Lemmyshitpost community closed until further notice

Hello everyone,

We unfortunately have to close the !lemmyshitpost community for the time being. We have been fighting the CSAM (Child Sexual Assault Material) posts all day but there is nothing we can do because they will just post from another instance since we changed our registration policy.

We keep working on a solution, we have a few things in the works but that won’t help us now.

Thank you for your understanding and apologies to our users, moderators and admins of other instances who had to deal with this.

Edit: @Striker the moderator of the affected community made a post apologizing for what happened. But this could not be stopped even with 10 moderators. And if it wasn’t his community it would have been another one. And it is clear this could happen on any instance.

But we will not give up. We are lucky to have a very dedicated team and we can hopefully make an announcement about what’s next very soon.

Edit 2: removed that bit about the moderator tools. That came out a bit harsher than how we meant it. It’s been a long day and having to deal with this kind of stuff got some of us a bit salty to say the least. Remember we also had to deal with people posting scat not too long ago so this isn’t the first time we felt helpless. Anyway, I hope we can announce something more positive soon.

nogrub,

good thing you did it the way you did nobody should have to look at awful stuff like this. keep your mind healthy nobody should have to deal with that

pewgar_seemsimandroid,

hah other instances will just recreate it

godless,
@godless@lemmy.world avatar

Fucking bastards. I don’t even know what beef they have with the community and why, but using THAT method to get them to shut down is nothing short of despicable. What absolute scum.

aceshigh,
@aceshigh@lemmy.world avatar

jealousy is a powerful emotion.

MajorHavoc,

I would not be shocked to learn this was being organized or funded by one or several of the major stockholders of current popular social media sites. (Speaking of fucking bastards.)

chraqs,

That is awful.

douglasg14b,
@douglasg14b@lemmy.world avatar

Isn’t there semi-automated tools that can detect CP?

Those might be an automated solution to at least cut down on the volume.

The same can go for banned images. These can automatically be identified with perceptual hashing, and automatically be denied when uploading.

Rolive,

The one thing AI would be good for… Humans shouldn’t have to see that shit.

Zeth0s,

Humans have to see that shit to train ai. That is why it is so difficult to find a model for that

kylian0087,

Honestly what a shit job you must have when working with that stuff. it is sad and a difficult thing.

NuclearArmWrestling,

A lot of the mods for big providers like FB require counseling after the horrible crap they see (not just CSAM, but also terrible things like animal abuse and mutilation, etc). Unfortunately, the big companies have outsourced much of it to other countries where there aren’t as many worker protections, traumatizing people and replacing them when they can’t meet some arbitrary metric.

shotgun_crab,

You’d need data to train an AI… Yeah that won’t happen

HikingVet,

IIRC there is a database that law enforcement uses during investigations to obtain access to these groups (they obtain consent from the victims to use the material).

joshuaacasey,
@joshuaacasey@lemmy.world avatar

the one thing you do not do with this shit is use AI (too much risk of false positives. I mean, I remember Facebook’s AI thought that an onion was nudity (probably thought it was a boob).

But tools do exist. PhotoDNA by Microsoft. Although much more user-friendly implementation if you use Cloudflare, related links:

Zeus,

the “risk” of false positives comes down to the consequence. if the consequence is being stuck in the slammer, don’t use ai. if the consequence is you can’t upload the image unless you manually appeal, or even maybe have to use an external image host; i think ai is fine

edit: ah bugger, wrong acct. ah well(please tag @zeus if you want me to see your response)

cley_faye,

There are. They are easy to abuse too, and cause a lot of other issues, along with not being 100% efficient. Apple tried that and was met with appropriate backlash. There are many issues : training data is one, but also it is impossible to rule out false positive/false negative automatically, and it is relatively easy (for now) to doctor pictures to pass through. A nefarious actor could easily bypass these. There’s also the case of false positive that can very quickly push some bystander under the bus, and knowing how moderate and understanding internet is… yup.

It is also risky, as this will effectively be a censorship tool; they are often setup in the pretense of “helping”, but once they’re up, it all depends on who steers it. Such responsibility can hardly fall on moderators/admin of lemmy, and it would also be problematic to handle them on a more nationwide (or more) level, since it would give incredible censorship power to authorities.

And a bigger bottom-line is that working hard to prevent these kind of content from reaching us, while it have an obvious upside, also does nothing in respect to the actual issue of the content existing and being created.

tl;dr: there is no easy solution that doesn’t come with one hell of a string attached to it.

On the other hand, it is quite hard to hide yourself from authorities online, and this kind of behavior (I hope, somehow, that the people that posted these only do so to be toxic to lemmy and not to actually disseminate content) should lead to some action from authorities, getting to actual people and subsequently moving upward the stream to actually act on it. Hopefully.

CookieJarObserver,
@CookieJarObserver@sh.itjust.works avatar

We should just track these people and send them the police directly, way more efficient than Symptom control.

HelloHotel,
@HelloHotel@lemmy.world avatar

Apple is building the tech, too they arent sharing it with the world for humanitarian purposes like this.

HelloHotel,
@HelloHotel@lemmy.world avatar

Apple willingly made that tech, however its designed to get the individual in trouble by looking at the photos from their personal device and snitching on its owner (leaking them in the process). They can easly adapt it into a tool for social media, but it goes against their beleafs.

guts,

PhotoDNA.

HawlSera,

The only word I can think of is “disgusting”, and that is far from strong enough.

Hackerman_uwu,

It is absolutely ghastly to realise that something like this was inevitable.

Thank you for being willing to deal with this. Godspeed.

xaon_rider92,

Thank you for all your work. It sucks that there are people who would do shit like this. Please don’t forget to take care of yourselves as well.

Chickenstalker,

My guess is butthurt trumpolinas whose memes could not gain traction and were shat upon.

elbarto777,

Eh. Some trolls do it for the lulz.

UnfortunateShort,

It’s so funny to me that there are peopld who are legit willing to risc a life in jail for trolling some people that may or may not disagree with them…

elbarto777,

Those people either have developmental challenges, if they’re adults (e.g. they belong to a mental hospital), or are edgy teens.

Dangerous tiktok challenges can say quite a lot about the subject.

HelloHotel,
@HelloHotel@lemmy.world avatar

Its probably a lot of diffrent people with their own unique false flags. Saw sombody waving a false communist flag, disrupting lemmy.world, accedentially attacked my own people in my annoyance.

bigkix,

Saw that one post (unfortunately). How come people who spread content like that in the “open” internet (not darkweb) don’t get arrested?

Kolanaki,
@Kolanaki@yiffit.net avatar

They would need to be reported with some credible and actionable evidence to the appropriate authorities. Just having the material they are posting isn’t enough. If they are taking precautions, it’s gonna be hard to figure out who and where they are from what the site would be able to log while they use it.

T156,

The legal system also takes time. The material could be disseminated fairly widely before an investigation would be started and completed. Especially with bots. Hundreds of bots are a lot faster than a team of humans.

pewgar_seemsimandroid,

GET OUT THE 4CHAN

elbarto777,

I hardly know anything about the subject of the dark web, but my take is, they operate from the dark web. They open temporary email accounts, then free computing or free hosting accounts, or are part of a bot net. The rest is relatively easy.

Law enforcement monitors the dark web, though, so if they make a stupid move (and they will), they will eventually get caught.

GuyDudeman,
@GuyDudeman@lemmy.world avatar

God I hope they get caught.

ricdeh,
@ricdeh@lemmy.world avatar

Will they though? Not necessarily, as no police department can do anything about state terrorism. If Russian hackers attack Western infrastructure, the FBI or whoever cannot go there and arrest them.

elbarto777,

I was talking about domestic crimes. But sure, you’re correct, unless it’s considered an act of war.

UnfortunateShort,

Just had like 90 (probably unrelated) arrests in one state in Germany. There are just way too man to arrest them all.

cubedsteaks,

I’m in the US and grew up here. My dad is a piece of shit pedophile who exploited me for several websites. None on darkweb but at the time, they didn’t really need to be.

Word got out and cops came to interrogate ME the person who was the victim in this situation. They also blamed me for what was going on (how? I don’t know, I was a teen who was being exploited underage but cops gonna cop) and they basically intimidated me into dropping out of school and taking the blame for my dad because the other option was that I be sent to a home as an orphan.

My dad got away with a slap on the wrist basically because cops in the US don’t do their job. They even cover for people. I ended up literally running away from home.

I think the issue is that people see this topic as all outrage - I mean, look at the comments here. Everyone is so mad they can’t even think straight. And I’m personally noticing that some of the outrage doesn’t even seem to be directed at the right people. Like everyone is super willing to shit on pedos left and right but I wonder if they would be willing to listen to someone who has been knee deep in this shit before and were innocent because they were being exploited by a pedophile.

Like a lot of comments say “disgusting” but then don’t say anything about how the person that it happened to must feel. Everyone’s upset they saw something but they don’t seem to be upset about who they saw it happening to.

Like I wonder who they think hurts more in this situation. The person who was made into a victim or the people who just saw it happen.

sunaurus,
@sunaurus@lemm.ee avatar

I’m sorry for your experience and I hope you’re doing better now. It’s very important to note that the major victims in this “attack” are absolutely the abused children. That’s exactly what makes this the most disgusting attack on Lemmy to date.

OsrsNeedsF2P,

First, thank you for your comment and I’m glad you posted it.

Second, I want to take a moment to clarify what people mean when they say “disgusting” - at least for me - it’s not a matter of “oh my god I saw something awful, my day is ruined, that’s disgusting”, it’s instead “oh my god I can’t believe that happened, that’s disgusting”. The nuance is that the “disgust” is against the people who allowed it to happen - The perpetrators, the cops who did nothing, the people who shared it, and the world that allowed it to happen.

Again, thank you for sharing your story, it’s a great reminder of what the actual issue at hand is. Much love!

cubedsteaks,

Exactly, that was my point. People are upset with the perpetrators - and no one really seems to be empathizing with the victims.

HelloHotel,
@HelloHotel@lemmy.world avatar

Darkweb as a proxy to the clear web. Its a ligitimate tool used for horriffic things somtimes. Tor is a huge double edge sword.

If these people were distrobuting, the most open stratigy would hide in plain sight. Like say the dark corners of some well known mainstream, but negligent social media site. These people are here to terrorize.

Draconic_NEO,
@Draconic_NEO@lemmy.world avatar

Usually they do, eventually (even on the darkweb).

Though it does take time to pin them down sometimes because many criminals take steps to hide their identities and make it very difficult.

Lots of people though are caught easily and quickly, hopefully these guys will be like that and will get caught quickly and put away for good.

quitenormal,

I had no idea that this was going on. I expect that, like me, most people are horrified.

HelloHotel,
@HelloHotel@lemmy.world avatar

These bad actors are wierd, most who spread CSAM dont want to be known about by the masses, these posts are implied to be attempting to be visible as their posting in a well known community. It feels Sus.

Keep up the good work keeping us safe, keep your therapist and/or support network in the loop about this so they can catch you if you fall.

pewgar_seemsimandroid,

they forget about 4chan

spookex,

I mean, this is just pulling out the old Reddit playbook.

AHS was known for mass posting CSAM on subreddits that they wanted to be banned by the admins.

Bit different here, but the principle of killing the place is there. CSAM spammed on L.W -> CSAM spreads to other instances because federation and sync -> other instances obviously don’t want CSAM on them and defederate from L.W -> L.W dies because nobody is federated with them

xhieron,
@xhieron@lemmy.world avatar

This was my first thought as well. I hate that being so cynical is my reaction now, but this is just DDOS by another method. The point is to make the platform unusable so people will go somewhere else. CSAM is just the weapon. It’s doubly vile because it’s just going to become ammunition in the war against federation altogether. The stakes are high enough that the institutional players have plenty of cash, no ethics, and no accountability, and I wouldn’t at all put it past any social media alternative to employ these kinds of tactics to kill the fediverse before it can gain a foothold. And (at the risk of getting too conspiratorial) that’s not even considering governments and ordinary black hats.

DarthBueller,

AHS? American Home Shield? American Horror Story?

spookex,

Anti Hate Subreddits

Librechad,

What if the mods are just keeping the CSAM and getting away with it? We don’t even know these people. This lowkey just looks bad on both sides.

iquanyin,
@iquanyin@lemmy.world avatar

no it doesn’t. what if facebook is paying you to come here and undermine trust? it’s more likely than your speculation.

KrisND,

Sincerely appreciate your work to better this instance and the fediverse in it’s entirely.

LillyPip,

Thank you for your work to keep that despicable trash out of our feeds. Sorry you have to deal with it. Fuck those losers.

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