Dear Lemmy.world Community,
Recently posts were made to the AskLemmy community that go against not just our own policies but the basic ethics and morals of humanity as a whole. We acknowledge the gravity of the situation and the impact it may have had on our users. We want to assure you that we take this matter seriously and are committed to making significant improvements to prevent such incidents in the future. Considering I’m reluctant to say exactly what these horrific and repugnant images were, I’m sure you can probably guess what we’ve had to deal with and what some of our users unfortunately had to see. I’ll add the thing we’re talking about in spoilers to the end of the post to spare the hearts and minds of those who don’t know.
Our foremost priority is the safety and well-being of our community members. We understand the need for a swift and effective response to inappropriate content, and we recognize that our current systems, protocols and policies were not adequate. We are immediately taking immediate steps to strengthen our moderation and administrative teams, implementing additional tools, and building enhanced pathways to ensure a more robust and proactive approach to content moderation. Not to mention ensuring ways that these reports are seen more quickly and succinctly by mod and admin teams.
The first step will be limiting the image hosting sites that Lemmy.world will allow. We understand that this can cause frustration for some of our users but we also hope that you can understand the gravity of the situation and why we find it necessary. Not just to protect all of our users from seeing this but also to protect ourselves as a site. That being said we would like input in what image sites we will be whitelisting. While we run a filter over all images uploaded to Lemmy.world itself, this same filter doesn’t apply to other sites which leads to the necessity of us having to whitelist sites.
This is a community made by all of us, not just by the admins. Which leads to the second step. We will be looking for more moderators and community members that live in more diverse time zones. We recognize that at the moment it’s relatively heavily based between Europe and North America and want to strengthen other time zones to limit any delays as much as humanly possible in the future.
We understand that trust is essential, especially when dealing with something as awful as this, and we appreciate your patience as we work diligently to rectify this situation. Our goal is to create an environment where all users feel secure and respected and more importantly safe. Your feedback is crucial to us, and we encourage you to continue sharing your thoughts and concerns.
Every moment is an opportunity to learn and build, even the darkest ones.
Thank you for your understanding.
Sincerely,
The Lemmy.world Administration
spoiler
CSAM
Well thanks for the spoiler thing, but I don’t even know what the acronym (is it even an acronym?) means anyway and now I’m too afraid to do a web search for it 😅
Well, maybe it’s better that way.
::: spoiler CSAM is child sexual abuse material I believe. So yeah, better not to look it up :::
I’m pretty convinced the initialism was created so that people could Google it in an academic context without The Watchers thinking they were looking for the actual content.
The initialism was created to focus the efforts of law enforcement. They have limited resources, so they want to address actual children being abused, rather than Japanese cartoons. Both are child porn, but CSAM involves real children.
You may be correct although it seems like pretty dumb reasoning. I doubt any of those cretins would search the words “child sexual abuse material.” That would require acknowledging the abuse part of it.
I think you may have misunderstood. The entire point is to have an academic term that would never be used as a search by one of those inhuman lowlifes.
I don’t mean to be pedantic, so I hope my meaning came across well enough…
I think my point is that the acronym exists because of the search term, not the other way around. And it’s pretty laughable that the academic term has to be distilled down to an acronym because it is otherwise considered a trigger word.
They already use codewords when chatting about it. I forget what the more advanced ones were beyond “CP”, but there’s a Darknet Diaries episode or two that go over it. In particular, the one about Kik. He interviews a guy who used to trade it on that platform.
CSAM is meant to differentiate between child porn, which also includes things like cartoons of children, with actual children being abused. Law enforcement have limited resources so they want to focus on where they can do the most good.