> traumatizing contract workers for $2-3 an hour)

Is there an hourly rate at which this should be acceptable?

> In contrast, OpenAI has no such problem. It did not have CSAM pushed onto it, it actively collected such data itself. It could have, at any point before and after, simply stopped scraping all of the web indiscriminately and switched to using more curated sources of scraped data.

This is of course incredibly illegal, but megacorps (by valuation) and oligarchy members are above the law so who cares. I assume there could be a regulatory framework which can make this legal for an extremely specific purpose, but there is zero change that OpenAI was part of this/abiding by this in 2022, absolutely none.

> In contrast, OpenAI has no such problem. It did not have CSAM pushed onto it, it actively collected such data itself. It could have, at any point before and after, simply stopped scraping all of the web indiscriminately and switched to using more curated sources of scraped data.

You've just thrown the garbage over your fence. Instead of OpenAI contracting Sama to classify CSAM, the "Curators" have to.

At the end of the day, someone needs to classify it. If you say the platforms need to, and they miss some, and it ends up in OAI training data, OAI is going to be the entity paying the prices.

OpenAI runs ChatGPT where users submit text and photos and OpenAI generates and sends text and photos back. So users could be submitting CSAM. And yes, OpenAI could be generating CSAM. It's not limited to being a pull operation. What am I missing?

Having tens of thousands of decentralized, independently moderated servers would result in an order of magnitude more CSAM being shared than having a few oligopolies. The abusers just have to find the weakest link, and that weakest link will have fewer resources than multi trillion dollar companies. You would also likely not hear many news stories about it, because they won't have the expertise to even detect it.

That's a tradeoff you can choose to make, but you need to enter into it with open eyes.

> Server moderators should be legally responsible for content on their server.

And therefore anything that is remotely questionable will be blocked. Not just kiddie porn. Pissed off a local business with a bad review? Blocked.

Child abusers are twisted people, and I really don’t care much what happens to them, but making it impossible for them to use the internet means sterilizing the whole thing.

Also, if you've gone from zero to one of the biggest coroporations in the country, and have billions to throw at the 'metaverse', I find it hard to believe that removing CSAM is where you struggle.

> Server moderators should be legally responsible for content on their server.

So if you want to send someone to jail, just talk your way into joining their server, upload some illegal content, and report them for it?

> Not many moderators will have to look at CSAM because the structure of the system makes is unappealing to even try sharing CSAM, knowing you will be immediately blocked.

Why would someone join a server with active moderation if they wanted to share CSAM with their social media friends?

They would seek out one of those servers that was set up specifically for those groups, where it was known to be a safe space.

This is what many people don't get about federated networks: The people in those little servers DGAF if you block them. They want to be surrounded by their likeminded friends away from the rules of some bigger service like Facebook or Twitter. Federated social media is the perfect platform for them because they can find someone who set up a server in some other country with their own idea of rules and join that, not be subject to the regulations of mainstream social media.

Yep. If you cannot both safely and legally provide the thing you are selling you are no longer a legitimate company you are a criminal enterprise profiting off of exploitation.

I am not sold on the federated thing to solve CSAM or similar issues.

Actually companies should be bullied about privacy and copyright so they are unable to share any contents at a scale with 3rd parties. Thus they have to solve it on their own and forced to realize their business model is shit.

>CSAM on social media will be 100x suppressed because banning people is way easier on small servers.

No it isn't. Small servers often don't have paid security or moderation, are run in anonymous fashion, and have no profit motive that can even be used to incentivize them against hosting illegal content.

That's visible when it comes to porn. There's a million bootleg porn sites on the internet hosted that show off illegal content. The only site that was ever forced to curate its content was Pornhub, because they're sufficiently large, work in a jurisdiction that has laws and can be held accountable. From a content moderation standpoint going after a million web forums is an absolute pain in the ass compared to going after Facebook.

Which is the first argument any decentralization advocate always brings up (and they're correct to do so), censorship is harder and evasion of law enforcement easier when dealing with a network of independent actors.

The one thing I will throw out here that I can add to this conversation is that I think the government simply does not care, either. It's mainly only in regard to mass public outrage, or when someone is a political target that it gets dealt with from a law enforcement level.

Anecdotally, when I was a young adult I was a volunteer moderator for a large forum. We got reports of CSAM several times a month and had a process for escalating and reporting it to the FBI IC3 - we retained a lot of information about the users that posted it.

One of the administrators of the website mentioned to me that over the years since the inception of the forum, they'd reported almost a thousand incidents of CSAM distribution - and the FBI followed up with them to get information less than 10 times in total.

> Banning people is way easier on small servers

Big “citation needed” here. My bet is that Meta have far better moderation systems than any other social media company on the planet.

How would you test that that works?

> Companies of the 20th century certainly weren't more ethical.

Disagree, not on average. There was a non-trivially higher % of decisions made based on "what's good for the customer" or "what's good for the product" or "I would be ashamed to do this" and a lower % of decisions made based on "what maximizes profit in the next quarter". I think that is more ethical. To take it to an extreme, using slave labor because it's good for the customer is more ethical than using slave labor to maximize profit in the next quarter.