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.

  •  🦊 OneRedFox 🦊   ( @OneRedFox@beehaw.org ) English
    19•10 months ago

    That’d be useless though, because first, it’d probably opt-in via configuration settings and even if it wasn’t, people would just fork and modify the code base or simply switch to another ActivityPub implementation.

    No it wouldn’t, because it’d still be significantly easier for instances to deal with CSAM content with this functionality built into the platforms. And I highly doubt there’s going to be a mass migration from any Fediverse platform that implements such a feature (though honestly I’d be down to defederate with any instance that takes serious issue with this).