Several months ago Beehaw received a report about CSAM (i.e. Child Sexual Abuse Material). As an admin, I had to investigate this in order to verify and take the next steps. This was the first time in my life that I had ever seen images such as these. Not to go into great detail, but the images were of a very young child performing sexual acts with an adult.
The explicit nature of these images, the gut-wrenching shock and horror, the disgust and helplessness were very overwhelming to me. Those images are burnt into my mind and I would love to get rid of them but I don’t know how or if it is possible. Maybe time will take them out of my mind.
In my strong opinion, Beehaw must seek a platform where NO ONE will ever have to see these types of images. A software platform that makes it nearly impossible for Beehaw to host, in any way, CSAM.
If the other admins want to give their opinions about this, then I am all ears.
I, simply, cannot move forward with the Beehaw project unless this is one of our top priorities when choosing where we are going to go.
I’m sorry you had to handle that. Though, this is an inevitable problem for a site hosting user-generated content of any sort. I think not hosting your own content is the biggest first step. It might be better to depend on external image/filesharing sites like how things used to work with imgur, photobucket, flickr, etc. (is photobucket around anymore, lol?). This does pose a risk for link rot and what not, but I think given the scale of this operation, there’s no reason to having to be scanning your own servers for illegal content any more than you have to for basic moderation. I’m not sure how this issue works with federation (if another lemmy instance hosted a bad image/thumbnail/message, does that get copied over to beehaw?), but if your risk tolerance doesn’t want to deal with it, a non-federated option would give you more control.
In general user generated content is always going to pose a risk to the website hosting it. It’s a matter of good risk management, from prevention and mitigation to an effective response, that will best serve both the administration and the users in terms of ensuring a safe service and minimizing legal risk.