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.

  • lerba@beehaw.org
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    1 year ago

    This post seems highly reactive to me. I’m sorry to hear of you being exposed to such disturbing material, but I fail to see at true connection of that happening and using Lemmy as the platform. I absolutely agree that nobody should have to experience what you did, but I disagree with the platform change proposition.

    • potterman28wxcv@beehaw.org
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      1 year ago

      I don’t know of any software platform where that would not happen.

      Even with a text-only platform people can still post URLs to unsafe content.

      I think OP is referring to some kind of automated scanner but I’m not sure there are publicly available ones. I guess using them would come at a cost - either computational or $$. And even so, there can be false positives so you would probably still have to check the report anyway someday.