I’ve been on the fediverse for 8 years and today was my first run in with CSAM on another (otherwise legit) instance. A reminder to instance admins in the USA: you have a duty to report CSAM that lands on your instance to maintain any sort of criminal and civil indemnification. I hope whoever is responsible for that is brought to justice and the minor involved is helped.
Remember friends, strict liability laws are not to be trifled with.
@jerry Strict liability also means don't save the image for "evidence". If you delete and report, the authorities have ways of tracking down the evidence without you saving a copy. Remember, the post was created with material from the poster's computer. Deleting it from your instance won't destroy the evidence.
So, once again, delete and report.
@jerry there are libraries and binaries available to detect this sort if material. Wondering if its an option that can be turned on in mastodon on the admin side. If not, let me know and ill try to get familiar with the codebase and do a PR
Also, I don’t really care about your feelings about feds or police or law enforcement in this situation, so please save it.
For those wondering, the prescribed reporting mechanism in the US is through the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children here: https://report.cybertip.org/
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