While the study itself is a good read and I agree with the conclusions—Mastodon, and decentralized social media need better moderation tools—it’s hard to not read the Verge headline as misleading. One of the study authors gives more context here https://hachyderm.io/@det/110769470058276368. Basically most of the hits came from a large Japanese instance that no one federates with; the author even calls out that the blunt instrument most Mastodon admins use is to blanket defederate with instances hosted in Japan due to their more lax (than the US) laws around CSAM. But the headline seems to imply that there’s a giant seedy underbelly to places like mastodon.social[1] that are rife with abuse material. I suppose that’s a marketing problem of federated software in general.

1. There is a seedy underbelly of mainstream Mastodon instances, but it’s mostly people telling you how you’re supposed to use Mastodon if you previously used Twitter.

I’m not fully sure about the logic and perhaps hinted conclusions here. The internet itself is a network with major CSAM problems (so maybe we shouldn’t use it?).

“massive child abuse material problem”

“112 instances of known CSAM across 325,000 posts”

While any instance is unacceptable, does 112/325,000 constitute a “massive problem”?

0.0000034462% of posts are unacceptable! Massive problem!