Edit - This is a post to the meta group of Blåhaj Lemmy. It is not intended for the entire lemmyverse. If you are not on Blåhaj Lemmy and plan on dropping in to offer your opinion on how we are doing things in a way you don't agree with, your post will be removed.
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A user on our instance reported a post on lemmynsfw as CSAM. Upon seeing the post, I looked at the community it was part of, and immediately purged all traces of that community from our instance.
I approached the admins of lemmynsfw and they assured me that the models with content in the community were all verified as being over 18. The fact that the community is explicitly focused on making the models appear as if they're not 18 was fine with them. The fact that both myself and one a member of this instance assumed it was CSAM, was fine with them. I was in fact told that I was body shaming.
I'm sorry for the lack of warning, but a community skirting the line trying to look like CSAM isn't a line I'm willing to walk. I have defederated lemmynsfw and won't be reinstating it whilst that community is active.
The community in question used "child-like" in their sidebar to describe their acceptable content, and the first post I saw in a report looked like CSAM.
That, and other random photos of people who looked like they were 15 or 16.
To me, that's pretty damning, even if they are all 18+.
On lemmy, a report goes to the admins of the instance that the reporter is on. The admins of the instance the reported account is on, the admins of the instance the community is on and the mods of the community
That seems like a bad system, since it basically requires every instance to either moderate NSFW content whether they consent to it or not, or defederate and potentially disappoint users who liked having access to NSFW. I probably would have defederated them in your shoes too, since something that's ambiguous as to whether or not it's CSAM would be pretty distressing, but as far as I can tell everyone on the community in question is 18+ and this should never have been brought to your attention anyway, as an admin of a completely different instance.
I feel like it would make more sense for post reports to only go to the community mods/instance admins on the instance hosting the post, since anything else is going to subject a lot of non-nsfw instance admins to potentially illegal/traumatizing content they didn't sign up to moderate.
Given the way that Lemmy's federation currently works, with content being cached on remote instances, I think it's really important that the admins of instances are able to moderate what is cached on their instance. I agree that it seems odd, but if the feature were removed they'd have no control over what was being cached on their server and potentially over what they have legal liability for.
It's a serious issue with the way that Lemmy handles things, but is kinda endemic to the design at this point.