Darnell (Seize The Day)

Hours ago, France 🇫🇷 arrested the CEO of Telegram, Pavel Durov (@durov@telegram.me) for failure to provide adequate moderation over his social messaging platform (props to @chris@threads.net for alerting me about this story).

French authorities have detained Pavel Durov, the French-Russian billionaire who founded the messaging app Telegram, at an airport outside Paris, according to CNN affiliate BFMTV. [...]

Durov, 39, was wanted under a French arrest warrant due to the lack of moderation on Telegram which led to it being used for money laundering, drug trafficking and sharing pedophilic content, according to BFMTV.

According to BFMTV, the Telegram founder had not regularly travelled to France and Europe since the arrest warrant was issued. (Cable News Network)

The move has rattled corporate leaders of other large platforms, including Elon Musk (@elonmusk@x.com), who has posted several times about the incident, often portraying Europe as a region lacking in freedom of speech.

Musk's snark aside, Pavel Durov's arrest will create a precedent among social media administrators and CEOs (Corporate Executive Officers), as it means the leaders and administrators of each respective social media network can be held accountable for failing to properly moderate their networks.

For example, Elon Musk is already facing legal challenges in Australia 🇦🇺, Brazil 🇧🇷, & the European Union 🇪🇺 (which comprises of 27 countries, plus an additional 4 in the Schengen Area) for moderation failures, & it would not be surprised if arrest warrants were issued.

Note: The United States 🇺🇸 would probably intervene if any international arrest warrants were issued, mainly because Elon Musk is already embroiled in numerous court cases within America 🇺🇸 (😂🤣😂), & the US government would object to the opportunity of dealing out justice themselves upon an American 🇺🇸 citizen who is violating American 🇺🇸 laws.

So Why Should Social Media Admins In The Fediverse Be Worried‽

Although most Fediverse admins are probably too small to be noticed by most governments, they could still be subject to raids by authorities over offensive content, which happened to a reasonably active Mastodon instance last year.

In May, Mastodon server Kolektiva.social was compromised when one of the server's admins had their home raided by the FBI for unrelated charges._ All of their electronics,_ including a backup of the instance database, were seized. [...]

According to Kolektiva, the seized database, now in the FBI's possession, includes personal information such as email addresses, hashed passwords, and IP addresses from three days prior to the date the backup was made. It also includes posts, direct messages, and interactions involving a user on the server. Because of the nature of the fediverse, this also implicates user messages and posts from other instances.

To make matters worse, it appears that the admin targeted in the raid was in the middle of maintenance work which left would-be-encrypted material on the server available in unencrypted form at the time of seizure. (Via @eff@mastodon.social on Electronic Frontier Foundation Blog)

Like most Federated instances, Kolektiva probably relied on users to report offensive content to moderators. However, some content ended up slipping through, which resulted in a surprising raid by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI).

Automated Solutions For Fediverse Admins

Fediverse Admins managing ActivityPub powered sites with over 1,000 plus monthly active users (MAU) &/or 100,000 total users should consider integrating automated tools that can detect objectionable content like Child Sexual Abuse Material (CSAM) & financial fraud.

A few automated tools for detecting CSAM that are available to admins are Safer by Thorn (more info here), & a CSAM Scanning Tool by @cloudflare@cloudflare.social, the latter which is freely available for Cloudflare customers.

Automatically detecting fraud is more complex & more probably more expensive. However, several companies are designed to automatically detect fraud at scale, which can assist admins in moderating their online content. Mateusz Pniewski has an excellent list of 13 companies that admins may want to check out, which could make it easier for Admins to detect fraud on the federated platforms.

What About A Decentralized, Less Expensive Solutions‽

Unless one is a Cloudflare client, implementing automated tools like this is prohibitively expensive and probably not affordable for most admins. However, there could be a way to extend automated protection to the Fediverse without contracting assistance from a corporate giant.

Even as the digital world has transformed over the years, with social media platforms like Pixelfed becoming hubs for visual sharing and communication, the challenge of spam remains as relevant as ever. Pixelfed's ingenious implementation of the Naive Bayes classifier to combat spam is a testament to the algorithm's versatility. By analyzing the captions accompanying images, Pixelfed's spam filter can swiftly determine whether a post contains genuine content or is simply trying to clutter your feed with unwanted promotions or irrelevant information. (Pixelfed Blog)

@dansup@mastodon.social has created built-in anti-spam features for Pixelfed instances, which theoretically could be tweaked to thwart more offensive content upon each instance without sacrificing privacy.

This would probably require a massive amount of time, energy & collaboration between the Fediverse Founders (as well as funds). However, if successful, it would help safeguard the Fediverse from unsavory actors attempting to ruin the internet for everyone normal.

👨🏾‍💻 by @darnell@darnellclayton.com 🔛 @darnell@darnell.day 📧 darnell@darnell.day

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