CSAM exists on social media because they are so large that it's not possible to moderate them effectively. To me this is a a no-go. If a business is so large that it cannot respect laws, it needs to be shut down.

The correct way to organize social media is in federated way. Each server only holds on average a few hundred or few thousand people. Server moderators should be legally responsible for content on their server. CSAM on social media will be 100x suppressed because banning people is way easier on small servers.

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.

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.