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.

maybe look into IP and region banning to prevent someone from just making new accounts.

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.

I’ve spent the better part of this morning explaining to people the fact that a community needs to be shut down in order for volunteers to work on cleaning it up in the time they have available.

commenters seem to be pretty upset that something as “drastic” as turning off a community needs to be done. Some commenters have gone so far as to say that the policy of turning off communities in response to handling CSAM is what will “kill the fediverse”.

I think the normal response to this is: “Wow, this sucks. Thanks admins for doing your best work. I understand the community make not come back for a bit, take all the time you need!”. Yet, I hear “it’s the dev’s fault for not putting in the code for blocking CSAM and taking a community offline is unacceptable”. I call that “upity” but there’s probably better words for it.

They aren't asking devs to be admins or for admins to be devs. They specifically called out the developers because code exists to filter child sexual abuse material, disseminated by organizations such as the FBI and law enforcement, which can be implemented for image uploading.

Yeah? I doubt this is true but I could be wrong. You make it sound like preventing CSAM is as simple as importing a library, something I find dubious. Companies have been trying to filter out this material in an automated fashion for decades and yet they still have to employ humans to do it manually because automated means don’t really work. This is why companies like Reddit, facebook have trust and safety teams to do this work.

Edit: I goggled and could not find this database. I’m thinking it’s a myth.

NOBODY in this comment section is advocating for uploading fucking child sexual abuse material. That is a strawman you are setting up. Nobody is advocating for allowing the uploading of child sexual abuse material, or for the "material to be up on lemmy instances". NOBODY is suggesting that a single instance going down is "the world is ending". NOBODY is asking for "100's of mods to specifically address this one user's posting of CSAM".

ahem there were users who uploaded CSAM. Those are the users who were advocating for uploading CSAM, becuase they uploaded CSAM.

I’m literally arguing with people who are saying that they shouldn’t have shut down the community because it’s big and that shutting down the community (not CSAM) poses an threat to the fediverse. Maybe, but CSAM poses a legal threat, which is much greater than the threat of low engagement.

You're setting up a strawman argument nobody is proposing. The criticism is that, at this moment, the developers of Lemmy have not implemented a method for automatically vetting uploaded images for CSAM without requiring "100's of mods", which is what resulted in the condition that "taking the community down is the only option here".

Yeah, that doesn’t exist, as I’ve mentioned previously. You make it sound like getting CSAM off lemmy was as simple as writing some code - if it were, why doesn’t facebook and reddit do this?

Perhaps the wording of the original post was not precise and accurate enough for your full and complete understanding of the intent and meaning behind it. In this post, I have attempted to elucidate that intent and meaning to a degree which I hope is understandable to you.

You’re not understanding how CSAM detection works or is handled.

The grim reality is this: cameras exist, children exist, adults exist, the internet exists, and the second that a crime is committed, it is not added to an FBI database. If such as FBI database existed and IF it was useful (and not just a database of hashes for bit-perfect copies of CSAM) and IF it were updated when evidence of the crime surfaces.. IF all of those things are true, THEN it means there’s still likely a huge swath of CSAM material still out there, that could be posted at any time, and that would NOT be detected.

Again ask yourself, IF such a database existed, then WHY does reddit, twitter, facebook, hell, why doesn’t every or any site use it?

Pedophiles, instead of downvoting me, why not explain yourself?

They absolutely can, and every forum under the sun has tools and extensions to help with this. Fucking 4chan has code specifically dedicated to deal with CSAM. You have no clue what you're talking about.

Cool, name them and give me links then. I could not find such on the internet. There is software that tries to detect this, but even youtube’s algorithm is incorrectly flagging fully clothed 30 year old women as children.

Links or you’re talking out your ass.

Replace this with !technology@lemmy.world, or !selfhosted@lemmy.world, or !announcements@lemmy.world. "Oh no, users can't read the entire site" yes that is the definition of the end of the site.

Replace a site with CSAM and you’ll find it’s not a site you’ll want to go to in the first place. READ the original post where it was mentioned this is a stop-gap measure.

You're not seeing that this isn't a lemmyshitpost issue, it's an "any popular community on lemmy" issue. Snarkily taking potshots at lemmyshitpost as a community doesn't change it.

You’re.. offended that I had snark on the topic of lemmySHITPOST? surely, you are joking.

My point is not that this community is shit and that’s why this happened.

My point is that this is a community on a lemmy instance that was flooded with CSAM, and was shutdown because of the flood of CSAM.

It's not "not an option", it's the last resort. It's like saying that your only option to seeing a roach in your apartment is to burn the whole building down. Because doing it means you don't have a community anymore, and without communities the site has no purpose.

You do see how turning a community off and then on again isn’t the same thing as burning down a house (and unburning it again?)

You do realize that we’re talking about a literal crime against children vs your ability to see memes? Fuck off with your self-importance.