 Ouch. The Washington Post has this piece: “Twitter rival #Mastodon rife with child-#abuse material, study finds”. The author does not understand the implications of a decentralized network at all (“mastodon did not respond”) but imho that’s on us, not on them: we have not done the work to communicate it. The #fediverse needs a #PR team that can react quickly on press like this. 11 comments
@J12t Agree. It's not enough to sit here and say, "anyway the article is based on a faulty premise". That's the whole point that needs to get out there, among others. Then there's the actual problem of child-abuse material. How could the fediverse combat that? Moderation at the level of instance, but what about between instances? (Assuming an instance does not care or is even set up by child abusers) @J12t it's a bit like saying "email is used to plan terrorist acts, it's dangerous", or even "books are full of all kinds of horrible content". Both statements are true but do not mean that email and books should be automatically treated with prejudice. These tools enable the medium of communication, and being federated, lack control. It's interesting to think however which kind of tools should be controlled, clearly some should be.  @debs @KevinMarks @evan @coachtony we have made some baby steps towards that: there’s a “Fediverse marketing” Matrix group we set up as part of the developer network idea with currently 26 people on it. However, other than interesting discussions, it hasn’t really “done” anything yet. https://matrix.to/#/%23fediverse-developer-network%3Amatrix.org  @J12t one thing is educate more Fediverse developers about PhotoDNA and screening for CSAM. I was product manager at WMF on our work to hook up MediaWiki to PhotoDNA. I'm familiar with the platform and understand its importance. I'd like to invite @alex and/or colleagues to come to our next #SocialCG meeting to discuss the paper and talk about solutions. @dmitri could we push this to the top of the agenda? I'll take a task of soliciting participation from dev teams on the fediverse. |
Gregory's Server
@J12t
this like saying the internet has a CSAM problem and needs a PR team. we're in the AOL era of the early web as far as journalists understanding decentralized social networking.