Hello everyone,
We unfortunately have to close the !lemmyshitpost community for the time being. We have been fighting the CSAM (Child Sexual Assault Material) posts all day but there is nothing we can do because they will just post from another instance since we changed our registration policy.
We keep working on a solution, we have a few things in the works but that won’t help us now.
Thank you for your understanding and apologies to our users, moderators and admins of other instances who had to deal with this.
Edit: @Striker@lemmy.world the moderator of the affected community made a post apologizing for what happened. But this could not be stopped even with 10 moderators. And if it wasn’t his community it would have been another one. And it is clear this could happen on any instance.
But we will not give up. We are lucky to have a very dedicated team and we can hopefully make an announcement about what’s next very soon.
Edit 2: removed that bit about the moderator tools. That came out a bit harsher than how we meant it. It’s been a long day and having to deal with this kind of stuff got some of us a bit salty to say the least. Remember we also had to deal with people posting scat not too long ago so this isn’t the first time we felt helpless. Anyway, I hope we can announce something more positive soon.
I hope the devs take this seriously as an existential threat to the fediverse. Lemmyshitpost was one of the largest communities on the network both in AUPH and subscribers. If taking the community down is the only option here, that’s extremely insufficient and bodes death for the platform at the hands of uncontrolled spam.
Lemmy is new for all of us. I don’t see any other solution right now. You got some ideas how to handle it better?
I think better mod tools are needed but it will take time. Doesn’t mean the platform will die, but means we may have to deal with some stuff like this.
It’s a hard problem but it absolutely is an existential risk. Spam is an existential risk. A platform that collapses under spam will either remain too small to be irrelevant or collapse from unusability. I’m sorry but I don’t think your response completely grasps the number of forums, social media sites, wikis, etc. that have been completely crushed by spam.
I admit I haven’t kept track of that, true.
Solution now. Better solution later.
I’ve just finished arguing with other lemmy users about how admins aren’t interested in taking on your legal risk. That was for the topic of piracy. CSAM is another issue entirely. Not only can lemmy users not expect to see a CSAM-friendly instance, lemmy users should expect to be deanonymized by law enforcement. Fuck around with kids and find out.
Are you seriously conflating my position with arguing that CSAM should be allowed?
Are people having a difficult time reading today? It’s not just you. Maybe it’s this topic and how it intermeshes with technology. Some people seem to think that there’s a technical solution for this already (one that works as well if not better than human moderators).
No, I don’t think you personally are advocating for CSAM to be allowed. I think commenters are getting a little uppity about missing out on their favorite community while the admins deal with content that is:
Imagine you owned an instance, and you found 100 moderators for your communities. You rest your head on the pillow and go to sleep. You wake up and find that some user has written a script to post CSAM on all your communities, because “fuck you that’s why”. You get on the line with your moderators and they tell you they’ve been battling this all night, just banning people and deleting comments on site. They tell you they’ve had to turn off a few communities and that some users are complaining. Your hard work for weeks and months to get this instance to a healthy place is being tested. You get an email from your hosting service, saying that they have reports that your site contains CSAM and that’s against ToS - they give you a day to get it under control before they boot your server or turn it over to police. Imagine in this case you make the drastic move to simply pull the plug - taking the entire instance offline until you can sort it through. Now imagine some users come in and start complaining about how you dear admin are killing the fediverse. Personally, I have no sympathy for those user who complain about their community or instance being taken offline while admins deal with real shit.
So 4chan has this problem a lot but they are also based in the US where its most definitely illegal and they IP ban people and I think for the most part it works. It did suck though - I don’t go on there anymore but in the last few years I did, if I was on mobile, I would often get hit with a region ban because so many people in that area were banned that they just decided to block an entire IP region to prevent anyone else posting illegal content.
maybe look into IP and region banning to prevent someone from just making new accounts.
You’re discussing how to ban people, this isn’t the problem.
The problem is this: In the last hour, 10,000 images were uploaded. Some of those contain CSAM. Now, you have 1 hour to find all the CSAM photos (0 to 10,000 of them). In the next hour, another 10,000 images will be uploaded, some of them containing CSAM…
Unless you have a lot of human moderators, you’re going to use automated tools and get false-postives or false-negatives.
A site like 4 chan banning whole regions isn’t a great example of handling this well. I don’t think I need to explain (but maybe I do) that one person in a region who is posting CSAM doesn’t mean the entire region posts CSAM. You could just opt to block all regions by pulling the site off the internet. Not to mention, does this now mean that 4 chan allows CSAM for certain regions? Yikes. “Children can be abused only in these countries” “I’m sorry but your countries laws prevent images of children being abused, so this content is banned”. Yikes.
Again, the technical issue isn’t on banning. Here’s the code to ban user at IP 1.2.3.4:
if ( $_SERVER[‘REMOTE_ADDR’] === ‘1.2.3.4’ ) { die(‘nope!’); }
Here’s the code to ban a user at a specific region (pseudocode):
$geoip = new GeoIPDB(); $region = $geoip->get_region( ‘1.2.3.4’ ); if ( $region === ‘USA’ ) { die(‘nope!’); }
This isn’t difficult.
Now, for the code to DETECT CSAM:
look for skin tone tints (take into account all skin tone colors), look for quantity of skin on image (this would make close-ups of arms possible nude detections), detect a person in the photo, determine the person’s age by the photo… don’t detect images of art or of artful nudes, etc… or you know this is a lot of work, let’s make the humans detect instead.
Region banning would prevent anyone in the area from posting. I even mentioned that I use to come across bans for other people. In the case of 4chan, when they region ban, its possible someone else will be prevented from posting.
Now, if you want to talk about legality in other countries - that’s a different discussion. The internet is open to the WORLD. And all I would be comfortable confirming is that it’s definitely illegal in the US where I am. I’m not gonna get into other countries where it might not be illegal. I don’t know enough about those places to be able to tell you more.
Basically a region ban would be similar to just pulling that instance down. Preventing whatever region that person was posting in would prevent them from posting as well as making local accounts to try and post more.
When I would be downtown where I live, and got a ban that wasn’t meant for me, but I was in the region that was banned, I was able to appeal my ban. In order to appeal, you have to be good at using your words because a person has to sit there and read the appeal to make the decision to unban or not. Mine always went through but I also am capable of talking things out and I’m smart enough to know when to properly explain myself.
Other people didn’t get their appeals and I would see them complain about it elsewhere.
Anyway, you don’t need to condescend to me. I’m not against what you’re saying. I agree with a lot of what you said in other comments.
I don’t think the comment above was trying to express dissatisfaction towards Lemmy’s hosts for failure to respond. They’re simply stating that the way things are all set up, much as we might like it, has serious problems - ones that may end up being considered unsolvable. As you said, we might be heading for an eventual plug pull.
It’s like pointing out that cars produce fossil fuel exhaust. It sucks, and we’re seeing it as unsustainable, but there’s no convenient alternative yet.
Things are setup the way they are because it’s the best way that admins (not just of lemmy instances but of major sites like reddit and facebook) have found to handle these situations.
You could take it a step further and give law enforcement their own backdoor to your site, as Facebook has done, but I would not advocate for that solution. We are in a special place in the internet where we can somewhat self-police our own content, assuming we actually self-police our own content. The way we do this is the way these admins are currently handling this.
It may be reasonable to think that sites like reddit and facebook have it all figured out, but all they have is similar code to what lemmy has, but with a bit more money to pay some content moderators on trust and safety to actually remove this content before users get a chance to see it. The difference between those sites and lemmy is $$$ and that’s not something that’s likely to change anytime soon.
Sorry to hear about your investment in lemmy. How much did you end up investing? It just sounds like you’re very unsatisified with the value that lemmy has provided.
Personally, I don’t pay for lemmy. Lemmy is free as for as I understood it. As it being free, I can’t really dictate the legal risk that the admins have to go through, as I do not have power over them, and because I treat them as humans.
But yeah, I guess if you have a good reason, they really should be falling over backwards to moderate all the CSAM away from your favorite community. You are an all-powerful being.
I feel like you didn’t actually read their comment before posting, !dipshit@lemmy.world
It has nothing to do with Lemmyshitpost being their “favorite community” and they never mentioned “investing” or “value”. That’s all from you. Stop strawmanning their position. They were criticizing the ease with which entire communities can be taken down by single individuals. Additionally, it seems you are contradicting your own post from 20 minutes prior to your current comment. Perhaps you responded to the wrong comment?
Fyi, admins have the protection of federal law to not be held responsible, as long as they take action when it happens.
They have very low to zero legal risk, as long as they’re doing their job.
IANAL, but I can read laws.
Correct, emphasis mine. As long as they take action when it happens being the key phrase here.
IANAL but from what I understand, doing something to take action (removing content, disabling communites, banning users, all of the above) shows that they are working to remove the content. This is why previously when having conversations with people about the topic of piracy I mentioned DCMA takedown notices and how the companies I’ve worked at responded to those with extreme importance (sometimes the higher ups would walk over to the devs and make sure the content was deleted).
I’m annoyed at people in this thread who believe that the admins did the wrong thing, because turning off communities could cause users to go to another instance - who cares, this is bigger than site engagement. I’m annoyed at people who think that the devs had access to code which could prevent this issue but chose not to implement that code - this is a larger and much more difficult problem that can’t just be coded away, it usually involves humans to verify the code is working and correct false-positives and false-negatives.
You misunderstood what I meant by the part that you highlighted of my comment.
I’m speaking of Safe Harbor provisions, not having to take active DCMA actions. They’re two very different things.
Everyone got your sarcasm. We just think the Lemmyverse has no chance when it’s flooded with child porn
I’m a victim of CSAM and my dad exploited me for several websites.
I get being upset about this. But it’s not the end of the world for a site. Lemmy is still totally fine and I have been using it without seeing any CSAM and the only knowledge I even have of this is from posts like OP’s.
Like this isn’t a good time to be just down on the site and pessimistic.