stated - Instagram (dot com), Telegram (dot org), others.
Forgot a part of the chain: they’ll advertise to you on Instagram, message you on Telegram, and link you to Mega[upload].
But didn’t that shut down?
In !workingclasscalendar@lemmy.world we use stahmaxffcqankienulh.supabase.co for the images, could it be whitelisted?
Edit: community typo corrected
This is exactly what happened in various other “alt-reddit” sites that I was a part of. CSAM is uploaded as a tactic so that they can then contact the registrar of said website and claim that this site is hosting said CSAM.
It’s basically a sign of the site becoming more popular and pissing off the larger players.
But how would they even get the CSAM in the first place? It’s not like everyone just has pictures of children being sexually abused?
We aren’t talking about upstanding citizens here
Yeah we got some request like that and even for a announcement of ours. But we are planning to reduce them.
That being said we would like input in what image sites we will be whitelisting.
I’d like to suggest postimages(dot)org. I’ve been using that site since leaving reddit/imgur over the summer. They seem to be a good free service (although they do offer premium tiers) and according to their ‘about us’ section they’ve been operating for 20 years.
As one of the smaller instance admins who had to deal with the content… one of the image host was postimg.cc, so I’m not sure how fast they take down the content or if they run some kind of filtering.
Well that’s disturbing to hear. I figured if they’ve been around that long they’d have worked out effective tools to combat that stuff. But I suppose that might be a naive assumption, it must be a constant issue for image hosting services.
I’m glad I missed that, but sorry anyone had to see that.
I hope you will consider whitelisting https://imgbb.com/
It works well with Lemmy posts because it allows direct image linking.
If you’re hesitant to whitelist that site, then I hope you will allow https://postimages.org/
The drawback to the latter site is it’s ad-ridden (not a problem with uBO).
Both are superior image sharing sites to imgur, IMHO.
I use postimages every day so I hope it will be whitelisted.
I recently switched to imgbb after someone without an adblocker showed me a screenshot of one of my posts, but in my opinion everyone should be using uBlock Origin anyway, so I’d be ok with either option. They’re both extremely good image sharing sites.
The trouble is not everyone has an easy way to use an ad blocker - in particular iPhone users.
I mean, they should really just get an Android phone and install Firefox (or a hardened fork) then uBO, but try telling them that.
Hyperweb - my Safari iOS savior, supporting Adblock Plus (thus uBlock Origin) filterlists
Yeah but you’re still not getting an Android with hardened Firefox :p
Also that sounds like you have to manually add the lists, you can get uBO proprietary lists from github but I think most people would miss those.
They come with a number pre-added, but I’ve been meaning to copy lists from the uBO GitHub!
You have also implemented a ban on any contribution from a VPN without announcing it. It has been very annoying to figure out.
Please do announce these kind of changes and limitations you implement publicly unless you absolutely cannot.
As another avenue to the report button, could Lemmy world have a new community LemmyWorldSupport_911 where anyone can post and it’s monitored by moderators or admins and they can promptly react?. (911 =American number for emergency services)
As part of the community rules, posting for stuff that doesn’t warrant a 911 reaction could result an penalties for anyone looking to “prank” it or abuse it’s intended purpose.
Some small communities only have one mod and that mod has to sleep.
I’m planning on making something like that, but am first focussing on improving the features we already have.
(911 =American number for emergency services)
Could also do 112, since Lemmy.world is hosted in Europe :)
Or 912 bc WE DOOOO! WE DOOOO!
In Aus, we have 000, triple zero. I think 112 works here too, might just be mobiles though. It used to be triple oh, but some people saw the keypads had letters on them and dialled 777 or whatever number o was on.
I’ve probably seen too much American media. I’m happy for any, even 0118 999 881 999 119 725 … 3 but it might be a bit hard to learn.
Might be some Pixelfed instances worth adding to the list. I’ve been using pixelfed.de which has its community guidelines here. Haven’t had to report anything yet but the process to do so is easy (went through the first couple clicks and hit cancel) and it looks like they’ve got a way to flag posts for site admin review, not just mods. Seems like a good system to keep that sort of content under control and, though I haven’t looked through their documentation and code to confirm, I would be surprised if they didn’t have something automated too.
Thank you for doing unpleasant work like this when it comes up.
There are a lot of PixelFed instances, this might get complicated.
I’d ask for https://miniature.photography but I’m one of only a dozen or so people who post there.
