Hello everyone,

We unfortunately have to close the !lemmyshitpost community for the time being. We have been fighting the CSAM (Child Sexual Assault Material) posts all day but there is nothing we can do because they will just post from another instance since we changed our registration policy.

We keep working on a solution, we have a few things in the works but that won’t help us now.

Thank you for your understanding and apologies to our users, moderators and admins of other instances who had to deal with this.

Edit: @[email protected] the moderator of the affected community made a post apologizing for what happened. But this could not be stopped even with 10 moderators. And if it wasn’t his community it would have been another one. And it is clear this could happen on any instance.

But we will not give up. We are lucky to have a very dedicated team and we can hopefully make an announcement about what’s next very soon.

Edit 2: removed that bit about the moderator tools. That came out a bit harsher than how we meant it. It’s been a long day and having to deal with this kind of stuff got some of us a bit salty to say the least. Remember we also had to deal with people posting scat not too long ago so this isn’t the first time we felt helpless. Anyway, I hope we can announce something more positive soon.

  • @krayjEnglish
    26•9 months ago

    How would you respond to having someone else forcibly load up your pc with child porn over the Internet? Would you take it offline?

    But that’s not what happened. They didn’t take the server offline. They banned a community. If some remote person had access to my pc and they were loading it up with child porn, I would not expect that deleting the folder would fix the problem. So I don’t understand what your analogy is trying to accomplish because it’s faulty.

    Also, I think you are confusing my question as some kind of disapproval. It isn’t. If closing a community solves the problem then I fully support the admin team actions.

    I’m just questioning whether that really solves the problem or not. It was a community created on Lemmy.world, not some other instance. So if the perpetrators were capable of posting to it, they are capable of posting to any community on lemmy.world. You get that, yeah?

    My question is just a request for clarification. How does shutting down 1 community stop the perpetrators from posting the same stuff to other communities?

    • GhostalmediaEnglish
      18•9 months ago

      Fact of the matter is that these mods are not lawyers, and even if they were not liable, they would not have the means to fight this in court if someone falsely, or legitimately, claimed they were liable. They’re hobbits with day jobs.

      I also mod a few large communities here, and if I’m ever in that boat, I would also jump. I have other shit to do, and I don’t have the time or energy to fight trolls like that.

      If this was Reddit, I’d let all the paid admins, legal, PR, SysOps, engineers and UX folks figure it out. But this isn’t Reddit. It’s all on the hobbyist mods to figure it out. Many are not going to have the energy to put up with it.

      • @krayjEnglish
        5•9 months ago

        How does it limit liability when they could continue posting that content to any/every other community on lemmy.world?

        • @[email protected]
          8•9 months ago

          But it does remove the immediate issue of CSAM coming from shitpost so world isn’t hosting that content.

            • @[email protected]
              3•9 months ago

              They’re taking a whack-a-mole approach for sure but it’s either that or shut the whole instance down. I imagine their hope is that either the bad guys give up/lose interest or that it buys them some time.

              Either way, it shows they are taking action which ultimately should help limit their liability.