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: @[email protected] 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.

  • @PugJesusEnglish
    82•1 year ago

    Genuine question: won’t they just move to spamming CSAM in other communities?

    • @givesomefucksEnglish
      51•1 year ago

      With how slow Lemmy moves anyways, it wouldn’t be hard to make everything “mod approved” if it’s a picture/video.

        • @Anonymousllama
          21•1 year ago

          This seems like the better approach. Let other sites who theoretically have image detection in place sort this out. We can just link to images hosted elsewhere

        • @devious
          8•1 year ago

          Yes, and only whitelist trusted image hosting services (that is ones that have the resources to deal with any illegal material).

          • @[email protected]
            1•1 year ago

            the problem is those sites can also misuse the same tools in a way that harms the privacy of it’s users. We shouldn’t resort to “hacks” to fix real problems, like using client scanning to break E2EE . One solution might be an open sourced and community maintained auto mod bot…

        • @assassin_aragorn
          1•1 year ago

          This seems like a really good solution for the time being.

        • @droans
          28•1 year ago

          Not-so-fun fact - the FBI has a hard limit on how long an individual agent can spend on CSAM related work. Any agent that does so is mandated to go to therapy afterwards.

          It’s not an easy task at all and does emotionally destroy you. There’s a reason why you can find dozens of different tools to automate the detection and reporting.

          • @CharlesDarwinEnglish
            2•1 year ago

            Yep. I know someone that does related work for a living, and there are definite time limits and so on for exactly the reasons you say. This kind of stuff leaves a mark on normal people.

      • @[email protected]
        3•1 year ago

        Or it could even just ask 50 random instance users to approve it. To escape this, >50% of accounts would have to be bots, which is unlikely.