There’s another round of CSAM attacks and it’s really disturbing to see those images. It was really bothering to see those and they weren’t taken down immediately. There was even a disgusting shithead in the comments who thought it was funny?? the fuck
It’s gone now but it was up for like an hour?? This really ruined my day and now I’m figuring out how to download tetris. It’s really sickening.
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Real talk, Lemmy needs some of the basic ass moderation tools that Reddit had so mods can be alerted and so mods can recommend that an admin ban an account or domain.
Sure, there are ways that we can scan uploads with AI and do a bunch of other complex magic, but we need the basics first.
One tool that I liked from Reddit was manually approving posts from accounts under a certain age or karma threshold. I hope we can get tools like that one day.
There is already the ability to restrict by karma with lemmy bots, but this will just encourage karma farming IMO, hence why nobody has done this yet
I like the sound of the former approach - it sounds like a more effective solution and is similar to what Discourse does (manual approval of posts for new accounts, with an accompanying trust level) in a lemmy implementation it could possibly be managed or set by each instance
Edit:clarification
Lemmy will need a trust and safety team, but those can be expensive, and it would be an operational challenge for every instance to have experienced people. Would probably work best if there was a T&S collective and instances can elect to use them as a resource.
But before we can even get to that, we need those basic mod tools. A volunteer TS team would need that to be effective.
Can’t address a serious report if you don’t know it exists, and if you aren’t empowered report bad actors to admins to ban them from an instance.
Better tools will open the door for instance admins who don’t come from a network admin/developer background to responsibly host their communities, too.
For the Lemmyverse to truly thrive, Admins should be relatively free to focus their time on the social elements of running an instance, which is a wholly different skillset than systems administration. Right now in order to be an effective Admin you need a heaping of both, (unless of course you’re interested in running an unmoderated instance).
Even with fantastic moderation tools if one malicious user can take down an entire Lemmy instance then all is for naught.
AI generated CSAM will be (or already is) the next big DoS/troll tool, all you can really do is delete/block
im giving up on the internet
I mean if it has the potential to kill the value of real CSAM that’s kinda a win though… Sure, it’s disturbing, but I’d rather people don’t actually get abused in order to create such content - which will inevitably happen anyway.
AFAIK, it all falls down on moderators’ shoulders. I don’t envy their jobs one bit :(
How was it handled on Reddit? Did the moderators have to handle it there as well, or did Reddit filter it out beforehand?
Reddit uses a CSAM scanning tool to identify and block the content before it hits the site.
https://protectingchildren.google/#introduction is the one Reddit uses.
https://blog.cloudflare.com/the-csam-scanning-tool/ is another such tool.
Are any of the examples that your provided libre/free and open-source? I wasn’t able to find any info for Google’s, and Cloudflare seems to only offer theirs for free if you are already using Cloudflare’s services. If not the examples that you provided, does there exist any tools that are libre/free and open-source?
No.
The nature of the checksums and perceptual hashing is kept in confidence between the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC) and the provider. If the “is this classified as CSAM?” service was available as an open source project those attempting to circumvent the tool would be able to test it until the modifications were sufficient to get a false negative.
There are attempts to do “scan and delete” but this may add legal jeopardy to server admins even more than not scanning as server admins are required by law to report and preserve the images and log files associated with CSAM.
I’d strongly suggest anyone hosting a Lemmy instance to read https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2022/12/user-generated-content-and-fediverse-legal-primer
The requirements for hosting providers are https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/2258A
(a) Duty To Report.—
(1) In general.—
(A) Duty.—In order to reduce the proliferation of online child sexual exploitation and to prevent the online sexual exploitation of children, a provider—
(i) shall, as soon as reasonably possible after obtaining actual knowledge of any facts or circumstances described in paragraph (2)(A), take the actions described in subparagraph (B); and
(ii) may, after obtaining actual knowledge of any facts or circumstances described in paragraph (2)(B), take the actions described in subparagraph (B).
(B) Actions described.—The actions described in this subparagraph are—
(i) providing to the CyberTipline of NCMEC, or any successor to the CyberTipline operated by NCMEC, the mailing address, telephone number, facsimile number, electronic mailing address of, and individual point of contact for, such provider; and
(ii) making a report of such facts or circumstances to the CyberTipline, or any successor to the CyberTipline operated by NCMEC.…
(e) Failure To Report.—A provider that knowingly and willfully fails to make a report required under subsection (a)(1) shall be fined—
(1) in the case of an initial knowing and willful failure to make a report, not more than $150,000; and
(2) in the case of any second or subsequent knowing and willful failure to make a report, not more than $300,000.
AI will make this redundant
It will also make it a battle of attrition. Because now we’re not only using AI to block CSAM; Trolls are using AI to generate CSAM.
The issue is that these tools typically work by hashing the image (or a specific section of the image) and checking it against a database of known CSAM. That way you never actually need to view the file to compare it to the list. But with AI image generation, that list of known CSAM is essentially useless because trolls can just generate new images.
Even without the issue of new AI-generated images, those hash-based scanning tools aren’t available to hobbyist projects like the typical Lemmy instance. If they were given to hobbyist projects, it would be really easy for an abuser to just tweak their image collection until it didn’t set off the filter.
You can use CloudFlare’s CSAM scanning tool completely for free. You can’t get access to the hashes, which would allow what you are talking about.
Sure, for Lemmy instances who are Cloudflare customers. But I don’t think it can be integrated with the Lemmy code by default.
Bingo, that’s the issue. With an endless supply of fresh content, hash checking is dead
On the other hand, if the people who want those images can satisfy their urges using AI fakes, that could mean less spreading of images of actual abuse. It might even mean less abuse happening.
However, because they’re terrible people, I have to suspect that’s not the case.
People who create the content and insane monsters, but a LOT of actual pedos (vs predators looking for a power play) are disgusted by their preference. I know a ton of them look to cartoons already for stimulation, so I think AI content could draw more people away from actual material. Hopefully if demand reduces there will be less creation of new real content as the potential profits fall more proportionate to the risk.
Reddit pays people.
Unless this place monetizes its done. But everyone in this place expects everything to be free.
They don’t pay moderators, so that’s a moot point.
But I do agree in general that there needs to be money flow to developers and admins, and potentially moderators as well. Perhaps that can be done with donations, or perhaps there needs to be a profit model, IDK, but I haven’t seen a long term solution here.
My opinion is that the federated model is broken, and we should be looking into decentralized models where users share some of the burden. That way monetization wouldn’t be an issue because there isn’t a huge infrastructure cost.
But I’ll stick around while it works.
Reddit pays admins, I think we are mostly on the same page on the rest. Donations will never happen though. It’s going to be at least $100 a year per person+ unless you end up cutting corners on stability and I don’t see the user base accepting that really.
Nah, it’s more like a few hundred/month/instance, so if an instance has 5k users, it’s $1-2/user/month. So about a quarter of what you suggested.
But again, it’s unlikely to actually happen. Voluntary donations tend to suffer from the Bystander Effect.
Especially as Lemmy has even worse moderator tools than reddit (without custom tools) and the devs don’t give a shit.
They really don’t care, do they?
I think the Lemmy dev team could use some help pushing out more moderation controls if there are any devs out there who want to make the world a little bit better place.
For starters it would be nice to be able to set up rules like:
You can’t comment for 1 day, you can’t comment links for 1 week, you can’t post until you have X comment karma, and you can’t post images / links to non-whitelisted sites until you have mod approval/Y karma/whatever. Toss in a rate limit on posting, and it’s not perfect but it may give mods a little more breathing room. Without adequate tools I understand why certain instances choose to go with the walled garden approach.
Set up CloudFlare’s CSAM scanning tool. It’s completely free. It’s not on lemmy devs to secure your instance. Lemmy devs could add better admin and moderating tools, but it’s better to stop it before it even makes it to your server.
Imo, lemmy shouldn’t allow image uploads at all. All images should be hosted elsewhere on services that can handle scanning content. This would also drastically cut down on hosting costs for lemmy instances.
If lemmy is to host images, it should merely be as a backup. But since lemmy content isn’t easy to search as is anyway, that’s not a short term concern. And those images should be archived via mod action imo, not user action.
can’t you already run Lemmy without image hosting if you just disable the pictrs service?
there’s also a new config option to disable caching of remote images
disable caching of remote images
I’m not exactly sure how Lemmy works here, but are pictrs images considered “remote,” or are they copied between instances? AFAIK, each instance has its own pictrs service, but I’m not sure if that’s sent along with the post content when federating messages.
But if lemmy can interact with other instances without storing any non-text data, then perhaps the problem is solved.
Is there an option to delete a single image from your lemmy instance?
Dumb question, but I’m sure I’m not the only one … What is CSAM? And what the acronym means?
Child Sexual Abuse Material.
Here’s a safe for work blog post by Cloudflare for how to set up a scanner: https://developers.cloudflare.com/cache/reference/csam-scanning/ and a similar tool from Google https://protectingchildren.google
