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.
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.
“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.
> In quite a few countries, a false positive can lead to someone getting put in prison
That can only happen if it is either (1) used by government, or (2) used by private entities in a process flow that includes reports to government.
"There exist countries with criminal justice systems with weak enough standards of proof that a false positive on a scan alone would result in prison", even if 100% true, is not a justification for a firm not making efforts to block child porn distribution on its networks. (It is, OTOH, a justification for working to reform the criminal justice systems in those countries, but that is rather far from the topic here.)
Intentionally viewing what you think is child porn is a crime, but not catching it is not a crime. If you think it's stupid, lobby Congress to change the law.
> Intentionally viewing what you think is child porn is a crime
The entire argument for why verification was even an issue is that the allegedly the scan is not sufficient reason to actually believe that something is child pornoography. But whether or reviewing such a report may or may not be a crime in some jurisdiction somewhere on Earth, the certainty that arguments like that would detract from the point is the reason that of the two (moral and legal) issues raised in the post I responded to, I only said that one of them was ridiculous, and it wasn't the legal one.
> 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.
I said that I ran a company that could benefit from having access to that list, and could benefit NCMEC by reporting when we stumbled upon content which shows up in the list. (It's content scanning software for the adult film industry)
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.
This thread is so weird. Several people asking why gore should be as illegal as child porn, but with no followup from anyone so far with reasons. I am not trying to be sarcastic in asking why. I am legitimately curious.
The argument is that the child is revictimized with each viewing. Wouldn't it be the same for a murder victim?
The argument is that distributing child sex abuse material creates a demand for more of it. Wouldn't it be the same for murder videos?
There was a series of photos going around when I was a kid. A girl who died in a car accident. Horrible, gruesome, nightmare inducing photos of the aftermath were shared. The family was victimized by those photos being shared.
We live in a time where vore, nude photos shared without the subject's permission, and AI nudification software are all illegal. Why should it be legal to share photos and videos of violent crimes and accidents? How is that any different?
What precisely is your definition of gore? Could you define it in a way that makes it illegal to share images of murders and car crashes as entertainment, without criminalizing, say, journalists documenting a war?
CNN covered the Daniel Pearl story just fine without showing the video. There's no reason to share a murder video for entertainment just like there's no reason to share a rape video for entertainment.
I didn't say there was a good reason, in fact I agree there is no good reason to share such videos for entertainment.
I asked a specific question about your definition of gore, so I could try to engage with your opinion in good faith without making assumptions. But instead of answering the question, you dodged it with a cherry-picked example that doesn't represent every scenario that I'm considering. That makes me inclined to believe that your position isn't particularly well-considered.
Maybe the reason you get downvoted whenever you bring this up while "nobody has a good argument on why it should remain legal" is because you don't provide enough substance for anyone to argue against...
Definition of gore would be something like photos/videos of people suffering from graphic bodily harm shared for entertainment purposes. Medical stuff shared in a professional setting is different. Crime scene photos shared during an investigation is different. I don't think anyone is arguing about what is and isn't gore.
Thank you for sharing an argument. I for some reason was thinking more like medical gore, which I don’t think should be illegal, but I’m sympathetic to your argument re: violent crime. I don’t know that I agree about car crashes, though.
I haven’t really thought about this before, so I don’t know where I’d personally draw the line, if at all, but I understand better where y’all are coming from now.
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.
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.
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.
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[ 0.24 ms ] story [ 6.1 ms ] thread> 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.
It's all a matter of 'the image hash was on the database, therefore OP is guilty. 10 years incarceration'.
I wouldn't want to be enabling such a system.
That can only happen if it is either (1) used by government, or (2) used by private entities in a process flow that includes reports to government.
"There exist countries with criminal justice systems with weak enough standards of proof that a false positive on a scan alone would result in prison", even if 100% true, is not a justification for a firm not making efforts to block child porn distribution on its networks. (It is, OTOH, a justification for working to reform the criminal justice systems in those countries, but that is rather far from the topic here.)
The entire argument for why verification was even an issue is that the allegedly the scan is not sufficient reason to actually believe that something is child pornoography. But whether or reviewing such a report may or may not be a crime in some jurisdiction somewhere on Earth, the certainty that arguments like that would detract from the point is the reason that of the two (moral and legal) issues raised in the post I responded to, I only said that one of them was ridiculous, and it wasn't the legal one.
Also, is The Times admitting they were in possession of the illegal pictures? Does Freedom of the Press protect against that?
Are you suggesting the national database maintainers are in possession of illegal pictures and should also have their rights questioned?
> 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.
https://www.judiciary.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/2024-01-31_-_...
There has never been a more blatant honeypot in the history of American social media.
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?
The argument is that distributing child sex abuse material creates a demand for more of it. Wouldn't it be the same for murder videos?
There was a series of photos going around when I was a kid. A girl who died in a car accident. Horrible, gruesome, nightmare inducing photos of the aftermath were shared. The family was victimized by those photos being shared.
We live in a time where vore, nude photos shared without the subject's permission, and AI nudification software are all illegal. Why should it be legal to share photos and videos of violent crimes and accidents? How is that any different?
I asked a specific question about your definition of gore, so I could try to engage with your opinion in good faith without making assumptions. But instead of answering the question, you dodged it with a cherry-picked example that doesn't represent every scenario that I'm considering. That makes me inclined to believe that your position isn't particularly well-considered.
Maybe the reason you get downvoted whenever you bring this up while "nobody has a good argument on why it should remain legal" is because you don't provide enough substance for anyone to argue against...
I haven’t really thought about this before, so I don’t know where I’d personally draw the line, if at all, but I understand better where y’all are coming from now.
What makes you think they aren't?
The complaint in the article is about not taking down the images faster than within an hour.
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.
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.