While I agree with Section 230 in theory, it is often only used in practice to protect megacorps. For example, many Lemmy instances started getting spammed by CSAM after the Reddit API migration. It was very clearly some angry redditors who were trying to shut down instances, to try and keep people on Reddit.

But individual server owners were legitimately concerned that they could be held liable for the CSAM existing on their servers, even if they were not the ones who uploaded it. The concern was that Section 230 would be thrown out the window if the instance owners were just lone devs and not massive megacorps.

Especially since federation caused content to be cached whenever a user scrolled past another instance’s posts. So even if they moderated their own server’s content heavily (which wasn’t even possible with the mod tools that existed at the time), then there was still the risk that they’d end up cacheing CSAM from other instances. It led to a lot of instances moving from federation blacklists to whitelists instead. Basically, default to not federating with an instance, unless that instance owner takes the time to jump through some hoops and promises to moderate their own shit.

Oh my, yes, you are correct. That was sort of knee jerk, as opposed to it being the reporting party's burden somehow. I simply cannot understand the legal gymnastics needed to punish your customers for this sort of thing; I'm tired but I feel like this is not exactly an uncommon occurrence. Anyways let us all learn from my mistake and do not be rash and curtail your own freedoms.

Not to create an argument, which isn't my intent, as certainty there may be a thought such as, "scraping as it stands is good because of the simplification and 'benefit'". Which, sure, it's easiest to wide net and absorb, to simply the concept, at least as I'm also understanding it.

Yet, maybe it is the process of scraping, and also absorbing into databases including AI, which is a worthwhile point of conversation. Maybe how we've been doing something isn't the continued 'best course' for a situation.

Undeniably, more minutely monitoring what is scraped and stored creates large quantities, and large in scope, of questions and obstacles, but, maybe having that conversation is where things should go.

Thoughts?

Who do you think the FBI would contract to do the work anyway 😬

Maybe not Google but it would sure be some private company. Our government doesn’t do stuff itself almost ever. It hires the private sector

Google isn't the only service checking for csam. Microsoft (and other file hosting services, likely) also have methods to do this. This doesn't mean they also host csam to detect it. I believe their checks use hash values to determine if a picture is already clocked as being in that category.

This has existed since 2009 and provides good insight on the topic, used for detecting all sorts of bad category images:

https://technologycoalition.org/news/the-tech-coalition-empowers-industry-to-combat-online-child-sexual-abuse-with-expanded-photodna-licensing/

Google wants to be able to recognize and remove it. They don't want the FBI all up in their business.