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> The unprecedented arrest of founder Pavel Durov to force this on the company further confirms what this is and what it isn't: it is not about child safety. W

> The unprecedented arrest of founder Pavel Durov to force this on the company further confirms what this is and what it isn't: it is not about child safety. What? He was arrested for running a service that was hosting CSAM (illegal, and correctly so by most people's ethical systems) and not giving reasonable effort to take it down (illegal, and correctly so by most people's ethical systems). I think you're just reflexively anti-moderation because it's the chic thing these days, but you're kind of ideology-ing yourself into an awkward corner on this particular case.

encom 2y ago
>awkward corner Is that awkward corner "let the government (pick any) censor your platform, or you're a pdf file"? It's all so tiresome.
- llamaimperative 2y ago
  No, but hosting CSAM and not moderating it does make you liable of certain crimes in many jurisdictions!
moralestapia 2y ago
To @superkuh's point, I would believe that part of his bail negotiation package was to make Telegram more "transparent" for governments.
mapt 2y ago
If you are defending digital free speech and privacy, against the wishes of governments, you are defending the opportunity to spread CSAM. Necessarily. Data is data. You may not like that, but you have to choose which is your higher priority: A world that contains platforms which permit digital free speech & privacy despite the preferences of government, or a world with a little less CSAM. We could always try and prosecute the extraordinarily rare child sexual abusor who is highly social (spreading/selling evidence against them), just like we try and prosecute terrorism or left-wing social activism: With an abundance of enthusiastic government infiltrators and investigators eager to build a case against somebody, rather than with prescriptive automatic filters or with mandatory enthusiastic private-sector infiltrators.
- jazzyjackson 2y ago
  "If you're defending the right for women to leave the household and work in co-ed spaces, you are defending the opportunity to rape." This is what you sound like to me.
  - mapt 2y ago
    There's lots of rape inside households. Most, even. The only prescriptive, airtight solution is surgically modifying males so that they can't rape any more. Not a fan, but I suppose that depends on how certain we have to be that rape isn't occurring. How important is it to you? We could do a halfway thing where we install cameras in every room of every house to gather evidence against rapists. The latter is what we do with most digital communication platforms right now in order to try and track down CSAM. Durov got arrested for not paying people specifically to watch those cameras and call the police.
    - llamaimperative 2y ago
      Uhhh no, he got arrested for not taking down content even after other people (including nation states) reported it to him. From the indictment: > JUNALCO's cybercrime unit (J3) was informed of Telegram's near-total lack of response to judicial requests, particularly by OFMIN (National Office for Minors). Other French investigation services, prosecutors, and Eurojust partners, notably Belgian, shared the same observation. This led JUNALCO to open an investigation into potential criminal liability of the messaging service's leaders.
    - autoexec 2y ago
      > The only prescriptive, airtight solution is surgically modifying males so that they can't rape any more. Your solution only works if you think that women can't and don't rape people, including other women. Reality strongly disagrees. Ultimately it all comes down to freedom vs security. We could force people to have surgery and lock them indoors to keep them safe, or we can accept putting ourselves in some amount of risk in exchange for giving ourselves more freedom.
- 2y ago
jazzyjackson 2y ago
I would say in this moment highly moderated spaces (bluesky, mastadon) are more 'chic' than anything-goes spaces (4chan, twitter) there are plenty of techies who believed in freedom from being surveilled by government censors without any social pressure to be cool or rebellious or whatever. It's just a principal someone can hold, doesn't have to have anything to do with peer pressure
- rsynnott 2y ago
  Bluesky moderation is largely consensual (as is Mastodon moderation in theory, though unless you run your own instance you deputise it to whoever runs your instance in practice); to a large extent, if you don't use blocklists or moderation services, it's almost unmoderated, except for illegal content. I'd argue less 'moderated' than Twitter, really, in that it doesn't by default do things like downrank links.
  - jazzyjackson 2y ago
    I know libsoftikok and TERFs are lightning rods, but it is untrue that bluesky leaves moderation to the individual. Accounts posting squarely legal content are removed by the site administrators because the community demands that they not have to deal with 'nazis and bigots' I like the architecture of bluesky a lot but it doesn't fulfill its promise until third-parties go through the trouble of hosting relays and appviews so that people whose opinion the first party admins finds objectionable could still communicate.
    - rsynnott 2y ago
      > Accounts posting squarely legal content are removed by the site administrators because the community demands that they not have to deal with 'nazis and bigots' I'm not sure that that is true. I subscribe to a blocklist of transphobes, which has literally thousands of people on it. I suspect that libsoftiktok et al were getting performatively banned by putting bigoted content in their _profiles_, which _are_ somewhat heavily moderated. (Though, actually, that libsoftiktok arsehole does sometimes sic her followers on named people, which is verboten, so maybe it was that.)

encom 2y ago

>awkward corner Is that awkward corner "let the government (pick any) censor your platform, or you're a pdf file"? It's all so tiresome.

llamaimperative 2y ago
No, but hosting CSAM and not moderating it does make you liable of certain crimes in many jurisdictions!

moralestapia 2y ago

To @superkuh's point, I would believe that part of his bail negotiation package was to make Telegram more "transparent" for governments.

mapt 2y ago

If you are defending digital free speech and privacy, against the wishes of governments, you are defending the opportunity to spread CSAM. Necessarily. Data is data. You may not like that, but you have to choose which is your higher priority: A world that contains platforms which permit digital free speech & privacy despite the preferences of government, or a world with a little less CSAM. We could always try and prosecute the extraordinarily rare child sexual abusor who is highly social (spreading/selling evidence against them), just like we try and prosecute terrorism or left-wing social activism: With an abundance of enthusiastic government infiltrators and investigators eager to build a case against somebody, rather than with prescriptive automatic filters or with mandatory enthusiastic private-sector infiltrators.

jazzyjackson 2y ago
"If you're defending the right for women to leave the household and work in co-ed spaces, you are defending the opportunity to rape." This is what you sound like to me.
- mapt 2y ago
  There's lots of rape inside households. Most, even. The only prescriptive, airtight solution is surgically modifying males so that they can't rape any more. Not a fan, but I suppose that depends on how certain we have to be that rape isn't occurring. How important is it to you? We could do a halfway thing where we install cameras in every room of every house to gather evidence against rapists. The latter is what we do with most digital communication platforms right now in order to try and track down CSAM. Durov got arrested for not paying people specifically to watch those cameras and call the police.
  - llamaimperative 2y ago
    Uhhh no, he got arrested for not taking down content even after other people (including nation states) reported it to him. From the indictment: > JUNALCO's cybercrime unit (J3) was informed of Telegram's near-total lack of response to judicial requests, particularly by OFMIN (National Office for Minors). Other French investigation services, prosecutors, and Eurojust partners, notably Belgian, shared the same observation. This led JUNALCO to open an investigation into potential criminal liability of the messaging service's leaders.
  - autoexec 2y ago
    > The only prescriptive, airtight solution is surgically modifying males so that they can't rape any more. Your solution only works if you think that women can't and don't rape people, including other women. Reality strongly disagrees. Ultimately it all comes down to freedom vs security. We could force people to have surgery and lock them indoors to keep them safe, or we can accept putting ourselves in some amount of risk in exchange for giving ourselves more freedom.
2y ago

jazzyjackson 2y ago

I would say in this moment highly moderated spaces (bluesky, mastadon) are more 'chic' than anything-goes spaces (4chan, twitter) there are plenty of techies who believed in freedom from being surveilled by government censors without any social pressure to be cool or rebellious or whatever. It's just a principal someone can hold, doesn't have to have anything to do with peer pressure

rsynnott 2y ago
Bluesky moderation is largely consensual (as is Mastodon moderation in theory, though unless you run your own instance you deputise it to whoever runs your instance in practice); to a large extent, if you don't use blocklists or moderation services, it's almost unmoderated, except for illegal content. I'd argue less 'moderated' than Twitter, really, in that it doesn't by default do things like downrank links.
- jazzyjackson 2y ago
  I know libsoftikok and TERFs are lightning rods, but it is untrue that bluesky leaves moderation to the individual. Accounts posting squarely legal content are removed by the site administrators because the community demands that they not have to deal with 'nazis and bigots' I like the architecture of bluesky a lot but it doesn't fulfill its promise until third-parties go through the trouble of hosting relays and appviews so that people whose opinion the first party admins finds objectionable could still communicate.
  - rsynnott 2y ago
    > Accounts posting squarely legal content are removed by the site administrators because the community demands that they not have to deal with 'nazis and bigots' I'm not sure that that is true. I subscribe to a blocklist of transphobes, which has literally thousands of people on it. I suspect that libsoftiktok et al were getting performatively banned by putting bigoted content in their _profiles_, which _are_ somewhat heavily moderated. (Though, actually, that libsoftiktok arsehole does sometimes sic her followers on named people, which is verboten, so maybe it was that.)