Yeah so, someone just straight up posted child porn on Lemmy Shitposts. Jesus christ this is getting out of hand.
Sick fucking bastards
Any vulnerability will be exploited. The fact that Lemmy federates and caches media by default is a huge vulnerability in a decentralized network. This was inevitable, I’m just glad I didn’t wind up having to see it myself.
Growing pains of the fediverse. Hopefully we tackle this early and don’t have repeats
How is this a specific weakness of lemmy though? What’s stopping people from posting CSAM on reddit or facebook or whatever?
Those sites are centralized and governed by a single private company, so they can have a dedicated team of content moderators to check and verify illegal content. Federation and how lemmy caches content on all federated instances means when someone posts illegal stuff on one instance, every other connected instance gets a copy too. So random guy running an instance in his room has to go find the content and purge it themselves even though it wasn’t posted directly on their instance, or they can be held legally liable depending on the country they’re in. It’s also the reason (whether you agree with it or not) why instances like .world preemptively blocked piracy communities.
They use specific tools connected to a database that automatically detect and disallow that material from being posted.
If something like that gets posted to reddit, it is in a single database (even if it is reduntant and/or distributed) controlled by a single entity and can be removed. Cleanup is a breeze.
In Lemmy, since servers cache federated media, it gets saved across multiple servers. Every single admin has to be notified and then manually do the cleanup on their server.
Lemmy.world should 100% be reporting this to the FBI: https://www.justice.gov/criminal-ceos/report-violations
Lemmy.world is in Finland, though. The FBI doesn’t have jurisdiction there, and they would have to report it to the corresponding Finnish counterpart.
Yep, since they’re so concerned about what is and is not legally posted to their servers they can walk the walk now and contact the FBI.
Downvote if you love kiddy porn.
Why do you sound vindictive
Some people are upset that Lemmy.world blocked some piracy communities.
I know you’re probably right about why he’s so salty. But Fediverse means he can go sailing the high seas whenever he likes. It’s not like Reddit where once it’s blocked, it’s blocked. There are options here.
The frustration comes from the fact that r/piracy is still up on Reddit and they specifically don’t allow links or references.
So, in a way they’re being much more strict than Reddit, which is a much bigger and well known site. I can understand a little bit of the frustration.
I did not know that, thank you. But for myself, having been on both the Reddit and the Lemmy iterations of that group, Reddit before the migration and Lemmy after, I can tell you that the old r/piracy and the new instance are being run exactly the same (and by the same mods) so as to avoid the legal problems that come with allowing direct links.
As for the r/piracy sub operating on Reddit now, it’s a totally different thing. I would strongly recommend you trust NOTHING from there. There is some crazy shit going down since dbzer0 and the rest left. Reddit/Spez reopened the sub with his own scabs and it’s pretty self-evident they don’t know much about the subject, or how to engage in it safely. It might even be a trap, especially if they are now allowing direct links, which are never a good idea for a non-hosting site. I don’t even bother with it anymore because there is so much bad info being tossed around.
But to each his own. Lemmy is not Reddit and never will be. Apples and oranges; chalk and cheese; swings and roundabouts. That’s the charm, IMO. There’s no excuse here for someone to sit and whine when there are SO many options, none controlled by a single power. I appreciate you trying to mediate a bit, but there’s no reason for anyone here to be unhappy with all the options we now have. It just takes a bit of effort to find what works for your own specific needs.
Lemmy.world is the biggest instance by quite a bit. Anything it bans sees a sharp drop in engagement. It’s a death sentence to certain communities so there’s something to be salty about.
Your claim to “death sentence” in regard to a piracy community seems dubious at best. Not only are the high seas doing just fine, going by content alone they always will be. The danger is not from lack of desirable content, the danger is from law enforcement who like to protect rich men’s spoils while starving those who create the riches.
And it should be added that this particular instance also has a savvy admin who left Spez twitching, hoisted on his own petard, screeching “Not like that! Not like THAT!” as he was pinned there watching the highly profitable sub r/piracy sail into the federated distance, lol. Their Lemmy community is doing just fine. Have you been over there? They’re still around, just defederated.
But that’s not the only questionable part. Seems like a waste of time to mourn a community that is completely thriving elsewhere, when to me it’s a far sadder thing to watch a person only sit and whine about an instance they like getting defederated, when they could so easily follow it out and make an account there, HELPING TO GROW IT with their presence. I know this because that’s exactly what I did.
But hey, you do you.
I am on that instance, that doesn’t change the thousands of lemmy world users who have stopped engaging with it. Even worst, I have to split my time between them, so I myself am engaging less with it even thought it was my first account.
I’m also not interested in having a dozen lemmy account and obviously neither are most folks. My viewing and commenting ends up being disjointed.
I’d like to watch lemmy as a whole grow, not just what the admins of lemmy.world deem acceptable to be mildly associated with. There was zero legal risk with being federated with dbzer0, a complete farce.
For all this talk about Reddit being shit, this is the exact kind of behavior that made it shit.
I’m upset about the piracy thing, but fully support the action against stopping CSAM no matter the cost.
The dude above is just dense me thinks.
Time to stop browsing new. Jesus. I hope they get caught and locked up for a long time.
Edit: wtf, it still shows up browsing by top hour despite shittons of down votes. That’s an actual issue. Sorting by “top” anything should not include heavily down voted posts. I hope lemmy.world is working with the FBI and whatever country this garbage is coming from to fuck them up.
I just did that but I didn’t see it. Guess I should count myself lucky though.
Yep just rolled past that. Not even blurred nsfw either.
Cunt needs to be locked away
At first I was confused and thought I was on a porn sub, then I was confused as to why this was a shitpost, then I looked closer at her physique and I wanted to gouge my eyes out.
What is wrong with people?
Yeah edgy teens i imagine. Not realising the seriousness of it all.
I mean, is CP really prominent enough to find easily? Unless they flat out did a specific search. But I don’t see why you would, I was just as scared as a teen when I was looking up how to get weed shipped to my house lmao. Noped out.
On the darkweb there’s shit everywhere.
But even 4chan bans child porn and they’re a bunch of degenerates.
That’s my only concern for Lemmy is it becomes a home for degenerate cunts
Degenerate cunts are everywhere, unfortunately. Online and offline. I think Lemmy is doing alright so far.
In the last 6 months 2 dudes in the same department at my job have been arrested for cp/doing pedo shit. I don’t trust anyone anymore.
Lemmy is overall well moderated. There will always be bad actors. The difference is whether they are properly removed and handled, or allowed to fester.
I can’t remember the News organization that did the reporting, but CSAM content grew a LOT during the pandemic, and learning of this, a news agency wanted to look into it, see how easy it was to find, they tried just doing some basic searches (the search terms for which they didn’t reveal) in major search engines, and turned up a lot of content, specifically in Bing I think off the top of my head. They nearly got in trouble with the FBI because of it. So yeah, if you go looking for it, apparently shockingly easy to come across.
Bing has done a lot to make its video and image search a bit less effective in finding porn.
The unfortunate answer is yes. The good news is that it’s really hard to disseminate it and most file sharing sites get taken down pretty quickly once those admins find out what is going on.
Is this something edgy teens do to other social medias? It makes most sense that someone or some group that doesn’t like the recent success of Lemmy and the Fediverse would be behind this.
Now, what type of group is well known for breaking laws, having no concern for the well-being of people, and could do something like this with virtually no risk to themselves? And which of these groups in particular is known for having foreign ties to a country and people in that country that could facilitate this type of activity with little risk to themselves?
Now, what type of group is well known for breaking laws, having no concern for the well-being of people, and could do something like this with virtually no risk to themselves?
Unfortunately that describes multiple groups. But given the tactics, (if it is indeed an organized group) likely it’s the 50 Cent Party, possibly in retaliation for defederating hexbear.
That only really describes large corporate or state actors, anyone else is at serious risk of handling CSAM.
Today I saw a post on a gardening instance self hosted by someone, which contains only one gardening community.
It was small and OP said thanks to the few frequent visitors and traffic from other instances accounts but they are shutting it down since someone posted (I assume) CSAM material on their instance. Doesn’t want to risk it of course so a nice community now has to leave.
Ah man, I liked that community :/
Spez is posting CP to Lemmy
He’s still angry that he was forced to shut down r/jailbait
Crazy to think Spez actually got a kick out of moderating a community flooded with CSAM
Reddit bans people for advocating violence against child molesters but not other demographics so it’s plausible Spez supports child molestation. Why else would your site care about protecting those animals.
I got banned for making fun of them hiring an admin whose father had just happened to be raping kids while he was home.
Of course he was totally unaware of the child raping so my memes were mean and uncalled for and hurt their fee fees.
Wait what
The CEO of nazi digg modded a CSAM sub.
Wouldn’t surprise me at all if it was Reddit driven.
Reddit, Twitter, and Facebook all
The post was federated to my server, not the image. Am I fine? Unfortunately to purge it I’ll have to look at it.
I’ll add a feature to photon where you can purge posts directly from the modlog so you don’t have to view the post.
Not a lawyer, but I would reach out to the appropriate law enforcement agency to report it and see what needs to happen with any of the data.
Fair warning in some jurisdictions it is illegal to be in possession of CSAM. In my country if you’re lucky the LEO responding to your call will say “delete that shit right and forget it ever existed. Otherwise I’d have to arrest you for possession of CSAM”
There’s really no distinction here between reporting a discovery of CSAM and actually being in possession of it since you are already in possession of it in the eyes of the law when you discovered it.
Not saying you’re wrong and I’m not a lawyer either so I don’t know, but that sounds pretty stupid for multiple reasons.
- How would any website moderator even be able to moderate their site and report it to the authority if just by reporting it they’re confessing to doing something illegal. There would be nothing stopping people from posting it everywhere if there’s no legal mechanism for reporting it.
- “Possession” a.k.a ownership is a huge part of the law. You can’t just say that just because I’m aware of something existing, I’m in possession of it. By that logic I can go to any jewelry store, look at a diamond and it becomes mine.
Thing is, it doesn’t get reported unless it’s the police doing their own investigation. The law is absurd on that point and needs to be changed so “possrsion” doesn’t mean “stumbled upon it by pure coincidence”
So I entirely agree with you, it’s just hard to change such laws because who wants to be the politician who suggested to relax a CSAM law. It is a touchy subject here since child pornography technically was legal for a few years after pornography was legalised.
Thing is, it doesn’t get reported unless it’s the police doing their own investigation. The law is absurd on that point and needs to be changed so “possrsion” doesn’t mean “stumbled upon it by pure coincidence”
So I entirely agree with you, it’s just hard to change such laws because who wants to be the politician who suggested to relax a CSAM law. It is a touchy subject here since child pornography technically was legal for a few years after pornography was legalised.
Like I said, not a lawyer. Certainly if you believe you would be arrested for illegal content on you public facing server, you should probably contact a lawyer prior to following my advice.
Sounds like rolling the dice on getting arrested yourself.
I’d be more likely to reach out to a carefully chosen DA rather than LEO - far less risk of running into troglodytic idiocy, more likely to have someone who can listen, process, and draw correct conclusions and if necessary connect you with LEO capable of doing the same. But then again, this is not an area I have any experience in.
Just delete it and you will be fine. You can find it on Google images, it’s not a ultra virus that sends you straight to jail when the pixels hit your eyes.
The only way I can see it being a problem is if someone is running a whole community about it on your instance.
So glad I missed it.
I’m so glad I didn’t end up spinning up my own instance like I was planning. I feel sorry for the mods and admins.
You could just block sign-ups or have a vetting process in place
Right, but I’m worried about federation. Wouldn’t that mean that the CSAM would end up on my server as well?
Only if people from your instance subscribed to it.
Yes, so it would if it gets posted to any community you follow yourself. This is an absolute cluster fuck and not worth it if you are not prepared to deal with moderating illegal stuff even on your one user instance. Some people are just way too naive and ignorant of the laws around stuff like this. In Europe your are way more at risk as a platform/website provider/hoster than you are in the US and this can bite you in the ass really hard if you are unlucky.
Hmm yea good point, that’s a tricky one
Doesn’t prevent caching of federated content
A risky move for trolling. Way to get your name on the sex offenders list.
Sex offender list? In my country it’s a super serious crime, you’ll get imprisoned.
There was a guy a while back that got assaulted by masked police in his own home because police believed he was a paedophile because they’d been tipped off that he had child porn.
He didn’t. His boyfriend (who was 30) was just really twinky. Sadly there were no repercussions for the police.
Fuck, you just reminded me of a story that happened like 10 years ago. We were drunk as fuck and my friend said that they have just finiahed their pool at their parents house and we thought it would ve a great idea to take a dip at 6 in the morning. So we were pooling around, when suddenly the police arrived. They didn’t even see us, they went straight for the front door. We snuck out and my friend who (i believe) still lived there, went to the police and talked to someone. He was in cuffs vefore he said much.
We sat in their neighbours porch and kinda watched ir all pan out. They took computers and everyone who lived there with them. We were shocked, but also so drunk we could barely even stand.So turned out that somehow they found out that there is child porn on their family computer, which was there because his little brother was like 12 and super horny and he was horny for girls his age. It was such a mess.
Wtfffff lmao
Gods yeah that’d be a problem here too. If your horny underaged kid takes nudes of themselves and send them to their friends, they’ve committed at least three crimes.
- They’ve produced sexual material of minors
- They possess sexual material of minors
- They’ve spread sexual material of minors
All of which could land you in a whole heap of trouble.
a user is creating a tool to detect and delete that stuff:
Cna you just delete it? I thought that you would have to go through a special procedure, or to report it to the authorities first, before doing that.
that depends on the laws where you live.
anyway, the dev said it detects a ton of false positive, so they will / already have set up the tool to just flag the images, and then a human need to look at them and decide.
still in its hearly stages
jesus fucking christ i guess imma log off lemmy for a while and maybe check back in 2 weeks
god damn holy shit what the fuck
I’m hoping the Lemmy devs are working on some better moderation & filtering tools. The mods have their hands full…
IIRC, it’s on the roadmap, but the devs also have their hands pretty full with everything else.
Thanks for the warning, please tell me it has been removed at this point
Most have yeah, it took admins by surprise, but every instance I’ve seen has been really proactive about it.
I believe someone shared a tool to automate the process, so hopefully soon it won’t be a problem any longer
Holy crap. That’s insane! I was wondering what prompted the admins to do the sign up restriction. Makes perfect sense now.
