Researchers found CSAM within five minutes of searching Mastodon.

Mastodon, an alternative social network to Twitter, has a serious problem with child sexual abuse material according to researchers from Stanford University. In just two days, researchers found over 100 instances of known CSAM across over 325,000 posts on Mastodon. The researchers found hundreds of posts containing CSAM related hashtags and links pointing to CSAM trading and grooming of minors. One Mastodon server was even taken down for a period of time due to CSAM being posted. The researchers suggest that decentralized networks like Mastodon need to implement more robust moderation tools and reporting mechanisms to address the prevalence of CSAM.

  •  alyaza [they/she]   ( @alyaza@beehaw.org ) 
    16•10 months ago

    not surprised at all. this is a growing pain here too because this was previously a thing handled invisibly by platforms and federation makes it fall to individual sysadmins and whoever they have on staff. the tools for this stuff are, in general, not here yet–and as people have noted there are potential conflicts with some of the principles of federation introduced by those tools that can’t be totally handwaved.