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.
Yeah, the key problem here is that any open forum, of any considerable popularity, since the dawn of the Internet has had to deal with shit like CSAM. You don’t see it elsewhere because of moderators. Doing the very job Op does. It’s just now, Op, you’re in the position. Some people can, and have decided to, deal with moderating the horrors. It may very well not be something you, Op, can do.
The thing is though, with traditional forums you get a LOT of controls for filtering out the kind of users who post such content. For instance, most forums won’t even let you post until you complete an interactive tutorial first (reading the rules and replying to a bot indicating you’ve understood them etc).
And then, you can have various levels of restrictions, eg, someone with less than 100 posts, or an account less than a month old may not be able to post any links or images etc. Also, you can have a trust system on some forums, where a mod can mark your account as trusted or verified, granting you further rights. You can even make it so that a manual moderator approval is required, before image posting rights are granted. In this instance, a mod would review your posting history and ensure that your posts genuinely contributed to the community and you’re unlikely to be a troll/karma farmer account etc.
So, short of accounts getting compromised/hacked, it’s very difficult to have this sort of stuff happen on a traditional forum.
I used to be a mod on a couple of popular forums back in the day, and I even ran my own community for a few years (using Invision Power Board), and never once have I had to deal with such content.
The fact is Lemmy is woefully inadequate in it’s current state to deal with such content, and there are definitely better options out there. My heart goes out to @Chris and the staff for having to deal with this stuff, and I really hope that this drives the Beehaw team to move away from Lemmy ASAP.
In the meantime, I reckon some drastic actions would need to be taken, such as disabling new user registrations and stopping all federation completely, until the new community is ready.