CSAM is abhorrent and its production and dissemination should be met with the harshest punishment allowed by the law but it is quite impressive how this "one thing" (for lack of a better term) could trivially be used to silence entire online communities.
Imagine if large social media companies serruptitiously (sp?) paid contractors to get into these federated communities and uploaded illegal content for the explicit purpose to get them shutdown - I feel like I have come across Nitter before, is it like a Mastodon that is similar to Twitter or something right?
No, it is an open source front end for Twitter hosted by volunteers. It does not display content outside of whats on Twitter.
In other words, its literally just Twitter.
This is kinda like taking a proxy down for piping someone else's content, which is why its so outrageous. They have no control over Twitter's infringements.
Nitter is a third-party Twitter client. Think a version of the web experience that consumes the public fundamentally public view of Twitter. No API tokens involved.
So... Trying to say that Nitter has a CSAM problem means not that the Nitter instance is hosting CSAM, but that Twitter itself is hosting CSAM.
Now if you have a higher signal to noise ratio at finding CSAM through the Nitter client, that's just because you knew where the content was on twitter and accessed it there. RTFA'ing the article reveals that someone reported the Nitter instance, not realizing they should have been reporting Twitter instead, and the apparently unsupervised automated pipeline that leads from some technically illeterate concerned citizen in the U.K. through an internet non-profit IWF, to the German Federal Authorities, to a German VPS (Netcup), led to the sudpension of the client instance with a demand to remove the content in question, which again, is hosted by Twitter.
So... Yes. These CSAM reporting pipelines are basically site takedown shotguns that are apparently so minimally supervised, it is easier to just give up trying to host than to get someone to actually look into the matter.
This is actually one of my biggest concerns with how we handle CSAM. I acknowledge it is horrible, and I acknowledge it is a problem. However, in it's current form, it is a strongly weaponizable form of censorship, with little recourse to be found, and so many people in the bloody loop, but no one whose job it is to be publicly accountable for said loop and it's actions that someone wrongfully on the receiving end of one of these things can push back through.
It is strange that what is effectively just a secondary website that just uses Twitter's APIs to display content would be targeted, but I completely understand this guy saying this is not worth the time or headache, but it is surprising that Twitter isn't also a party in any complaints. Maybe not completely surprising that the various administrators at these sites wouldn't really look further than whatever appeared directly in their crosshairs though...
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[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 25.9 ms ] threadImagine if large social media companies serruptitiously (sp?) paid contractors to get into these federated communities and uploaded illegal content for the explicit purpose to get them shutdown - I feel like I have come across Nitter before, is it like a Mastodon that is similar to Twitter or something right?
In other words, its literally just Twitter.
This is kinda like taking a proxy down for piping someone else's content, which is why its so outrageous. They have no control over Twitter's infringements.
Just kidding, my conspiratorial sense is a little trigger-happy today...
https://www.inverse.com/input/tech/nitter-is-a-new-front-end...
So... Trying to say that Nitter has a CSAM problem means not that the Nitter instance is hosting CSAM, but that Twitter itself is hosting CSAM.
Now if you have a higher signal to noise ratio at finding CSAM through the Nitter client, that's just because you knew where the content was on twitter and accessed it there. RTFA'ing the article reveals that someone reported the Nitter instance, not realizing they should have been reporting Twitter instead, and the apparently unsupervised automated pipeline that leads from some technically illeterate concerned citizen in the U.K. through an internet non-profit IWF, to the German Federal Authorities, to a German VPS (Netcup), led to the sudpension of the client instance with a demand to remove the content in question, which again, is hosted by Twitter.
So... Yes. These CSAM reporting pipelines are basically site takedown shotguns that are apparently so minimally supervised, it is easier to just give up trying to host than to get someone to actually look into the matter.
This is actually one of my biggest concerns with how we handle CSAM. I acknowledge it is horrible, and I acknowledge it is a problem. However, in it's current form, it is a strongly weaponizable form of censorship, with little recourse to be found, and so many people in the bloody loop, but no one whose job it is to be publicly accountable for said loop and it's actions that someone wrongfully on the receiving end of one of these things can push back through.
It is strange that what is effectively just a secondary website that just uses Twitter's APIs to display content would be targeted, but I completely understand this guy saying this is not worth the time or headache, but it is surprising that Twitter isn't also a party in any complaints. Maybe not completely surprising that the various administrators at these sites wouldn't really look further than whatever appeared directly in their crosshairs though...