Several months ago Beehaw received a report about CSAM (i.e. Child Sexual Abuse Material). As an admin, I had to investigate this in order to verify and take the next steps. This was the first time in my life that I had ever seen images such as these. Not to go into great detail, but the images were of a very young child performing sexual acts with an adult.

The explicit nature of these images, the gut-wrenching shock and horror, the disgust and helplessness were very overwhelming to me. Those images are burnt into my mind and I would love to get rid of them but I don’t know how or if it is possible. Maybe time will take them out of my mind.

In my strong opinion, Beehaw must seek a platform where NO ONE will ever have to see these types of images. A software platform that makes it nearly impossible for Beehaw to host, in any way, CSAM.

If the other admins want to give their opinions about this, then I am all ears.

I, simply, cannot move forward with the Beehaw project unless this is one of our top priorities when choosing where we are going to go.

  • flatbield@beehaw.orgEnglish
    39·
    1 year ago

    People keep talking about going to another platform. Personally I think a better idea would be to develop lemmy to deal with these issues. This must be a fediverse wide problem. So some discussion with other admins and the developers is probably the way to go on many of these things. Moreover you work with https://opencollective.com/, can they help. Beyond this, especially CSAM, there must be large funding agencies where one could get a grant to get some real professional programming put into this problem. Perhaps we could raise funds ourselves to help with this too.

    So frankly I would like to see Beehaw solve the issues with lemmy, rather then just move to some other platform that will have its own issues. The exception may be if the Beehaw people think that being a safe space creates too big a target that you have to leave the Threadiverse to be safe. That to me seems like letting the haters win. It is exactly what they want. My vote will always be to solve the threadiverse issues rather then run away.

    Just my feeling. There may be more short term practical issues that take precedence and frankly it is all up to you guys where you want to take this project.

      • flatbield@beehaw.orgEnglish
        3·
        1 year ago

        They will still need to have a developer set this up and presumably it should be added as an option to the main code base. I thought I heard the beehaw admins were not developers.

        There are a number of other issues that are driving the admins to dump lemmy. Same applies there.

      • thySatannic@beehaw.orgEnglish
        1·
        1 year ago

        Wait… why is no access to csam hashes a good thing? Wouldn’t it make it easier to detect if hashes were public?! I feel like I’m missing something here…

          • sarmale@lemmy.zipEnglish
            1·
            1 year ago

            Question, from what I saw it seems like every CSAM image ever is assigned a new hash. Isnt it unscalable to asign a separate hash for everything? does that mean that most CSAM images were detected before?