Poptalk.scrubbles.tech is going down temporarily due to fear of federating CSAM

Blaze@discuss.tchncs.de to Fediverse@lemmy.ml – 128 points –
lemmy.world

https://poptalk.scrubbles.tech/c/poptalkmeta

(The site is already down, and my instance wasn't subscribed, so I can't properly link, hopefully the bot will help).

Link from LW: https://lemmy.world/post/3979585

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We need much better moderation tools. List of uploaded content, list of cached content, option to purge cached content.

I keep hearing they are swamped and not many people, so if that's really the case i hope this spurs knowledgeable people to join to help add these things.

Absolutely this. There are issues with deletes not federating properly too, right?

That's a big part of the issue here too since even when .world cleans up the content it's already been pushed out to every other instance and will now remain there until all THOSE admins also purge it.

Fascist shutdown of public discourse, step by step:

  1. Find out where public discourse is.
  2. Post child porn on an obscure corner of it.
  3. Take screenshots of the posted porn.
  4. Send law enforcement to seize all the things.

They are a dumbass if they do this cause they will get prosecuted themselves for posting that. There's a safe harbor provision for server admins so long as they make a good faith effort to report when it is brought to their attention (at least in the US). So long as you are doing your due diligence as a web host, you should be fine.

I'm talking about when the government wants an excuse for shutting down public discourse. Obviously it isn't going to prosecute itself.

They have much less roundabout ways of shutting things down if they really want to.

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imo it’s more likely that some agitator dickweed would do that than a government. Both are conceivable, though.

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Ah yes, it was all a false flag, instigated by the government to take away our freedoms, I get it

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Also screenshots of csam would count as csam right

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IANAL, but you are still responsible for it if you host it on a cloud server, the difference is mainly that the authorities will complain first with your cloud host, which will likely take down the entire site, instead of with you directly who can swiftly remove the offending material if asked to do so.

It is FUD to say the police will SWAT you if someone reports CSAM on your server. But you should have an easy way for the responsible agencies to contact you for take-down requests.

For people hosting in the EU, this pdf document explains the legal situation a bit and also where and how to report CSAM, should you come across it.

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Federation lovers find out all the work that goes behind curtains in any modern website that hosts user generated content.

To all the people who like to talk smack to Jitsi for requiring Google login, lemmy.world for banning piracy communities, or to even to YT for honouring takedown requests: go ahead and try to host just 100 people on your site.

I was contemplating setting up an instance dedicated to micromobility, active transport and livable cities... but this is a BIG turn off - I don't think it's worth spinning up a new instance until the new mod tools land, and the ability to disable caching federated thumbnails

There are some instances using ML to scan their pictrs folder IIRC, could be good if it could quarantine/delete/purge posts from Lemmy

Hey, that sounds very interesting. Hope you can do it in the future, I'll definitely join. :)

Aww, dang, scrubbles was gonna be one of my internet friends. I get it though, protecting yourself is important. Good luck, comrade.

I had to clean a child porn image once because some bastard registered at an instance I'm moderating and posted an anime child porn image to another instance using the account he created here. And I found a total of 5 copies of that image in the server...

Egregious CSAM aside, none of these websites, including sites like Reddit, can be 100% confident that the people posting images are doing so of people who are over 18. For example, how could Lemmy or Reddit be confident that (insert gonewild poster here) is over the age of 18? As far as I'm aware the only checks that they do are to confirm that the poster is the person they say they are, not that they are of an appropriate age to post.

I get that the Lemmy devs are swamped with a lot of github issues, but how is this not one of, if not THE top priority for them right now? It's mind blowing that instance admins don't have the ability to disable the automatic caching of images from other remote instances.

If any shit show instance that ends up having CSAM can then cause an admin's instance to inadvertently cache/host that same content, why the fuck would anyone be motivated to host an instance and deal with the liability?

Following the Unix philosophy, why aren't any of us doing anything?

Because people are blowing this way out of proportion. Users uploading illegal content is always part of hosting a platform and lawmakers realized this decades ago. Platform hosters legally cannot be held liable for the content of their users unless they have actual knowledge of specific instances of illegal content. This is both in the US (section 230 of the Communications Decency Act) and the EU (chapter II of the Digital Services Act, previously the eCommerce directive)