This is the head of T&S sharing about the new challenges that have come with the Brazilian wave. I hope it’s clear that the increased CSAM is not left online; we take this very seriously. This is just what comes with the increased attention.
Do you feel that this is a transition towards the “moderation at scale is hard” unending series of battles, or do you think it’s just a blip that’s totally addressable?
Like every other app we’ll constantly battle with it. It’s the job. And then disagreements about how we handle it will create controversies, and then that’s where the protocol comes in, where other apps show up and provide viewpoint diversity and a check on the decisions we make
Great answer! Love how you're never afraid to jump in with clear answers to tough questions, gives me some hope we might actually be able to have something nice for once. Bluesky has really been a breath of fresh air compared to how things are going with "the everything app".
It's possible that the reason this particular item is attracting outsized attention is not randomicity or peculiarity. The competition's hype machine never sleeps.
Well, either way it’s useful to be real about the kinds of challenges that come with social media. It’s not hypothetical. And we’re still at a very small scale compared to most networks (9mm users)
As just a normal user, I can't speak to their motivations, but the sandcastle kickers are much more present now.
There is a surge of new users I've seen who are there just to spread racial slurs, and get on the opposite side of whatever argument is being raised in that particular thread.
There are so many of these suddenly that it feels coordinated to me. But I suppose that all it takes is one /pol/ post.
I was an early Lemmy instance host, and particular communities in bigger servers were getting hit with CSAM bots that were using it as an attack vector. It caused the meme community on Lemmy.world to completely shut down. Not only that, but Lemmy didn't properly remove images from storage when the attacks happened. They weren't accessible on the frontend anymore at least, but it required additional work on the command line to locate and remove the content from storage.
Wouldn't surprise me in the least if something similar wasn't also happening here, partially masked by the increased attention.
