Yet another Hacker News

Child Sexual Abuse Material Persists on X

38 points mplanchard 3 hours ago 37 comments

mplanchard 3 hours ago | parent

The newsworthy thing here, IMO, is that they don’t even seem to be checking images against the NCMEC database

> The U.S. national center shares digital fingerprints with major technology companies so they can scan and remove the imagery. The center’s list is used by Google and Meta, among others. About a third of the images found by The Times were from that list.

mitxela 2 hours ago | parent

NCMEC won't share that database with almost anyone. I wouldn't be surprised if they denied it to Elon.

londons_explore 2 hours ago | parent

It also has a fairly high false positive rate, and due to the nature of the content paying someone to verify false positives is near impossible both legally and morally.

mr_woozy 1 hour ago | parent

I worked for a startup almost a decade ago that automated this process entirely (reducing the need for human oversight / comparing).

It worked, no one wanted to pay for it. Or were completely locked into Microsoft or other large companies solutions that half worked.

dragonwriter 1 hour ago | parent

“We can’t fight child porn on our platform because it is less moral to run a scanner that may produce false positives and either accept that this may result in blocking some content that isn’t child porn OR pay someone to look at content and verify whether or not it is child porn, so instead we just do the far more moral thing of allowing and profiting from the distribution of child porn" is an interesting, if not exactly convincing, argument.

rationalist 2 hours ago | parent

I'm surprised Twitter didn't implement it earlier (before it was bought and rebranded to X).

Also, is The Times admitting they were in possession of the illegal pictures? Does Freedom of the Press protect against that?

iAMkenough 1 hour ago | parent

I think they’re saying Elon is in possession of it, and they were able to verify it via file hashing compared against the national database.

Are you suggesting the national database maintainers are in possession of illegal pictures and should also have their rights questioned?

mplanchard 22 minutes ago | parent

From TFA:

> The Times conducted its own scan for child sexual abuse material on X by writing an automated computer program that searched for related terms without displaying the images, which are illegal to view. Links to the images were sent to a Microsoft service that checked whether they were included on lists of known abusive material compiled by the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children and other child safety groups. Matches were verified by analysts at the Canadian Center for Child Protection.

mikeyouse 1 hour ago | parent

They were using it in 2024..

https://www.judiciary.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/2024-01-31_-_...

PeterStuer 2 hours ago | parent

I thought all maps moved to bluesky?

rationalist 2 hours ago | parent

It took me a bit to realize you mean "MAPs" (so-called "Minor Attracted Persons") and not cartographical instruments.

r_lee 1 hour ago | parent

I don't think that "label" even applies if they're posting such content

hightrix 1 hour ago | parent

It shouldn't be a label at all. Pedofiles should be called as such, or worse.

iAMkenough 1 hour ago | parent

Americans give them the label “Commander in Chief”

cyanydeez 2 hours ago | parent

Surely, X should be shut down by some act of god.

bigyabai 1 hour ago | parent

For the government to subsequently reopen it?

There has never been a more blatant honeypot in the history of American social media.

2OEH8eoCRo0 1 hour ago | parent

Twitter/X should be held liable.

bigyabai 1 hour ago | parent

*taps the sign*

  Repealing Section 230 When You Disagree With It Creates An Even Bigger Incentive For Abuse

2OEH8eoCRo0 1 hour ago | parent

I think that it should be repealed or reworked because it is clearly not working.

mulemisterX 1 hour ago | parent

The only conclusion I can come to at this point is that it's a honeypot.

kelseyfrog 1 hour ago | parent

POSIWID.

NDlurker 1 hour ago | parent

Off topic, but gore should be treated the same way legally

NDlurker 1 hour ago | parent

I get downvoted whenever I bring this up but nobody has a good argument on why it should remain legal.

ZpJuUuNaQ5 54 minutes ago | parent

Anybody has a good argument why it should be illegal?

throwaway85825 51 minutes ago | parent

Arguably the average person needs to be exposed to more gore lest they become dangerously detached from the real world. People who live in sanitized bubbles end up creating systems that kill far more people because they cannot see the results of their actions. China censors all violent crime, it's basically illegal to report on. How do you think that's working out?

singleshot_ 1 minute ago | parent

Well, you probably haven’t asked anyone who knows. The government doesn’t have a compelling interest. Banning it wouldn’t be narrowly targeted.

UltraSane 1 hour ago | parent

Why? What about surgical videos?

ShinyLeftPad 58 minutes ago | parent

What about them?

UltraSane 43 minutes ago | parent

They are very gory.

ZpJuUuNaQ5 55 minutes ago | parent

Because? Death is an inevitable part of life. If anything, it reminds you appreciate you feeble existence a little more.

mplanchard 15 minutes ago | parent

Im curious, why?

The argument against CSAM is easy: the creation of the content is clearly harmful to the victims, its viewing and distribution furthers that harm, and its availability has the potential to increase demand.

How do we get to a similar place for gore?

OroPla 1 hour ago | parent

Can someone explain why the goal is only to remove the images and not go after whoever posted them? You'd think the pool of posters would eventually shrink to zero.

happymellon 1 hour ago | parent

> not go after whoever posted them?

What makes you think they aren't?

OroPla 47 minutes ago | parent

Because it's not mentioned anywhere who posted the images in the first place and which prison he or she is now living in.

The complaint in the article is about not taking down the images faster than within an hour.

mplanchard 20 minutes ago | parent

The point is more that these images should not be uploadable in the first place, since they are trivially validated against the national DB to be CSAM.

And, from TFA:

> The program The Times wrote reported the images to the authorities. The images were removed, but some had been viewed hundreds of times.

gamblor956 55 minutes ago | parent

Not surprising.

Musk displayed uncommonly detailed knowledge of the Southeast Asian child sex trade in the aftermath of the Thai Cave Crisis. It's not a big stretch to allowing CSAM on his own social media network.