Olives @olives@qoto.org

@jdp23 @thisismissem As far as I know, the real child porn issue is far more recent. It was initially defederated by instances for containing objectionable content.

What's frustrating to me (about that instance, not you) is that other similar instances moderate such content better in a bid to offer a space for free artistic expression.

At the end of the day, I don't think these kinds of activities are good for any instance. It drags everyone down.

Some degree of collaboration might help here. Even if someone wants to have a different standard from another, it would be nice to have a baseline (i.e. real child porn should have no place anywhere).

While I suspect David is cherry-picking some of these posts (given the dates), it would be nice to see some of these other iffy accounts go away too.

The spammy ones which hint at engaging in illicit activity. I'm not sure if you've had to deal with them, however, a few instances have had to.

If they're appearing elsewhere (i.e. on the main fediverse), then that is quite a disturbing development. These accounts are also present on mainstream social media.

@thisismissem @jdp23 Ideally, the less of this content the better, although I tend to worry about the process (removing it at all costs).

That is one area where I haven't been very fond of the large platforms.

As for the statistics, both of them are potential. I don't think he looks at the hits for legal reasons, although I'd lean towards probably for the first one.

The second one is for an algorithm of poorer repute (it's far newer and fuzzier).

Hope that helps clarify what I mean.

@realcaseyrollins Explaining this in more detail is a pita but there is one specific instance (which has been specifically criticized for it's moderation lately) where they potentially found a tiny amount of it (although, we have to use the word potential, because these algorithms have false positive rates and the guy didn't look at the images for legal reasons).

But, it's tiny compared to the size of the instance. It's an exaggeration, especially when you consider that Big Tech is far worse.

So, maybe, they need to do better moderation or something, but it's clearly a hit piece.

@thisismissem @jdp23 I wrote about this before. I can go further, if you like.

This "study" is absolute garbage.

For instance, it scans around half a million posts to find 100 "potential" hits, and on sites which don't use one particular tool.

He then acts as if this faux pas is the "end of the world", even though mainstream social media is known to be objectively worse than the fediverse in sheer number of cases.

He also uses Google's algorithms which have been known to misclassify computer generated images. While that might not be to your liking, it is extremely misleading to suggest that this is that.

It is also not unlikely that some of these posts might be spammy / automation based and which hit a large number of hashtags.

Also, he cherry-picks one *particular site* (which has recently been under heavy fire from fediverse admins) when other similar sites, even with similar policies, aren't seen to be troublesome in the same way.

Also, some cherry-picked posts shown in screenshots are labelled as having been posted almost a year ago, and statistics are ever so conveniently missing on this.

Also, if he wanted to help admins with a pertinent issue, he could have reached out to them privately, rather than cherry-picking posts here and there to try to humiliate them.

Also, this very same person has previously made tweets in opposition to Facebook deploying end-to-end encryption in FB Messenger.

He also seems to want Facebook to essentially run the fediverse in the name of "saving the children", or to run every image through a Microsoft hosted service (a PRISM / NSA partner).

Problematically here, some of these services are not even based in the U.S., even if they were, services have First / Fourth Amendment rights, and the argument is in the quality of moderation / communications, not a lack of moderation.

It's not tenable to hold every service liable for a small amount of misuse, nor it is proportionate to do so, especially when someone's free expression is taken into consideration.

Also, a bad actor could just run their own dedicated service in violation of the law. If they're so determined to flout the law, they could well do so.

Also, these services are known to take actual child porn down, he admitted as much, often within hours, however, because it wasn't taken down "immediately", it becomes a "scandal".