Several months ago Beehaw received a report about CSAM (i.e. Child Sexual Abuse Material). As an admin, I had to investigate this in order to verify and take the next steps. This was the first time in my life that I had ever seen images such as these. Not to go into great detail, but the images were of a very young child performing sexual acts with an adult.
The explicit nature of these images, the gut-wrenching shock and horror, the disgust and helplessness were very overwhelming to me. Those images are burnt into my mind and I would love to get rid of them but I don’t know how or if it is possible. Maybe time will take them out of my mind.
In my strong opinion, Beehaw must seek a platform where NO ONE will ever have to see these types of images. A software platform that makes it nearly impossible for Beehaw to host, in any way, CSAM.
If the other admins want to give their opinions about this, then I am all ears.
I, simply, cannot move forward with the Beehaw project unless this is one of our top priorities when choosing where we are going to go.
A few observations/thoughts.
- There’s an awful lot of posts basically saying “this is a part of the job of moderation” and I don’t think that’s a particularly empathetic or useful observation. I’ve been on the internet and moderating for long enough to have been exposed to a lot of this, but this is not an inevitability. It’s an outcome of the system we’ve designed, of regulation and law that we have, and of not prioritizing this as a problem strongly enough. Being dismissive of an emotional experience and trauma isn’t particularly helpful.
- I’m not technical enough to explain this, but there are technical and legal issues with CSAM and the lemmy platform that we’ve ran into. For one, there’s no automated scanning tools for this kind of content. My understanding is that even implementing or creating said tools would be difficult because of the way pict-rs and rust are storing images in the first place. You cannot turn off image federation, at all. At best, you can clear the content, but doing so may violate CSAM laws depending on the country and reporting requirements. Someone on the technical side can explain better than I can.
- This isn’t a thread to discuss who’s to blame for CSAM. Please cease all discussions fighting about religion in the comments. I will be removing these comments.
You cannot turn off image federation, at all.
This is correct for Lemmy codebase; but a WIP by the pictrs dev and upstream Lemmy itself.
For now, Beehaw users can go to their settings via the website, and uncheck Show images if they’re so inclined. This should prevent all images in posts and comments from loading automatically for you. This does not translate to other instances, front-ends, or apps. Just the main website.
