How will Lemmy handle illegal content?

jk47@lemmy.world to No Stupid Questions@lemmy.world – 138 points –

How will Lemmy handle illegal content like drug dealing, child porn, snuff movies etc? On Reddit, the corporation is accountable so they will make an effort to ensure non of this exists on their platform. And they would face legal troubles if they failed to act.

But as Lemmy is decentralised this isn't really possible. Sure the main instances can defederate from bad instances, but those instances could still operate and be accessible on the web. Especially if they're hosted in countries outside of the western sphere of influence. Multiple bad instances could federate and duplicate the illegal content pretty easily, making it difficult for the authorities to keep it shut down. Has this been thought about already?

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I'm not so sure this is the case. The images folder on my single user instance is over 1gb, and I haven't posted any images.

Well actually you're caching thumbnails, but I think those only stick around for a month.

I'm going to have to disagree. I just remoted in to check it out. I have 2560x1440 resolution images weighing 2.9 MiB in there. It's pretty clear that these are full size images.

Well that's interesting as you'll never see those images actually served to users - find a remote post where the image URL is your local server. Doesn't happen.

Interesting indeed. I spent some time combing through the DB and pictrs folder to try to figure it out, but I'm at a loss so far.