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Mastodon, the decentralized network viewed as a viable alternative to Twitter, is rife with child sexual abuse material (CSAM), according to a new study<\/a> from Stanford\u2019s Internet Observatory<\/a> (via The Washington Post<\/em><\/a>). In just two days, researchers found 112 instances of known CSAM across 325,000 posts on the platform \u2014 with the first instance showing up after just five minutes of searching.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n To conduct its research, the Internet Observatory scanned the 25 most popular Mastodon instances for CSAM. Researchers also employed Google\u2019s SafeSearch API to identify explicit images, along with PhotoDNA, a tool that helps find flagged CSAM. During its search, the team found 554 pieces of content that matched hashtags or keywords often used by child sexual abuse groups online, all of which were identified as explicit in the \u201chighest confidence\u201d by Google SafeSearch.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n The open posting of CSAM is \u201cdisturbingly prevalent\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n There were also 713 uses of the top 20 CSAM-related hashtags across the Fediverse on posts that contained media, as well as 1,217 text-only posts that pointed to \u201coff-site CSAM trading or grooming of minors.\u201d The study notes that the open posting of CSAM is \u201cdisturbingly prevalent.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n One example referenced the extended mastodon.xyz server outage<\/a> we noted earlier this month, which was an incident that occurred due to CSAM posted to Mastodon. In a post about the incident<\/a>, the sole maintainer of the server stated they were alerted to content containing CSAM but notes that moderation is done in his spare time and can take up to a few days to happen \u2014 this isn\u2019t a giant operation like Meta with a worldwide team of contractors, it\u2019s just one person. <\/p>\n<\/div>\n While they said they took action against the content in question, the host of the mastodon.xyz domain had suspended it anyway, making the server inaccessible to users until they were able to reach someone to restore its listing. After the issue was resolved, mastodon.xyz\u2019s administrator says the registrar added the domain to a \u201cfalse positive\u201d list to prevent future takedowns. However, as the researchers point out, \u201cwhat caused the action was not a false positive.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n \u201cWe got more photoDNA hits in a two-day period than we\u2019ve probably had in the entire history of our organization of doing any kind of social media analysis, and it\u2019s not even close,\u201d David Thiel, one of the report\u2019s researchers, said in a statement to The Washington Post. \u201c<\/em>A lot of it is just a result of what seems to be a lack of tooling that centralized social media platforms use to address child safety concerns.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n