8 ms·

Addressing the distribution of illicit sexual content by minors online

31 points by Shank 3y ago

superkuh 3y ago
I'm hesitant to even comment in threads on this topic it's so blown out of proportion in modern western society but some of the absurd things implied need to be addressed. >Telegram implicitly allows the trading of CSAM in private channels. You might as well say, "Private unmonitored housing and properties implicitly allow the trading of CSAM." So...what about addressing the distribution of illicit sexual content by minors offline in the same way? Are we going to start saying that all inhabited spaces should be monitored by government cameras? Should all mail/packages be opened and read/scanned? Why are online spaces different than offline spaces? I'd argue it's because the people writing crap like this depend on FUD and ignorance to push their agendas and they have a monetary incentive in applying FUD to all digital spaces. >Gift card swapping and exchanges, such as G2G, are a critical part of the monetization of SG-CSAM, allowing anonymous compensation for content. Going to ban cash then too? This article is shallow, ignorant self promotion of their dept. to get more funding. It's almost offensive how they're exploiting chldren's safety for this purpose.
- alexb_ 3y ago
  > Are we going to start saying that all inhabited spaces should be monitored by government cameras? "Americans under the age of 30 stand out when it comes to 1984‐ style in‐ home government surveillance cameras. 3 in 10 (29 percent) Americans under 30 favor 'the government installing surveillance cameras in every household' in order to 'reduce domestic violence, abuse, and other illegal activity,'" >Going to ban cash then too? "Interestingly, more than half (53 percent) of those who support the United States adopting a CBDC are also supportive of government surveillance cameras in homes, while only 2 percent of those who oppose a CBDC feel the same," https://reason.com/2023/06/07/why-are-so-many-younger-americans-okay-with-big-brother-monitoring-their-homes/ https://reason.com/2023/06/07/why-are-so-many-younger-americ... There might be a very worrying ideological shift in how people view their own privacy.
  - jackmott42 3y ago
    Or maybe young people have new values than we do and we should let them do their thing. Trust they will figure out, since they are not any less clever than we are.
    - jedberg 3y ago
      They may be clever but they lack wisdom of experience.
      - jonas21 3y ago
        Funny, that's what the older folks said about us when we were young.
        jedberg 3y ago
        And they were right then too. We also lacked wisdom.
        flangola7 3y ago
        Buy they weren't right. There's a reason boomers fall for obvious scams and fake Facebook posts.
        jedberg 3y ago
        Because they are elderly and their minds don't work as well. When we were kids our grandparents were being scammed via letters and phone calls. It has nothing to do with wisdom. Combining youthful new ideas tempered by the wisdom of experience is the ideal situation. The young person needs to accept that the older person may have already tried what they are suggesting, and the older person needs to accept that the younger person is capable of coming up with new interesting ideas that may be different than what their experience was.
    - commandlinefan 3y ago
- adammarples 3y ago
  Not to say you're wrong, but the initial answers to those questions are A) online spaces are pretty much only for trading information, unlike housing which is for sleeping, cooking, general use. B) gift card exchanges are pretty much only for suspect stuff, unlike cash which is much more generally used
  - superkuh 3y ago
    I live in online spaces (chat rooms, forums, etc) much more than I live in physical spaces (bars, city council meetings, etc) and I'm pushing 40. I imagine the younger generation's lives are even more in online spaces. The internet is no longer just silly geocities sites and hampsterdance. People live here. re: gift cards, yeah, gift cards are kind of lame. But attacking people's means to transfer value in the new digital living spaces is bad. Even if they're sometimes used for bad things.
- jedberg 3y ago
  I feel like we have an uphill battle here. Most people these days are ok with government surveillance in the name of "safety". Go to a local city council meeting where they are discussing automatic ticket cameras and facial recognition in public places. Most people are totally ok with that. As Ben Franklin said: Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.
  - throwway120385 3y ago
    If it's someone else's liberty to put me in danger, it's not really a liberty I want to defend. Speed cameras are a pretty good example of a surveillance technology that exists because a few self-centered people rip through residential areas at high speed. These people endanger everyone around them for their own sense of enjoyment and they should be fined for that. I agree with you about facial recognition but you're absolutely wrong to apply that principal to speed cameras. I'm all for privacy but as a user of the road you have a responsibility to use it safely, and speeders are not safe users of the road. They should get ticketed as much as possible.
    - jedberg 3y ago
      I agree with you in principle, but it's a fine line to walk. What about China's social credit score? It's all based on surveillance cameras that doc you points for breaking petty laws like jaywalking or littering. Yes, both are safety issues, but at what cost?
      - throwway120385 3y ago
        No it's really not a fine line. If you do something that harms someone else I think society should be able to curtail your liberty. Social credit is not really the same thing because when you speed you're increasing the likelihood of a devastating crash with another driver or a pedestrian. Having witnessed just such a thing a couple of weeks ago and having rendered aid, I can assure you there is very real harm. It is not something I will forget.
    - 3y ago
- mindslight 3y ago
  Pournelle's iron law of bureaucracy strikes again. "SG-CSAM". Talk about jumping the shark. I don't know if it's possible to demonstrate consent any harder than someone taking pictures of themselves. And to the point that minors might be doing something that they don't fully understand the implications of - that is an issue of age-appropriateness better addressed by parental guidance rather than federal felonies. And the current legal regime is basically the strongest possible set up for parents to avoid trying to engage with their children's activities.
  - amluto 3y ago
    To be fair, the article says, right at the beginning (emphasis added): > selling self-generated illicit sexual content There are at least three things going on here, done by three different entities: 1. Someone creates the material (the “SG-CSAM”). Let’s refrain from nitpicking about the A in CSAM there. 2. Someone operates (usually for profit!) the forum on which the material is transmitted. And some of these forums (accidentally?) help match buyers and sellers. 3. Someone buys (and I guess requests?) the material. I think it’s pretty clear that #3 is frowned upon and is quite illegal in most jurisdictions. The article is largely about #2. #1 is interesting. It’s not the same thing as the usual concept of sexting. The article does not argue that #1 is or should be a crime. I personally find online content recommendations systems to be deeply problematic, and the (emergent?) behavior of Instagram’s that the article discusses is rather distressing.
    - mindslight 3y ago
      > I personally find online content recommendations systems to be deeply problematic I'm right there with you, and have wished for these needless centralizers to crash and burn for decades now. But if we imagine that Instagram/Twitter/etc were out of the picture and these kids were selling their wares on decentralized P2P platforms - it would seem that the main thing that would change would be a lack of possibility to centrally study and police the behavior. In other words point #2 and thus the whole focus of the article would vanish, yet the overall behavior would still exist. Looking at it in those terms, it feels a bit ridiculous to be pinning blame on centralized platforms for having not fully controlled their users, when a fully efficient market just wouldn't have those centralized choke points in the first place.
- jstarfish 3y ago
  This is just whataboutism. The online aspect facilitates this shit around the entire fucking planet. Online abstracts a lot of the "creepiness." You're going to be less inclined to take Polaroids of yourself to hand off to some sweaty mouthbreather hanging out the back of a panel van than you will taking selfies to send to some faceless internet "boyfriend." As a quick example, here's a bunch of accounts of online grooming by anonymous females: https://lolcow.farm/ot/res/303056.html https://lolcow.farm/ot/res/303056.html I don't believe these sorts of stories anymore (too much Munchausen-by-Internet these days), but one common feature is: intended victims panicking once things got physical/"real." Being offline is a wake-up call. Nobody is mailing shit to anyone. That's not a Thing.
- secalex 3y ago
  Hi, I'm one of the authors of the report. You have pretty significantly misread it. > You might as well say, "Private unmonitored housing and properties implicitly allow the trading of CSAM." The issue with Telegram is that they explicitly disallow the posting of "illegal pornography" on public channels, but not privately. We are not calling for any additional monitoring, but private Telegram groups (which are not E2EE, btw) turn out to be a centerpiece of the commercialization of online child sexual abuse. > Going to ban cash then too? Nope. The paper makes no recommendations around banning gift card platforms, but we do think they might want to take steps when teenagers are publicly linking to their payment wallets next to a price list that includes bestiality videos or content created when the child was pre-pubescent. > This article is shallow, ignorant self promotion of their dept. to get more funding. It's almost offensive how they're exploiting chldren's safety for this purpose. Thanks for reading!
- amluto 3y ago
  > You might as well say, "Private unmonitored housing and properties implicitly allow the trading of CSAM." The article is IMO utterly failing to distinguish between what I think are two products that are very, very different. On the one hand, there’s Telegram, which is effectively a private, unmonitored space. On the other hand: > Instagram's popularity and user-friendly interface make it a preferred option for these activities. The platform's recommendation algorithms effectively advertise SG-CSAM: these algorithms analyze user behaviors and content consumption to suggest related content and accounts to follow. That is not a private, unmonitored space. I tend to think that service providers that recommend content should be responsible for their recommendations.
- zamfi 3y ago
  Anything can be slippery-sloped into being horrifying for privacy. If there were some kind of sensor that could detect, say, physical child abuse and nothing else—no video, no audio, just a binary yes/no is there physical child abuse (assuming an appropriate statutory definition of physical child abuse) you bet there would be lots of demand for that sensor -- and you could have reasonable conversations about false positives, risks of other data getting out, etc. The difference between Telegram private chats and "unmonitored housing" is that the former has that kind of sensor available, and the latter doesn't.
alexb_ 3y ago
How do they come up with hashing matches for SG-CSAM? You would think that said content would be made extremely recently and traded between private accounts - how does software like PhotoDNA even get that in their systems? Anyone knowledgeable about this?
- pseg134 3y ago
  They don’t. And how are you going to check? Just fund their next study and stop being creepy.
  - kanbara 3y ago
    whoa, why the ad hom? it’s a valid question. the tools that organisations and governments use to do justice are often invasive or at the behest of companies who allow access to private data
    - commandlinefan 3y ago
      I think OP (the one you're replying to) was being sarcastic - by it's very nature, there's no way at all to verify any of this. Some government bureaucracy publishes some list of hashes that you're supposed to validate against and remove anything that matches - but you and I have no way of knowing or ever checking what those hashes match to. If somebody up there had an ax to grind against, say, Alex Jones, they could add all his stuff to the "auto-remove-this" database and nobody would ever know.
      - jacquesm 3y ago
        That's really not how it works.
      - alexb_ 3y ago
        That absolutely wasn't the point of my comment at all.
        3y ago
beebmam 3y ago
>Gift card swapping and exchanges, such as G2G, are a critical part of the monetization of SG-CSAM, allowing anonymous compensation for content. It's always gift cards that enable this kind of terrible stuff. Do gift cards really add that much usefulness to a society that these downsides are worth it?
- thsksbd 3y ago
  [dead]
- alexb_ 3y ago
  You can say the same regarding cash.
  - thsksbd 3y ago
    [dead]
  - codedokode 3y ago
    You cannot send cash online anonymously unlike gift cards. But I am for anonymous money transfer so I am ok with gift cards.
- kkielhofner 3y ago
  There are multiple filings from publicly traded companies that show the wild benefits to corporations that issue gift cards. They essentially boil down to: - Revenue on the books now, almost pure profit until redeemed. - A substantial portion of them never get redeemed at all, and almost none get redeemed to their full “value”. Gift cards are a money printing machine for entities that issue them. Short of consumers shunning them completely they’re not going away.
  - bluefirebrand 3y ago
    The cultural taboo against just gifting cash directly but somehow gift cards got a pass is just insane honestly.
moralestapia 3y ago
>Twitter had an apparent and now resolved regression allowing CSAM to be posted to public profiles [...] Props to @elonmusk for making this one of their priorities when he let the sink in, and it was quickly resolved. An open question for the reader is "why was this ignored for almost a decade?".
- jacquesm 3y ago
  It wasn't and please don't believe a word Musk says unless you have some very hard evidence.
  - moralestapia 3y ago
    ??? Timeline is: * Twitter DID have this problem. * Musk buys Twitter. * After a couple months, Twitter does not have this problem anymore. Who do you think was responsible for that? A. The old engineering team who was 90% gone on a (laughable) tantrum? B. Ella Irwin, Head of Trust and Safety who had been there for years and resigned after Musk came in? C. Yoel Roth, Head of Integrity and Safety who had been there for years and resigned after Musk came in? D. Elon Musk I'm no Musk fanboy but the answer is evident.
    - jacquesm 3y ago
      Zero proof. If Twitter did have this problem to the degree you claim it should be trivial for you to prove this. I've been there for 15 years, never saw a single image that didn't pass muster and I've used it very intensively. So, unless you actively went and looked for it I am assuming you would not encounter it. But given the size of Twitter and the fact that any company that hosts images is going to be targeted you can assume that to the degree that it was going on before it is still going on today, only worse because Twitter has far less staff now to take care of these things. To portray the former Twitter staff as aiding and abetting whilst Elon rode in on his white horse and 'took care of things' is not in line with reality as I perceive it. And there is some proof that things have gotten worse, not better: https://9to5mac.com/2023/02/06/twitter-api/ https://9to5mac.com/2023/02/06/twitter-api/ (and many other articles besides).
throwaway092123 3y ago
Posting as throwaway because this is such a fraught topic. I'm sort of wondering about how you get to the term: "Self Generated Child Sexual Abuse Material". This seems near self-contradictory.
- thsksbd 3y ago
  [dead]
- nerdponx 3y ago
  I can imagine some scenarios involving grooming and other evil things, but to assume that teenagers acting on hormones is inherently self-imposed sexual abuse is a little extreme.
- maweaver 3y ago
  Well the item most clearly fitting that definition would be this: In other cases, minors are coerced into producing illicit sexual content, known as sextortion, with a dramatic increase in cases reported by the FBI in the past year.
- flangola7 3y ago
  They could be pressured into taking photos by another person such as an authority figure, which would make it real CSAM. But I'm confident that isn't the case for the overwhelming majority of "SG" consent. I sent and received countless nudes with my smartphone in highschool, of which 0% were nonconsensual.
  - nerdponx 3y ago
    Well, I for one was never quite so "popular" in that respect in high school. But I knew people who were, and it definitely raises some interesting questions about how we as a society ought to handle sexuality in young people. Plenty of sexually-charged activity happened on sites like Myspace and Stickam, most of it consensual, but not all of it healthy. For example, Person A is 17 and Person B is 19. A sends a sexy pic to B. Is B a predator extracting some manner of "unhealthy" consent, or is it just two teenagers having fun? What's the difference between unhealthy, and healthy but regrettable? It's often impossible to tell what's going on in a situation like that except on a case-by-case basis. Even if you were close friends with the people involved, you wouldn't always know what really happened until much later. I'm sure things are no different on Snapchat today. Furthermore, things get weird because teenagers tend to be irrational creatures. What happens if A lied about their age and they're actually 15? Let's also not forget that people mature at different rates: physically, mentally, and emotionally. Finally, this is all focused on the sharing of media. What if they meet up at a house party, get a little buzzed, and hook up? Perhaps there's a valid case to be made that, if you can stop even one instance of abuse, it's worth curtailing the freedoms of all teenagers. But I at least wish we wouldn't jump so far as to conclude that all "SG" sexual material is CSAM.
valrix 3y ago
So Stanford is now parroting talking points from the Cato institute? The source of the information can't be trusted at all, so this is just as crap. No, nearly 3/10 of Gen Z does NOT advocate for installation of cameras, but the 3/10 of the conservative Gen Z they asked totally could. But that's just sampling bias, nothing more.

31 points by Shank 3y ago

I'm hesitant to even comment in threads on this topic it's so blown out of proportion in modern western society but some of the absurd things implied need to be addressed. >Telegram implicitly allows the trading of CSAM in private channels. You might as well say, "Private unmonitored housing and properties implicitly allow the trading of CSAM." So...what about addressing the distribution of illicit sexual content by minors offline in the same way? Are we going to start saying that all inhabited spaces should be monitored by government cameras? Should all mail/packages be opened and read/scanned? Why are online spaces different than offline spaces? I'd argue it's because the people writing crap like this depend on FUD and ignorance to push their agendas and they have a monetary incentive in applying FUD to all digital spaces. >Gift card swapping and exchanges, such as G2G, are a critical part of the monetization of SG-CSAM, allowing anonymous compensation for content. Going to ban cash then too? This article is shallow, ignorant self promotion of their dept. to get more funding. It's almost offensive how they're exploiting chldren's safety for this purpose.

alexb_ 3y ago
> Are we going to start saying that all inhabited spaces should be monitored by government cameras? "Americans under the age of 30 stand out when it comes to 1984‐ style in‐ home government surveillance cameras. 3 in 10 (29 percent) Americans under 30 favor 'the government installing surveillance cameras in every household' in order to 'reduce domestic violence, abuse, and other illegal activity,'" >Going to ban cash then too? "Interestingly, more than half (53 percent) of those who support the United States adopting a CBDC are also supportive of government surveillance cameras in homes, while only 2 percent of those who oppose a CBDC feel the same," https://reason.com/2023/06/07/why-are-so-many-younger-americans-okay-with-big-brother-monitoring-their-homes/ https://reason.com/2023/06/07/why-are-so-many-younger-americ... There might be a very worrying ideological shift in how people view their own privacy.
- jackmott42 3y ago
  Or maybe young people have new values than we do and we should let them do their thing. Trust they will figure out, since they are not any less clever than we are.
  - jedberg 3y ago
    They may be clever but they lack wisdom of experience.
    - jonas21 3y ago
      Funny, that's what the older folks said about us when we were young.
      - jedberg 3y ago
        And they were right then too. We also lacked wisdom.
        flangola7 3y ago
        Buy they weren't right. There's a reason boomers fall for obvious scams and fake Facebook posts.
        jedberg 3y ago
        Because they are elderly and their minds don't work as well. When we were kids our grandparents were being scammed via letters and phone calls. It has nothing to do with wisdom. Combining youthful new ideas tempered by the wisdom of experience is the ideal situation. The young person needs to accept that the older person may have already tried what they are suggesting, and the older person needs to accept that the younger person is capable of coming up with new interesting ideas that may be different than what their experience was.
  - commandlinefan 3y ago
adammarples 3y ago
Not to say you're wrong, but the initial answers to those questions are A) online spaces are pretty much only for trading information, unlike housing which is for sleeping, cooking, general use. B) gift card exchanges are pretty much only for suspect stuff, unlike cash which is much more generally used
- superkuh 3y ago
  I live in online spaces (chat rooms, forums, etc) much more than I live in physical spaces (bars, city council meetings, etc) and I'm pushing 40. I imagine the younger generation's lives are even more in online spaces. The internet is no longer just silly geocities sites and hampsterdance. People live here. re: gift cards, yeah, gift cards are kind of lame. But attacking people's means to transfer value in the new digital living spaces is bad. Even if they're sometimes used for bad things.
jedberg 3y ago
I feel like we have an uphill battle here. Most people these days are ok with government surveillance in the name of "safety". Go to a local city council meeting where they are discussing automatic ticket cameras and facial recognition in public places. Most people are totally ok with that. As Ben Franklin said: Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.
- throwway120385 3y ago
  If it's someone else's liberty to put me in danger, it's not really a liberty I want to defend. Speed cameras are a pretty good example of a surveillance technology that exists because a few self-centered people rip through residential areas at high speed. These people endanger everyone around them for their own sense of enjoyment and they should be fined for that. I agree with you about facial recognition but you're absolutely wrong to apply that principal to speed cameras. I'm all for privacy but as a user of the road you have a responsibility to use it safely, and speeders are not safe users of the road. They should get ticketed as much as possible.
  - jedberg 3y ago
    I agree with you in principle, but it's a fine line to walk. What about China's social credit score? It's all based on surveillance cameras that doc you points for breaking petty laws like jaywalking or littering. Yes, both are safety issues, but at what cost?
    - throwway120385 3y ago
      No it's really not a fine line. If you do something that harms someone else I think society should be able to curtail your liberty. Social credit is not really the same thing because when you speed you're increasing the likelihood of a devastating crash with another driver or a pedestrian. Having witnessed just such a thing a couple of weeks ago and having rendered aid, I can assure you there is very real harm. It is not something I will forget.
  - 3y ago
mindslight 3y ago
Pournelle's iron law of bureaucracy strikes again. "SG-CSAM". Talk about jumping the shark. I don't know if it's possible to demonstrate consent any harder than someone taking pictures of themselves. And to the point that minors might be doing something that they don't fully understand the implications of - that is an issue of age-appropriateness better addressed by parental guidance rather than federal felonies. And the current legal regime is basically the strongest possible set up for parents to avoid trying to engage with their children's activities.
- amluto 3y ago
  To be fair, the article says, right at the beginning (emphasis added): > selling self-generated illicit sexual content There are at least three things going on here, done by three different entities: 1. Someone creates the material (the “SG-CSAM”). Let’s refrain from nitpicking about the A in CSAM there. 2. Someone operates (usually for profit!) the forum on which the material is transmitted. And some of these forums (accidentally?) help match buyers and sellers. 3. Someone buys (and I guess requests?) the material. I think it’s pretty clear that #3 is frowned upon and is quite illegal in most jurisdictions. The article is largely about #2. #1 is interesting. It’s not the same thing as the usual concept of sexting. The article does not argue that #1 is or should be a crime. I personally find online content recommendations systems to be deeply problematic, and the (emergent?) behavior of Instagram’s that the article discusses is rather distressing.
  - mindslight 3y ago
    > I personally find online content recommendations systems to be deeply problematic I'm right there with you, and have wished for these needless centralizers to crash and burn for decades now. But if we imagine that Instagram/Twitter/etc were out of the picture and these kids were selling their wares on decentralized P2P platforms - it would seem that the main thing that would change would be a lack of possibility to centrally study and police the behavior. In other words point #2 and thus the whole focus of the article would vanish, yet the overall behavior would still exist. Looking at it in those terms, it feels a bit ridiculous to be pinning blame on centralized platforms for having not fully controlled their users, when a fully efficient market just wouldn't have those centralized choke points in the first place.
jstarfish 3y ago
This is just whataboutism. The online aspect facilitates this shit around the entire fucking planet. Online abstracts a lot of the "creepiness." You're going to be less inclined to take Polaroids of yourself to hand off to some sweaty mouthbreather hanging out the back of a panel van than you will taking selfies to send to some faceless internet "boyfriend." As a quick example, here's a bunch of accounts of online grooming by anonymous females: https://lolcow.farm/ot/res/303056.html https://lolcow.farm/ot/res/303056.html I don't believe these sorts of stories anymore (too much Munchausen-by-Internet these days), but one common feature is: intended victims panicking once things got physical/"real." Being offline is a wake-up call. Nobody is mailing shit to anyone. That's not a Thing.
secalex 3y ago
Hi, I'm one of the authors of the report. You have pretty significantly misread it. > You might as well say, "Private unmonitored housing and properties implicitly allow the trading of CSAM." The issue with Telegram is that they explicitly disallow the posting of "illegal pornography" on public channels, but not privately. We are not calling for any additional monitoring, but private Telegram groups (which are not E2EE, btw) turn out to be a centerpiece of the commercialization of online child sexual abuse. > Going to ban cash then too? Nope. The paper makes no recommendations around banning gift card platforms, but we do think they might want to take steps when teenagers are publicly linking to their payment wallets next to a price list that includes bestiality videos or content created when the child was pre-pubescent. > This article is shallow, ignorant self promotion of their dept. to get more funding. It's almost offensive how they're exploiting chldren's safety for this purpose. Thanks for reading!
amluto 3y ago
> You might as well say, "Private unmonitored housing and properties implicitly allow the trading of CSAM." The article is IMO utterly failing to distinguish between what I think are two products that are very, very different. On the one hand, there’s Telegram, which is effectively a private, unmonitored space. On the other hand: > Instagram's popularity and user-friendly interface make it a preferred option for these activities. The platform's recommendation algorithms effectively advertise SG-CSAM: these algorithms analyze user behaviors and content consumption to suggest related content and accounts to follow. That is not a private, unmonitored space. I tend to think that service providers that recommend content should be responsible for their recommendations.
zamfi 3y ago
Anything can be slippery-sloped into being horrifying for privacy. If there were some kind of sensor that could detect, say, physical child abuse and nothing else—no video, no audio, just a binary yes/no is there physical child abuse (assuming an appropriate statutory definition of physical child abuse) you bet there would be lots of demand for that sensor -- and you could have reasonable conversations about false positives, risks of other data getting out, etc. The difference between Telegram private chats and "unmonitored housing" is that the former has that kind of sensor available, and the latter doesn't.

alexb_ 3y ago

How do they come up with hashing matches for SG-CSAM? You would think that said content would be made extremely recently and traded between private accounts - how does software like PhotoDNA even get that in their systems? Anyone knowledgeable about this?

pseg134 3y ago
They don’t. And how are you going to check? Just fund their next study and stop being creepy.
- kanbara 3y ago
  whoa, why the ad hom? it’s a valid question. the tools that organisations and governments use to do justice are often invasive or at the behest of companies who allow access to private data
  - commandlinefan 3y ago
    I think OP (the one you're replying to) was being sarcastic - by it's very nature, there's no way at all to verify any of this. Some government bureaucracy publishes some list of hashes that you're supposed to validate against and remove anything that matches - but you and I have no way of knowing or ever checking what those hashes match to. If somebody up there had an ax to grind against, say, Alex Jones, they could add all his stuff to the "auto-remove-this" database and nobody would ever know.
    - jacquesm 3y ago
      That's really not how it works.
    - alexb_ 3y ago
      That absolutely wasn't the point of my comment at all.
      - 3y ago

beebmam 3y ago

>Gift card swapping and exchanges, such as G2G, are a critical part of the monetization of SG-CSAM, allowing anonymous compensation for content. It's always gift cards that enable this kind of terrible stuff. Do gift cards really add that much usefulness to a society that these downsides are worth it?

thsksbd 3y ago
[dead]
alexb_ 3y ago
You can say the same regarding cash.
- thsksbd 3y ago
  [dead]
- codedokode 3y ago
  You cannot send cash online anonymously unlike gift cards. But I am for anonymous money transfer so I am ok with gift cards.
kkielhofner 3y ago
There are multiple filings from publicly traded companies that show the wild benefits to corporations that issue gift cards. They essentially boil down to: - Revenue on the books now, almost pure profit until redeemed. - A substantial portion of them never get redeemed at all, and almost none get redeemed to their full “value”. Gift cards are a money printing machine for entities that issue them. Short of consumers shunning them completely they’re not going away.
- bluefirebrand 3y ago
  The cultural taboo against just gifting cash directly but somehow gift cards got a pass is just insane honestly.

moralestapia 3y ago

>Twitter had an apparent and now resolved regression allowing CSAM to be posted to public profiles [...] Props to @elonmusk for making this one of their priorities when he let the sink in, and it was quickly resolved. An open question for the reader is "why was this ignored for almost a decade?".

jacquesm 3y ago
It wasn't and please don't believe a word Musk says unless you have some very hard evidence.
- moralestapia 3y ago
  ??? Timeline is: * Twitter DID have this problem. * Musk buys Twitter. * After a couple months, Twitter does not have this problem anymore. Who do you think was responsible for that? A. The old engineering team who was 90% gone on a (laughable) tantrum? B. Ella Irwin, Head of Trust and Safety who had been there for years and resigned after Musk came in? C. Yoel Roth, Head of Integrity and Safety who had been there for years and resigned after Musk came in? D. Elon Musk I'm no Musk fanboy but the answer is evident.
  - jacquesm 3y ago
    Zero proof. If Twitter did have this problem to the degree you claim it should be trivial for you to prove this. I've been there for 15 years, never saw a single image that didn't pass muster and I've used it very intensively. So, unless you actively went and looked for it I am assuming you would not encounter it. But given the size of Twitter and the fact that any company that hosts images is going to be targeted you can assume that to the degree that it was going on before it is still going on today, only worse because Twitter has far less staff now to take care of these things. To portray the former Twitter staff as aiding and abetting whilst Elon rode in on his white horse and 'took care of things' is not in line with reality as I perceive it. And there is some proof that things have gotten worse, not better: https://9to5mac.com/2023/02/06/twitter-api/ https://9to5mac.com/2023/02/06/twitter-api/ (and many other articles besides).

throwaway092123 3y ago

Posting as throwaway because this is such a fraught topic. I'm sort of wondering about how you get to the term: "Self Generated Child Sexual Abuse Material". This seems near self-contradictory.

thsksbd 3y ago
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nerdponx 3y ago
I can imagine some scenarios involving grooming and other evil things, but to assume that teenagers acting on hormones is inherently self-imposed sexual abuse is a little extreme.
maweaver 3y ago
Well the item most clearly fitting that definition would be this: In other cases, minors are coerced into producing illicit sexual content, known as sextortion, with a dramatic increase in cases reported by the FBI in the past year.
flangola7 3y ago
They could be pressured into taking photos by another person such as an authority figure, which would make it real CSAM. But I'm confident that isn't the case for the overwhelming majority of "SG" consent. I sent and received countless nudes with my smartphone in highschool, of which 0% were nonconsensual.
- nerdponx 3y ago
  Well, I for one was never quite so "popular" in that respect in high school. But I knew people who were, and it definitely raises some interesting questions about how we as a society ought to handle sexuality in young people. Plenty of sexually-charged activity happened on sites like Myspace and Stickam, most of it consensual, but not all of it healthy. For example, Person A is 17 and Person B is 19. A sends a sexy pic to B. Is B a predator extracting some manner of "unhealthy" consent, or is it just two teenagers having fun? What's the difference between unhealthy, and healthy but regrettable? It's often impossible to tell what's going on in a situation like that except on a case-by-case basis. Even if you were close friends with the people involved, you wouldn't always know what really happened until much later. I'm sure things are no different on Snapchat today. Furthermore, things get weird because teenagers tend to be irrational creatures. What happens if A lied about their age and they're actually 15? Let's also not forget that people mature at different rates: physically, mentally, and emotionally. Finally, this is all focused on the sharing of media. What if they meet up at a house party, get a little buzzed, and hook up? Perhaps there's a valid case to be made that, if you can stop even one instance of abuse, it's worth curtailing the freedoms of all teenagers. But I at least wish we wouldn't jump so far as to conclude that all "SG" sexual material is CSAM.

valrix 3y ago

So Stanford is now parroting talking points from the Cato institute? The source of the information can't be trusted at all, so this is just as crap. No, nearly 3/10 of Gen Z does NOT advocate for installation of cameras, but the 3/10 of the conservative Gen Z they asked totally could. But that's just sampling bias, nothing more.