Lemmyshitpost community closed until further notice

Fuck these trolls

I would like to extend my sincerest apologies to all of the users here who liked lemmy shit posting. I feel like I let the situation grow too out of control before getting help. Don't worry I am not quitting. I fully intend on staying around. The other two deserted the community but I won't. Dm me If you wish to apply for mod.

Sincerest thanks to the admin team for dealing with this situation. I wish I linked in with you all earlier.

Contact the FBI

This is seriously sad and awful that people would go this far to derail a community. It makes me concerned for other communities as well. Since they have succeeded in having shitpost closed does this mean they will just move on to the next community? That being said here is some very useful information on the subject and what can be done to help curb CSAM.

The National Center for Missing & Exploited Children (NCMEC) CyberTipline: You can report CSAM to the CyberTipline online or by calling 1-800-843-5678. Your report will be forwarded to a law enforcement agency for investigation. The National Sexual Assault Hotline: If you or someone you know has been sexually assaulted, you can call the National Sexual Assault Hotline at 800-656-HOPE (4673) or chat online. The hotline is available 24/7 and provides free, confidential support.

The National Child Abuse Hotline: If you suspect child abuse, you can call the National Child Abuse Hotline at 800-4-A-CHILD (422-4453). The hotline is available 24/7 and provides free, confidential support. Thorn: Thorn is a non-profit organization that works to fight child sexual abuse. They provide resources on how to prevent CSAM and how to report it.

Stop It Now!: Stop It Now! is an organization that works to prevent child sexual abuse. They provide resources on how to talk to children about sexual abuse and how to report it.

Childhelp USA: Childhelp USA is a non-profit organization that provides crisis intervention and prevention services to children and families. They have a 24/7 hotline at 1-800-422-4453. Here are some tips to prevent CSAM:

Talk to your children about online safety and the dangers of CSAM.

Teach your children about the importance of keeping their personal information private. Monitor your children's online activity.

Be aware of the signs of CSAM, such as children being secretive or withdrawn, or having changes in their behavior. Report any suspected CSAM to the authorities immediately.

Not that I'm familiar with Rust at all, but... perhaps we need to talk about this.

The only thing that could have prevented this is better moderation tools. And while a lot of the instance admins have been asking for this, it doesn’t seem to be on the developers roadmap for the time being. There are just two full-time developers on this project and they seem to have other priorities. No offense to them but it doesn’t inspire much faith for the future of Lemmy.

Lets be productive. What exactly are the moderation features needed, and what would be easiest to implement into the Lemmy source code? Are you talking about a mass-ban of users from specific instances? A ban of new accounts from instances? Like, what moderation tool exactly is needed here?

The amount of people in these comments asking the mods not to cave is bonkers.

This isn’t Reddit. These are hobbyists without legal teams to a) fend off false allegations or b) comply with laws that they don’t have any deep understanding of.

This is flat out disgusting. Extremely questionable someone having an arsenal of this crap to spread to begin with. I hope they catch charges.

There are just two full-time developers on this project and they seem to have other priorities. No offense to them but it doesn’t inspire much faith for the future of Lemmy.

this doesn't seem like a respectful comment to make. People have responsibilities; they aren't paid for this. It doesn't seem to fair to make criticisms of something when we aren't doing anything to provide a solution. A better comment would be "there are just 2 full time developers on this project and they have other priorities. we are working on increasing the number of full time developers."

I hope the devs take this seriously as an existential threat to the fediverse. Lemmyshitpost was one of the largest communities on the network both in AUPH and subscribers. If taking the community down is the only option here, that's extremely insufficient and bodes death for the platform at the hands of uncontrolled spam.

Fucking bastards. I don't even know what beef they have with the community and why, but using THAT method to get them to shut down is nothing short of despicable. What absolute scum.

Please get some legal advice, this is so fucked up.

Genuine question: won't they just move to spamming CSAM in other communities?

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.

It's likely that we'll be seeing a large number of instances switch to whitelist based federation instead of the current blacklist based one, especially for niche instances that does not want to deal with this at all (and I don't blame them).

Sounds like the 4chan raids of old.

Batten down, report the offender's to the authorities, and then clean up the mess!

Good job so far ^_

How does closing lemmyshitpost do anything to solve the issue? Isn't it a foregone conclusion that the offenders would just start targeting other communities or was there something unique about lemmyshitpost that made it more susceptible?

Is it possible to (at least temporarily):

1. Turn off instance image hosting (disable pictrs)
2. Disallow image and video posts across all communities
3. As in Firefish, turn off caching of remote images from other instances.

whilst longer term solutions are sought? This would at least ensure poor mods aren't exposed to this shit and an instance could be more positive they're not inadvertently hosting CSAM.

good thing you did it the way you did nobody should have to look at awful stuff like this. keep your mind healthy nobody should have to deal with that

Thank you so much for all of the effort and time all of you are putting into this situation. Having to deal with bad actors is one thing, but you are now dealing with images that are traumatizing to view.

Please, for your sanity and overall well being, PLEASE take care of yourself. Yes, it sucks about having to close !lemmyshitpost, but self-care and support are of the utmost importance.

I'm afraid the fediverse will need a crowdsec-like decentralized banning platform. Get banned one platform for this shit, get banned everywhere.

I'm willing to participate in fleshing that out.

Edit: it's just an idea, I do not have all the answers, otherwise I'd be building it.

I assume you've contacted the FBI, but if not PLEASE DO.

Thank you for your work to keep that despicable trash out of our feeds. Sorry you have to deal with it. Fuck those losers.

Thank you for all your work. It sucks that there are people who would do shit like this. Please don't forget to take care of yourselves as well.

Looks like Google has some tooling available that might help: https://protectingchildren.google/tools-for-partners

Probably other options too.

Who the fuck has such a problem with this instance?

Saw that one post (unfortunately). How come people who spread content like that in the "open" internet (not darkweb) don't get arrested?

I’m gone for a few days and some assholes trying to fuck up this instance. Smh.

These bad actors are wierd, most who spread CSAM dont want to be known about by the masses, these posts are implied to be attempting to be visible as their posting in a well known community. It feels Sus.

Keep up the good work keeping us safe, keep your therapist and/or support network in the loop about this so they can catch you if you fall.

I've actually never seen anything of this stuff so good job!

Isn't there semi-automated tools that can detect CP?

Those might be an automated solution to at least cut down on the volume.

The same can go for banned images. These can automatically be identified with perceptual hashing, and automatically be denied when uploading.

This sucks, but we were probably due to have a Grand Registration Security Hash-Out at some point; going forward, any instance that wants others to federate with it is probably going to have to have a system in place to make it impossible for jackasses like this to create endless spam accounts.

It's one of the few things Reddit handles the situation better by being a centralized entity with a dedicated workforce filtering out these content. It's a shame it has to be this way, but I understand why it has to be done.

This is seriously fucked up, but won't closing lemmyshitpost just lead them to target other LW communities?

Probably unrelated but I once saw that community get attacked with scat porn, it could be the same person.

There's also another issue. If you upload an image to Lemmy but then cancel, the image is still hosted on the Lemmy instance and one can still access it if one copies the image's URL before canceling. This basically means that there might be other illegal stuff that's being hosted on Lemmy instances without anyone noticing.

This is so fucked, but this brings up a question -- is this something to be concerned about for instances federated with lemmy.world? As in, if something like this is uploaded to a community that the instance federates with, their instance will now have a copy as well?

Wow, this is awful. Huge cudos to y'all for holding on through this. It's obviously a deliberate attack on the fediverse by malicious actors.

It is absolutely ghastly to realise that something like this was inevitable.

Thank you for being willing to deal with this. Godspeed.

Ya'll are going through one of the worst situations I could imagine, but I'm confident you will figure it out and come out better for it. Keep your heads up. (P.S. - Sorry about the scat, lol)

Just saw this: That is fucking awful. Thank you for your service to the community and for protecting us from seeing that shit.

I am wondering what kind of moderation tools would be needed.
On the top of my head, I'd say a trust-level system would be great, both for instances and users. New instances and users start out on a low trust level. Posts and commemts federated by them could be set to require approval or get deranked compared to other posts and comments. In time the trust-level increases and the content is shown as usual. If an incident occurs and content is getting reported, the trust level decreases again and eventually will have to be approved first again.

You can couple that with a reporting-trust-level. If a report is legitimate, future report will hold more weight, while illegitimate reports will make future reports hold less.

Anyone got any idea why they are doing this? Seems a bit extreme.

Lads, as a casual Lemmy user, just how much danger am I in of having my mind permanently incinerated by seeing images of children being sexually tortured? I've been using the net since the mid-90s and I have never seen a single piece of CSAM in that time, and I now realise that I've been insanely lucky in that regard. My mind is already host to all manner of unspeakable internet shit (looking at you, cartels), but I don't think I could endure seeing anything like the stuff those evil fucking degenerate nihilist cunts have on their hard drives. I would want to commit murder.

So, stay the hell off Lemmy or... ?

That is awful.

Yeah I don't blame you for being frustrated

Would someone be able to ELI5 why lemmyshitpost has this problem but other communities don't or at least seemingly? I would think if they can do this to one lemmy.world community, wouldn't they be able to do all?

Sincerely appreciate your work to better this instance and the fediverse in it's entirely.

The only word I can think of is "disgusting", and that is far from strong enough.

Why would someone post that crap? If you’ve been banning and removing posts all day that seems like someone is malicious trying to do it to get Lemmy in trouble. I don’t know, just a guess but someone needs to go to prison for doing that.

All I can is that I'm sorry this is happening to you guys. Are there specific ways others can help?

Lemmy devs NEED to get mod tools out asap. Approved posts only, whitelisting users for communities, etc.

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Well that's fucking horrible. Jesus christ on a bicycle.

What's CSAM

is there a list somewhere including detailed descriptions of the tools needed?

My field is QA but i'm reasonably competent in a few scripting languages (mainly JS, but can also code in python and C#)

they would probably not be browser embedded, at least not at first, but i can dedicate a couple evenings a week to writing tools so long as there is a specification

Thank you for your work.

That also means that they could post to other communities, so I guess moderators need to be vigilant

What kind of lowlife piece of shit do you need to be to post some shit like that? Some people will stoop to the most depraved levels just to fuck with strangers, it's horrifying

isn't this what 8cjan is for? Seriously what the fuck is wrong with people who think that CSAM is appropriate shit post material. The Internet really is a fucked up place. is there a way to setup something to automatically remove inappropriate posts similar to YouTube's system of automatically removing inappropriate contents?

My guess is butthurt trumpolinas whose memes could not gain traction and were shat upon.

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I do think if the platform needs to grow more, we need more full time devs working on it and building it up to par. Good time to start funding campaign for Lemmy

Are they only posting to this one community? If so, why? Would closing this community not just make them post on a different one?

I had no idea that this was going on. I expect that, like me, most people are horrified.

Have you reported this to the FBI?

That sucks! I saw one of these things and reported it. If you need moderators for when it opens I'm willing to help.

It's time for us all to cough up what we can and finance and support the creation of a Foundation. Two fulltime devs that have other priorities just isn't going to cut it to move forward, zero disrespect, Lemmy is amazing.

We don't want a Corporation, so ......... here we are.

CSAM (Child Sexual Assault Material) posts

The federal governments of several nations should be in pursuit of this, and IP addresses and specific time logs shared.

What stops them from posting across other instances? I'm surprised they spam stuff in that specific instance instead of all over.

IP ban + report to the ISP or VPN provider should get the ball rolling. IP blacklist for known compromised hosts. Police report in the country with jurisdiction.

Relevant: Excellent congressional legal memo explaining the current US law on CSAM (as of 2022) Link

To the person uploading such things, don't they ask themselves, what if that was your child?

Thank you so much for the transparency and for all your (and the teams) work to keep things running for us <3

I'm sorry you (and the other admins & mods of the community) have to deal with this shit, it's disgusting. Thank you for doing what you do.

For some reason I only got this on my feed now. But if you read this mods, thank you for all your hard work

Of all the lack of positive role model behaviour one could exhibit, it had to be this. Seeing that shit kind of fucked me up, NGL. Good health to the mods who are running defense for us!

I'd like to do my part and report there are a ton of assholes on lemmy. It's REALLY bad here and I've been around a while.

I appreciate all the hard work you're doing. Not only must it be exhausting to delete all this perverse filth, but I'm guessing you have to look at it too. At least the thumbnail.

wow that's fucked, but thanks for the transparency

I don't know if it has been mentioned there yet but do you think it would be a good idea to post this to the lemmy incidents room on Matrix?

Pedophiles are fighting with the only weapon they have that can fuck up someone’s life-

The irony.

Thank you. I love fediverse.

I understand this is a major growing problem in many parts of the tech industry right now.

Solving the problem will make us strong... I just wish it was over something like malware. Something urgent enough to make us work, but not awful enough... You know.

What the fuck, dude? That's weird.

How come that I never encountered any kind of this content and browse constantly Lemmy, is this one of the perks of surfing through subscribed feed?

I unsubscribed from meme communities very early on because they were spamming such a feed.

Is there a way to see all reports made by myself and see their statuses?

Thank you. Thank you. Thank you!

As someone who was a moderator on a nothorious website, it can at times feel like shoveling water out of a boat while it's still leaking. Efficient and robust tooling makes a very big difference, but it's not waterproof. Mods cannot be appreciated enough.

Was wondering why I couldn't reply to a comment from earlier today when I was sure I hadn't broken any rule to get banned. Hope it's back soon, but more importantly that you can stop all the damn CP.

WTH is wrong with people?

what if we use deep learning based automoderators to instantly nuke these posts as they appear? For privacy and efficiency let's make the model open source and community maintained.. maybe even start a seperate donation for maintaining this, and maybe even make it a public API!

Thank you.

Sorry for my ignorance, what does CSAM mean? Thank you in advance.

Any news regarding the situation? (Tue 12:59)

Who is making these attacks?

wtf did just happened

To me this is a flaw of federation in general and I really think the solution should be to defederate yourselves from other instances until further notice, and only federate with trusted communities.

With how Lemmy (and the fediverse in general) is currently set up, what's stopping malicious actors from just creating another Lemmy instance of their own then targeting another community until you're forced to close that one like you did with Lemmyshitpost.

Thank you for editing your comment. Take care!

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Thankfully, I never stray from my subscriptions feed so never have the misfortune of seeing any of this.

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Can you please stop pinning threads globally? or maybe add toggle so people could disable it in their feed

Never been more glad that I don’t follow shitposters or shitpost communities. Can’t believe that community is as big as it is anyway considering how annoying shitposting is.

Keep it like that forever.

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hah other instances will just recreate it

I'm closing on a home. Timing is convenient for me. Can we keep it closed until I finish closing? Both are something I'm stressed about and looking forward to.

I can make it better news if things go right. I'm anxious.

Wow I love this site, on top of not working half the time it's filled with pedophiles

Fortunately there are other, better Reddit alternatives out there so it's whatever

What if the mods are just keeping the CSAM and getting away with it? We don't even know these people. This lowkey just looks bad on both sides.