Mastodon, an alternative social network to Twitter, has a serious problem with child sexual abuse material according to researchers from Stanford University. In just two days, researchers found over 100 instances of known CSAM across over 325,000 posts on Mastodon. The researchers found hundreds of posts containing CSAM related hashtags and links pointing to CSAM trading and grooming of minors. One Mastodon server was even taken down for a period of time due to CSAM being posted. The researchers suggest that decentralized networks like Mastodon need to implement more robust moderation tools and reporting mechanisms to address the prevalence of CSAM.
“massive child abuse material problem”
“112 instances of known CSAM across 325,000 posts”
While any instance is unacceptable, does 112/325,000 constitute a “massive problem”?
0.0000034462% of posts are unacceptable! Massive problem!
That’s just the material they knew was CSAM from previous investigations.
There were also 713 uses of the top 20 CSAM-related hashtags across the Fediverse on posts that contained media, as well as 1,217 text-only posts that pointed to “off-site CSAM trading or grooming of minors.” The study notes that the open posting of CSAM is “disturbingly prevalent.”
You moved the period in the wrong direction. It’s
0.034462%.
So instances that are actually supporting CSAM material can and should be dealt with by law enforcement. That much is simple (and I’m surprised it hasn’t been done with certain … instances, to be honest). But I think the apparently less clearly solved issues have known and working solutions that apply to other parts of the web as well. No content moderation is perfect, but in general, if admins are acting in good faith, I don’t think there should be too much of a problem:
- For when federation inadvertently spreads some of the material through to other instances’ databases: Isn’t this the same situation as when ISP’s used to cache web traffic to save on bandwidth costs? In that situation, too, browsed web pages would end up in the ISP’s cache which could then harbour whatever material the user was looking at. As I recall, the ISP would just ban CSAM and other illegal material in their terms of service, and remove anyone reported as violating the rule, and that sufficed.
- As for “bad” instances/users: It’s impossible to block all instances and all users that might disseminate this material as you’d have to go to a “block everything, then allow known entities” rule which would break the Fediverse model. Again, users or site admins found to be acting in bad faith should be blocked and reported (either automatically or manually). Some may slip through the net, but as long as admins are seen to be doing the best they can, that should be enough.
There seem to be concerns about “surveillance” of material on Mastodon, which strikes me as a bit odd. Mastodon isn’t a private platform. People who want private messaging should use an E2EE messaging app like Signal, not a social networking platform like Mastodon (or Twitter, Threads etc.). Mastodon data is already public and is likely already being surveilled, and will be so regardless of what anyone involved with the network wants, because there’s no access control on it anyway. Having Mastodon itself contain code to keep the network clean, even if it only applies to part of the network, just allows those Mastodon admins who are running that part of the code to take some of the responsibility on themselves for doing so, reducing the temptation for third parties to do it for them.
Yeah I recall that the Japanese instances have a big problem with that shit. As for the rest of us, Facebook actually open sourced some efficient hashing algorithms for use for dealing with CSAM; Fediverse platforms could implement these, which would just leave the issue of getting an image hash database to check against. All the big platforms could probably chip in to get access to one of those private databases and then release a public service for use with the ecosystem.
Facebook actually being good for once? Unheard of
As much as we can (and should) lambast Facebook/Meta’s C-Suite for terrible decisions, their engineers are generally pretty legit.
They actually contribute a lot of useful stuff to the web dev world, like React.js. It’s just all the other shit they do that’s awful.
That’d be useless though, because first, it’d probably opt-in via configuration settings and even if it wasn’t, people would just fork and modify the code base or simply switch to another ActivityPub implementation.
We’re not gonna fix society using tech unless we’re all hooked up to some all knowing AI under government control.
That’s not the point. Yes, child porn sites can host child porn. Other sites/instances can’t stop that. But what other instances can stop, is redistributing said child porn. And for that purpose, such technology would be useful.
researchers found 112 instances of known CSAM across 325,000 posts on the platform
So you’re willing to vacuum up the hashes of every image file uploaded on thousands of decentralized systems into a centralized systems (that is out of “our” control and coupled with direct access for law enforcement and corporations) to prevent the distribution of 0.034% of files that are CSAM and that could just as well be reported and deleted by admins and moderators? Remember how Snowden warned us about metadata?
If you think that’s a wise tradeoff, I guess, go ahead. But then I’d have to question the entire goal of being decentralized in the first place. If it’s all about “a billionare can’t wreak havok upon my social network”, then yeah, I guess decentralization helps a bit but even that remains to be seen.
But if you’re actually willing to do that, you’d probably also be in favor of having government backdoors into chat encryption (and thus rendering the entire concept moot, because you can’t have backdoors that cannot be discovered by other nefarious actors) and even more censorship-resistant systems like Tor because evil people use it to exchange CSAM anonymously as well?
If you read the article, there’s actually more. The problem also isn’t just that they post the material directly onto Mastodon, they also use the platform to network.
I don’t know how you get the impression that this increases censorship.
Instance admin already manually block content. And they are already able to do that to any extend they wish to do.
This tool would simply automate that process.
Admins would not gain or lose any ability to block content. Identifying child porn would simply be easier.
(Imagine an admin going to their database and doing a CTRL+F with the term “child porn”, and then going through the posts to find offending ones. But instead of CTRL+F it’s an AI.)
(For some reason I don’t get a notification when you answer my comment. Is that a known issue? Did you block me or something?)
That’d be useless though, because first, it’d probably opt-in via configuration settings and even if it wasn’t, people would just fork and modify the code base or simply switch to another ActivityPub implementation.
No it wouldn’t, because it’d still be significantly easier for instances to deal with CSAM content with this functionality built into the platforms. And I highly doubt there’s going to be a mass migration from any Fediverse platform that implements such a feature (though honestly I’d be down to defederate with any instance that takes serious issue with this).
And the instances who want to engage with that material would all opt for the fork and be done with it. That’s all I meant.
Right, and the rest of us would be able to more effectively filter it out from our instances.
While the study itself is a good read and I agree with the conclusions—Mastodon, and decentralized social media need better moderation tools—it’s hard to not read the Verge headline as misleading. One of the study authors gives more context here https://hachyderm.io/@det/110769470058276368. Basically most of the hits came from a large Japanese instance that no one federates with; the author even calls out that the blunt instrument most Mastodon admins use is to blanket defederate with instances hosted in Japan due to their more lax (than the US) laws around CSAM. But the headline seems to imply that there’s a giant seedy underbelly to places like mastodon.social[1] that are rife with abuse material. I suppose that’s a marketing problem of federated software in general.
- There is a seedy underbelly of mainstream Mastodon instances, but it’s mostly people telling you how you’re supposed to use Mastodon if you previously used Twitter.
The person outright rejects defederation as a solution when it IS the solution, if an instance is in favor of this kind of thing you don’t want to federate with them, period.
I also find worrying the amount of calls for a “Fediverse police” in that thread, scanning every image that gets uploaded to your instance with a 3rd party tool is an issue too, on one side you definitely don’t want this kinda shit to even touch your servers and on the other you don’t want anybody dictating that, say, anti-union or similar memes are marked, denounced and the person who made them marked, targeted and receiving a nice Pinkerton visit.
This is a complicated problem.
Edit: I see somebody suggested checking the observations against the common and well used Mastodon blocklists, to see if the shit is contained on defederated instances, and the author said this was something they wanted to check, so i hope there’s a followup
In my opinion the biggest issue the author points out is that cached materials are sometimes retained even after moderator action. Which honestly just sounds like a straight up bug more than anything. Though if I were running an instance, the feds showing up at my door with a warrant because I’ve been accidentally distributing CSAM would be my nightmare scenario. And of course jurisdiction plays a part, too: an American user on a Canadian server might see drawn depictions of sexualized minors, think “weird but not illegal,” and now the Canadian admin has content that’s illegal in Canada on their Canadian server and has no idea.
IMO I think the best solution to this is something similar to what Renaud Chaput (Mastodon’s resident infra boffin) described in his recent blog post. Effectively, give admins a way to hand this off to pluggable third-party services. Admins that are worried about this sort of thing can then have some degree of safety via e.g. PhotoDNA, whereas others can take on additional risk and preserve additional privacy.
All that said: yeah the headline makes it sound like .social is some 8chan-esque hellhole, whereas in reality my feed is 99% German programmers sharing milquetoast political takes.
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While I agree that CSAM material needs to be addressed it’s also worth pointing out that cloudflare has some privacy issues.
I’m not fully sure about the logic and perhaps hinted conclusions here. The internet itself is a network with major CSAM problems (so maybe we shouldn’t use it?).
This is exactly what I thought. The story here is that the human race has a massive child abuse material problem.
It doesn’t help to bring whataboutism into this discussion. This is a known problem with the open nature of federation. So is bigotry and hate speech. To address these problems, it’s important to first acknowledge that they exist.
Also, since fed is still in the early stages, now is the time to experiment with mechanisms to control them. Saying that the problem is innate to networks is only sweeping it under the rug. At some point there will be a watershed event that’ll force these conversations anyway.
The challenge is in moderating such content without being ham-fisted. I must admit I have absolutely no idea how, this is just my read of the situation.
@mudeth @pglpm you really don’t beyond our current tools and reporting to authorities.
This is not a single monolithic platform, it’s like attributing the bad behavior of some websites to HTTP.
Our existing moderation tools are already remarkably robust and defederating is absolutely how this is approached. If a server shares content that’s illegal in your country (or otherwise just objectionable) and they have no interest in self-moderating, you stop federating with them.
Moderation is not about stamping out the existence of these things, it’s about protecting your users from them.
If they’re not willing to take action against this material on their servers, then the only thing further that can be done is reporting it to the authorities or the court of public opinion.
Maybe my comment wasn’t clear or you misread it. It wasn’t meant to be sarcastic. Obviously there’s a problem and we want (not just need) to do something about it. But it’s also important to be careful about how the problem is presented - and manipulated - and about how fingers are pointed. One can’t point a finger at “Mastodon” the same way one could point it at “Twitter”. Doing so has some similarities to pointing a finger at the http protocol.
Edit: see for instance the comment by @while1malloc0@beehaw.org to this post.
Understood, thanks. Yes I did misread it as sarcasm. Thanks for clearing that up :)
However I disagree with @shiri@foggyminds.com in that Lemmy, and the Fediverse, are interfaced with as monolithic entities. Not just by people from the outside, but even by its own users. There are people here saying how they love the community on Lemmy for example. It’s just the way people group things, and no amount of technical explanation will prevent this semantic grouping.
For example, the person who was arrested for CSAM recently was running a Tor exit node, but that didn’t help his case. As shiri pointed out, defederation works for black-and-white cases. But what about in cases like disagreement, where things are a bit more gray? Like hard political viewpoints? We’ve already seen the open internet devolve into bubbles with no productive discourse. Federation has a unique opportunity to solve that problem starting from scratch, and learning from previous mistakes. Defed is not the solution, it isn’t granular enough for one.
Another problem defederation is that it is after-the-fact and depends on moderators and admins. There will inevitably be a backlog (pointed out in the article). With enough community reports, could there be a holding-cell style mechanism in federated networks? I think there is space to explore this deeper, and the study does the useful job of pointing out liabilities in the current state-of-the-art.
I share and promote this attitude. If I must be honest it feels a little hopeless: it seems that since the 1970s or 1980s humanity has been going down the drain. I fear “fediverse wars”. It’s 2023 and we basically have a World War III going on, illiteracy and misinformation steadily increase, corporations play the role of governments, science and scientific truth have become anti-Galilean based on “authorities” and majority votes, and natural stupidity is used to train artificial intelligence. I just feel sad.
But I don’t mean to be defeatist. No matter the chances we can fight for what’s right.
@mudeth @pglpm The grey area is all down to personal choices and how “fascist” your admin is (which goes on to which instance is best for you?)
Defederation is a double-edged sword, because if you defederate constantly for frivolous reasons all you do is isolate your node. This is also why it’s the *final* step in moderation.
The reality is that it’s a whole bunch of entirely separate environments and we’ve walked this path well with email (the granddaddy of federated social networks). The only moderation we can perform outside of our own instance is to defederate, everything else is just typical blocking you can do yourself.
The process here on Mastodon is to decide for yourself what is worth taking action on. If it’s not your instance, you report it to the admin of that instance and they decide if they want to take action and what action to take. And if they decide it’s acceptable, you decide whether or not this is a personal problem (just block the user or domain on in your user account but leave it federating) or if it’s a problem for your whole server (in which case you defederate to protect your users).
Automated action is bad because there’s no automated identity verification here and it’s an open door to denial of service attacks (harasser generates a bunch of different accounts, uses them all the report a user until that user is auto-suspended).
The backlog problem however is an intrinsic problem to moderation that every platform struggles with. You can automate moderation, but then that gets abused and has countless cases of it taking action on harmless content, and you can farm out moderation but then you get sloppiness.
The fediverse actually helps in moderation because each admin is responsible for a group of users and the rest of the fediverse basically decides whether they’re doing their job acceptably via federation and defederation (ie. if you show that you have no issue with open Nazis on your platform, then most other instances aren’t going to want to connect to you)
Defederation is a double-edged sword
Agreed. It’s not the solution.
The reality is that it’s a whole bunch of entirely separate environments and we’ve walked this path well with email
On this I disagree. There are many fundamental differences. Email is private, while federated social media is public. Email is one-to-one primarily, or one-to-few. Soc media is broadcast style. The law would see it differently, and the abuse potential is also different. @faeranne@lemmy.blahaj.zone also used e-mail as a parallel and I don’t think that model works well.
The process here on Mastodon is to decide for yourself what is worth taking action on.
I agree for myself, but that wouldn’t shield a lay user. I can recommend that a parent sign up for reddit, because I know what they’ll see on the frontpage. Asking them to moderate for themselves can be tricky. As an example, if people could moderate content themselves we wouldn’t have climate skeptics and holocaust deniers. There is an element of housekeeping to be done top-down for a platform to function as a public service, which is what I assume Lemmy wants to be.
Otherwise there’s always the danger of it becoming an wild-west platform that’ll attract extremists more than casual users looking for information.
Automated action is bad because there’s no automated identity verification here and it’s an open door to denial of service attacks
Good point.
The fediverse actually helps in moderation because each admin is responsible for a group of users and the rest of the fediverse basically decides whether they’re doing their job acceptably via federation and defederation
The way I see it this will inevitably lead to concentration of users, defeating the purpose of federation. One or two servers will be seen as ‘safe’ and people will recommend that to their friends and family. What stops those two instances from becoming the reddit of 20 years from now? We’ve seen what concentration of power in a few internet companies has done to the Internet itself, why retread the same steps?
Again I may be very naive, but I think with the big idea that is federation, what is sorely lacking is a robust federated moderation protocol.
@mudeth I 110% agree faeranne, especially in that this is much like the topic of encryption and how people (especially politicians) keep arguing that we just need to magically come up with a solution that allows governments to access all encrypted communication somehow without impacting security and preventing people from using existing encryption to completely bypass it. It’s much like trying to legislate math into functioning differently.
The closest you can get to a federated moderation protocol is basically just a standard way to report posts/users to admins.
You could absolutely build blocklists that are shared around, but that’s already a thing and will never be universal.
Basically what you’re describing is that someone should come up with a way to *force* me to apply moderation actions to my server that I disagree with. That somehow such a system would be immune to abuse (ie. because it’s external to my server, it would magically avoid hackers and trolls manipulating it) and that I would have no choice in whether or not to allow that access despite running a server based on open source software in which I can edit the code myself if I wish (but somehow in this case wouldn’t be able to edit it to prevent the external moderation from working).
You largely miss the point entirely of my other arguments: email is a perfect reference point because, despite private vs public, it faces all the same technical, social, and legal challenges. It’s just an older system with a slightly different purpose (that doesn’t change it’s technical foundations, only just how it’s interacted with), but the closest relative to activitypub with much much larger scale adoption. These issues and topics have already been discussed ad nauseum there.
And I didn’t say users would moderate themselves, we decide what is worth taking action on. If you’re not an admin, you choose whether or not something is worth reporting and whether or not you find the server you’re on acceptable to your wants/needs. If you take issue with anti-vaxxers, climate change deniers, and nazis and your server allows all of that (either on the server itself, or has no issue with other servers that allow it)… then you move to a server that doesn’t.
Finally, this doesn’t end in centralization because of all the aforementioned gray areas. There are many things that I don’t consider acceptable on my server but aren’t grounds for defederation.
For example: I won’t tolerate the ignoring of minority voices on topics of cultural appropriation and microaggressions… but I don’t consider it a good idea to defederate other servers for it because the admins themselves often barely understand it and I would be defederation 90% of the fediverse at that point. If I see such from my users I will talk to them and take action as appropriate, but from other servers I’ll report if the server looks remotely receptive to it.
I for one am all for instances being forcibly taken down by police if they can’t moderate CSAM appropriately.
Moderation is a very real challenge. The internet at large aimed to solved it by centralizing everything to a few mega corps with AI moderation. The fediverse aims to solve it by keeping instances small and holding both mods and users accountable.
Does this come to the surprise of anyone? This is the case on large social networks and decentralised networks by definition are free and open for anyone to moderate how they please. Unfortunately including pedos
Pedos that got banned from platforms turn to other platform who hasnt done it yet
In other news: the sky is blue
While white knights propose ways to control everyone everywhere everytime, in the name of catching the pedos who will just hop to the next platform (or have already).
Mastodon.art doesn’t.
And the beauty of Mastodon is you can block an entire instance, as can your admin, when something awful is posted. Mastodon even has a hashtag they use as an alert for this kind of thing. (#Fediblock)
not surprised at all. this is a growing pain here too because this was previously a thing handled invisibly by platforms and federation makes it fall to individual sysadmins and whoever they have on staff. the tools for this stuff are, in general, not here yet–and as people have noted there are potential conflicts with some of the principles of federation introduced by those tools that can’t be totally handwaved.
One of the problems with the fediverse is that each server keeps its own copy of the content. It is definitely a worry that bad actors push content to federated servers to get them taken down due to the content they now are storing.
What’s the reason for that? Caching purposes?
I think so. My Lemmy instance for example is currently storing several gigabytes of images in my cloud buckets, but with my 4 users I’m reasonably confident it didn’t all come from us.
This is why I disabled that feature on my Lemmy instance.
General idea is that if there is only one copy, taking something down is knocking that server out of service.
The researchers suggest that decentralized networks like Mastodon need to implement more robust moderation tools and reporting mechanisms to address the prevalence of CSAM.
I agree, but who’s going to pay for it? Those aren’t just freely available additions to any application that you only need to toggle on.
I agree, but who’s going to pay for it?
How about police/the tax payer?
If university researchers can find the stuff, then police can find it too. There should be an established way to flag the user (or even the entire instance) so that content can be removed from the fediverse while simultaneously asking for all data that is available to try to catch the criminals.
And of course, if regular users come across anything illegal they will report it too, and it should be removed quickly (I’d hope immediately in many cases, especially if the post was by a brand new/untrusted account).
A decentralised platform like the Fediverses won’t easily work with nation states and their taxes. Even with Wikipedia today, it’s not funded directly via any government - but rather by certain universities giving some money to it + all the private doners.
And even if we get that working, power politics will mess this up like so often when things actually get troublesome.
It might be interesting to explore cryptocurrencies as for donations here though. They do have international liquidity and they can’t be misused foe power politics.
I’m not suggesting Beehaw/etc should be government funded. Rather I’m suggesting it’s already possible for basically anyone in the fediverse to report a post as needing urgent moderator attention.
I think there will be tax payer funded efforts, donation funded efforts, volunteers, etc that are unaffiliated with any specific instance but go through major instances and hit the report button where they consider it to be appropriate — not just manually with people but also with automated tools such as searching for images by a hash of their contents or maybe even running messages through a Large Language Model to check if it is, for example, a form of targeted harassment.
And yes, the report feature will be abused. That’s unavoidable and needs to be taken into account when deciding how to respond to a report. An algorithm could easily prioritise reports based on the history of past reports made by the same person / organisation.
Stack Exchange has a pretty good system - decisions by individuals are not trusted. Rather those trigger a review by a randomly selected (and trusted) individual to get a second opinion. And even after a decision has been made and an action has been taken (ban a user, etc) there’s often a third or even fourth review. And there are processes to appeal and question decisions.
It’s not an easy problem to solve, but as the creator of mastodon said - many hands make light work. The fediverse can some day have a billion people doing moderation tasks - where even simple acts like hitting the upvote button become part of the moderation system (upvote would imply that this account holder tends to make valuable contributions to the community, and should make the moderation system less likely to come down with a ban hammer).
And I also think there is scope for some communities to be entirely government funded. For example I’d love for every city in the world to run an offical community, with official local government anouncements as well as moderated discussions relevant to people who live in or are visiting the city.
I am exactly doubting your suggestion of tax paid donations. I don’t think this will happen, unless we actually come together and try to actually enforce this on the political level in various countries.
After all, open source software is an essential and critical foundation since many decades - but I’m not sure, whether there is any government that has made a pledge to donate a certain amount of money per year into the development and funding of such general purpose software. (Maybe I’m wrong though.)
Before the fediverse can get any public funding, we need to make some political efforts. the UN is the largest such institution - and it took all the fiasco with the 2 world war to get many countries pledge to donate to it every year…
I’m not sure, whether there is any government that has made a pledge to donate a certain amount of money per year into the development and funding of such general purpose software
Tor (The Onion Router) was invented by a United States Naval Intelligence Unit. They released the source code as open source and handed control over to the EFF but several US Government agencies continued to provide substantial funding (especially the Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights and Labor Affairs). As far as I know they continue to fund it.
There are definitely examples of Governments funding open source software, especially things that are as valuable as a social network.
One way to do this is to block hashes. This is a slippery slope though because it could be used maliciously. Only way to do this and protect freedom of information is to make this fully open source.
Block hash lists then? Something like a community driven hashlist for CSAM would work, of the majority of federated instances report it as that type then it would get added to the list. Instances could then choose what lists they wanted to block.
…instances could also show what lists they subscribe to so they users could see what sort of moderation they choose
This is kind of problematic… By creating a community driven hashlist that is freely shared, you’ve also kind of created an index of CSAM content that could easily be extrapolated for people actively looking to find/share that content.
Surely a list of hashes wouldn’t be that useful?
only if they are crypto hashes (hash functions that back btc, ltc, other cryptos) as they are irreversible*
*i wont explain, use your internet in the pocket
The researchers can’t be taken seriously if they don’t acknowledge that you can’t force free software to do something you don’t want it to.
Even if we started way down at the stack and we added a CSAM hash scanner to the Linux kernel, people would just fork the kernel and use their own build without it.
Same goes for nginx or any other web server or web proxy. Same goes for Tor. Same goes for Mastodon or any other Fedi/ActivityPub implementation.
It. Does. Not*. Work.
* Please, prove me wrong, I’m not all knowing, but short of total surveillance, I see no technical solution to this.
Hi, since Mastodon is no longer acceptable due to the 0.04 percent of instances found to have abusive material, would someone please suggest the alternative social network with 0 percent of these incidents? Companies like Facebook and Twitter are driven by shareholders and greed, Mastodon is a community effort and you’ll certainly find bad actors there, but I feel less dirty contributing to a community project, versus helping billionaires like Zuck and Elon line their pockets harvesting my data.
I don’t trust stanford to not work on behalf of the CIA or other 3 alphabet orgs. They kind of turn a blind eye to CSA in churches but a federated media? This sounds like a smear job.
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Is there any way mastodon stands out from other self hosted websites? Would the CSAM material be harder to distribute or easier to prosecute if they ran, say, a self-hosted bulletin board for it instead?
Privately hosted websites are only useful for established clients. Via social media and image sharing platforms the distributors try to reach new clientele. They often have more or less hidden tags and codes that can attract potential customers. When someone reacts to these they carefully try to see if the person could be trusted to have access to private sharing. It’s how drug dealers online sometimes work or extremist groups.
Probably just the ease at which you can find it since each instance is linked, it basically becomes a search engine that might not have the same controls/protection as Google etc
