Comment by Sir_Cmpwn | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Sir_Cmpwn | Hacker News Reader

This issue seems overblown, and I'm not surprised. Child porn is a great trigger word for making people approach an issue emotionally. I'd like to challenge everyone to take a few steps back and look at it more rationally instead. Many people who are concerned about their own instances probably does not have to worry [1]. I disagree with anyone taking the moral high road here too - I think it's disingenuous to call this "child porn" and illicit all of the emotional hatred that it implies when no children are being abused and it's legal to create, posess, and distribute in many countries.

The issue at hand is simply that it doesn't make sense for Mastodon to mirror content posted from other instances. It could be CP, or it could be a copyrighted work, doesn't matter. While this is clearly an issue to be resolved, it's been overhyped and a resolution is underway. I think any court would be friendly to a defendant who mirrored illegal content unintentionally through the behavior of their software in the meantime.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legal_status_of_drawn_pornogra...

"Probably" and "I think any court would be friendly" do not cut it, not even close, when your life could end up in ruins.

In your opinion, what's the difference between a mastodon instance having such contents because a user posted it; and twitter having such contents because a user posted it?

Twitter can afford an army of lawyers.

Not only that, companies like Twitter, Facebook, Google and Microsoft have full time people dedicated to dealing specifically with illegal content. They don't have many full-time employees (they can't as these positions often require very specific contracts with the Department of Justice for handling this type of evidence) which has resulted in at least two cases of employees sustaining pretty bad mental health problems:

http://mashable.com/2017/01/13/microsoft-employees-sue-ptsd-...

Twitter can demonstrate a procedure in place to deal with the problem, that is proportional to the size of the problem. An individual's procedures can only be proportional to their available time. The law will still say you should put up a server only if you can comply with the regulations it requires, and a defense based on "I'm doing my best to comply" will fail if your best is not good enough.

"Probably" here explicitly refers to the fact that it's probably not illegal in the country an arbitrary reader is from. Please do not misconstrue my words.

I don't have a cross reference of instance owners vs countries where the legality of the material is not clearly guaranteed, but since potentially "dangerous" countries include the US, Canada or the UK, I stand by my assertion.

You're still twisting my words and making an irrational point. I said you're probably in a safe country and if so you don't need to freak out.

And it's legal in the US.

While the case may be resolved favorably in the court of law, the defendant will still be pilloried in the court of public opinion. There's also the issue of having their assets seized, with all the financial costs associated with that.

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