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: @Striker@lemmy.world 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.

  • wanderingmagus
    6•9 months ago

    As another commenter posted below:

    But tools do exist. PhotoDNA by Microsoft. Although much more user-friendly implementation if you use Cloudflare, related links:

    As far as I am aware, every major site does use it in addition to manual vetting for any flagged “borderline” or “uncertain” results caught up in the filter.

    • 𝕯𝖎𝖕𝖘𝖍𝖎𝖙
      -7•9 months ago

      As far as I am aware, every major site does use it in addition to manual vetting for any flagged “borderline” or “uncertain” results caught up in the filter.

      I think this is where you could be wrong here. I appreciate the links, I’ll look into those in more detail. My best understanding is that these tools generate so many false-positives and false-negatives that it’s not worth using them. It may be a first line of defense until real humans get to see them, but my point is that humans are still needed. When humans are included because the system isn’t 100%, it means humans do the labor and as such, with limited time, humans need to determine when they can do the labor - sometimes shutting down a community is the best way to stop the flood while they clean up the mess.

      • RichardEnglish
        3•9 months ago

        This is just a matter of confirmation bias from your side now. You stubbornly refuse to accept factual information very helpfully delivered to you by users who have many better things to do than respond to your inquiries, and you dogmatically refuse to acknowledge that there are advanced and reliable automation tools available for the use case in question. And while you do all that, you belittle the other users in the community by referring to your supposedly superior knowledge and experience, however somehow failing to provide any data or secondary sources to back up your claims.