Dear Lemmy.world Community,
Recently posts were made to the AskLemmy community that go against not just our own policies but the basic ethics and morals of humanity as a whole. We acknowledge the gravity of the situation and the impact it may have had on our users. We want to assure you that we take this matter seriously and are committed to making significant improvements to prevent such incidents in the future. Considering I’m reluctant to say exactly what these horrific and repugnant images were, I’m sure you can probably guess what we’ve had to deal with and what some of our users unfortunately had to see. I’ll add the thing we’re talking about in spoilers to the end of the post to spare the hearts and minds of those who don’t know.
Our foremost priority is the safety and well-being of our community members. We understand the need for a swift and effective response to inappropriate content, and we recognize that our current systems, protocols and policies were not adequate. We are immediately taking immediate steps to strengthen our moderation and administrative teams, implementing additional tools, and building enhanced pathways to ensure a more robust and proactive approach to content moderation. Not to mention ensuring ways that these reports are seen more quickly and succinctly by mod and admin teams.
The first step will be limiting the image hosting sites that Lemmy.world will allow. We understand that this can cause frustration for some of our users but we also hope that you can understand the gravity of the situation and why we find it necessary. Not just to protect all of our users from seeing this but also to protect ourselves as a site. That being said we would like input in what image sites we will be whitelisting. While we run a filter over all images uploaded to Lemmy.world itself, this same filter doesn’t apply to other sites which leads to the necessity of us having to whitelist sites.
This is a community made by all of us, not just by the admins. Which leads to the second step. We will be looking for more moderators and community members that live in more diverse time zones. We recognize that at the moment it’s relatively heavily based between Europe and North America and want to strengthen other time zones to limit any delays as much as humanly possible in the future.
We understand that trust is essential, especially when dealing with something as awful as this, and we appreciate your patience as we work diligently to rectify this situation. Our goal is to create an environment where all users feel secure and respected and more importantly safe. Your feedback is crucial to us, and we encourage you to continue sharing your thoughts and concerns.
Every moment is an opportunity to learn and build, even the darkest ones.
Thank you for your understanding.
Sincerely,
The Lemmy.world Administration
spoiler
CSAM
What is the complete correct response for users to carry out if they spot CP?
Is just the report button on the post good enough? Is there some kind of higher level report for bigger-than-just-one-instance shit that threatens Lemmy as a whole? Should we call the FBI or some shit?
I haven’t come across any here, but if I do, I’d like to be able to aid in swift action against not only the post/account in question, but against the actual person running it.
In theory, reporting to the community moderators should be enough for users. It would then be the responsibility of thost moderators to report it to the instance admin, and then the admins responsibility to report it to the instance’s local law enforcement. They will then handle it appropriately.
However, sometimes community moderators are corrupt and will ignore reports and even ban users for reporting instance rule breaking content. In those cases, the user must report directly to the instance admin. As you can imagine, instance admins also can be corrupt and therefore the user must report to law enforcement.
But typically the first scenario is sufficient.
FYI: admins can see all reports. We currently have a tool running that scans for posts that are reported a lot, which will then notify people who can do something about it.
That seems too slow. Sibling comment by admin is reassuring here.
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You can always report casm to the FBI. You don’t need a mod’s guidance to do so.
Otherwise report and block.
Thanks admins, for taking this seriously.
Take care of yourselves as well. The images sound horrific.
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It’s safe to look things up!
Looking up the name of a crime does not mean that you’re doing that crime.
If you look up “bank robbery” that doesn’t make you guilty of bank robbery. It doesn’t even mean you’re trying to rob a bank, or even want to rob a bank. You could want to know how bank robbers work. You could be interested in being a bank guard or security engineer. You could be thinking of writing a heist story. You could want to know how safe your money is in a bank: do they get robbed all the time, or not?
Please, folks, don’t be afraid to look up words. That’s how you learn stuff.
To be fair… Also how you end up on a list.
I’ll just say illegal content involving minors.
I think lemmy should allow the moderators to allow only text as posts in their communities, this way people would not be able to troll with images or videos in text-only communities.
It’s not the best solution, but it’s perfect for AskLemmy.
Maybe this website could use karma as a way to allow people to post images and/or videos. 100 general karma for pictures, 200 for videos, I don’t know.
It’s just a matter of being creative to avoid this kind of content.
Especially make newer accounts text only, then there should be a new idea:
Image posts should not be federated for hours, maybe even a day. That would limit the spread, and provide local mods time to detect and remove content.
Content moderation is a never-ending battle It gets difficult to enforce the larger your user base becomes. I really hope we can keep this community safe
This is exactly what happened in various other “alt-reddit” sites that I was a part of. CSAM is uploaded as a tactic so that they can then contact the registrar of said website and claim that this site is hosting said CSAM.
It’s basically a sign of the site becoming more popular and pissing off the larger players.
Yeah we got some request like that and even for a announcement of ours. But we are planning to reduce them.
But how would they even get the CSAM in the first place? It’s not like everyone just has pictures of children being sexually abused?
We aren’t talking about upstanding citizens here
Might be some Pixelfed instances worth adding to the list. I’ve been using pixelfed.de which has its community guidelines here. Haven’t had to report anything yet but the process to do so is easy (went through the first couple clicks and hit cancel) and it looks like they’ve got a way to flag posts for site admin review, not just mods. Seems like a good system to keep that sort of content under control and, though I haven’t looked through their documentation and code to confirm, I would be surprised if they didn’t have something automated too.
Thank you for doing unpleasant work like this when it comes up.
There are a lot of PixelFed instances, this might get complicated.
I’d ask for https://miniature.photography but I’m one of only a dozen or so people who post there.
As another avenue to the report button, could Lemmy world have a new community LemmyWorldSupport_911 where anyone can post and it’s monitored by moderators or admins and they can promptly react?. (911 =American number for emergency services)
As part of the community rules, posting for stuff that doesn’t warrant a 911 reaction could result an penalties for anyone looking to “prank” it or abuse it’s intended purpose.
Some small communities only have one mod and that mod has to sleep.
I’m planning on making something like that, but am first focussing on improving the features we already have.
Lots of posts on the site come from files.catbox.moe and litterbox.catbox.moe – so I’d probably leave those whitelisted. He has terms against gore, csam, etc - but I don’t know if he has any kind of active filtration. It’s just a dude running a site; but often times it’s just really easy to upload there.
You guys should use this if possible: https://blog.cloudflare.com/the-csam-scanning-tool
Reached out:
Any response?
No, just bumped the email chain thanks to you :)
This can only be activated when you are in the USA! So a no go for us.
Catbox admin should be given one month to implement one of the several free CSAM filters available. If they have not done so in a month, it’s clear they’re not a safe resource.
Do we know the site they used to host the CSAM? Can’t we try and get whoever runs those servers to get this troll. Cause if they got one CSAM I bet they have a bunch. Maybe the FBI can raid them and help save some kids from these monsters.
From context clues it seems like they were hosted on Lemmy which is why they are now limiting image hosting.
Afaik after the first time this happened lemmy.world added content scanning, but from this post it sounds like the images were on an external hosting site and couldn’t be scanned.
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That being said we would like input in what image sites we will be whitelisting.
I’d like to suggest postimages(dot)org. I’ve been using that site since leaving reddit/imgur over the summer. They seem to be a good free service (although they do offer a premium tier) and according to their ‘about us’ section they’ve been operating for 20 years.
As one of the smaller instance admins who had to deal with the content… one of the image host was postimg.cc, so I’m not sure how fast they take down the content or if they run some kind of filtering.
Well that’s disturbing to hear. I figured if they’ve been around that long they’d have worked out effective tools to combat that stuff. But I suppose that might be a naive assumption, it must be a constant issue for image hosting services.
In !workingclasscalendar@lemmy.world we use stahmaxffcqankienulh.supabase.co for the images, could it be whitelisted?
Edit: community typo corrected
Damn, this broken record again? That sucks, and I’m sorry you had to see that.
Great contribution to the discussion
I dunno, I was just kind of disappointed that this kind of crap is still going on. Like, I was hoping for something more interesting, in a way, rather than the same old pathetic trolling.
Right next to the same old pathetic whining. Peas in a pod!
You’d fit in better back on reddit.
You’d think, but when I called out zero-content comments there, they reacted just like you are. Damned if I do, damned if I don’t 🤷♂️
I made a simple comment showing my support to the admin, which after this experience I’m sure is much needed. You’ve come in here behaving like an ass with zero effort yourself - you were wrong, my comments have had far more value to the discussion than anything you’ve brought. I don’t think the problem is the platform, I think the problem is you.
🤣🤣🤣
Damn, this broken record again? That sucks, and I’m sorry you had to see that.
Woah, check out that value loaded comment
my comments have had far more value to the discussion
🤣🤣🤣
You have also implemented a ban on any contribution from a VPN without announcing it. It has been very annoying to figure out.
Please do announce these kind of changes and limitations you implement publicly unless you absolutely cannot.
Because it’s related, shitposting@lemmyworld needs you! At least, far as I can tell. That’s what it says anyway.
A user from lemy.lol did the deed there about 4 hours ago and nothing happened since.We could use some tools to report a user directly instead of just blocking them. And if it doesn’t already exist, a common report log or something like that so that the mods and admins can work together on this.
Maybe an option across federated instances for admins to mark and hide posts for review, to at least get rid of the danger for regular users. Or an automated system that allows for multiple user reports and to hide a post for review.
