My dumb ass sitting here confused for a solid minute thinking CSAM was in reference to a type of artillery.
this post was submitted on 11 Dec 2025
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The article headline is wildly misleading, bordering on being just a straight up lie.
Google didn't ban the developer for reporting the material, they didn't even know he reported it, because he did so anonymously, and to a child protection org, not Google.
Google's automatic tools, correctly, flagged the CSAM when he unzipped the data and subsequently nuked his account.
Google's only failure here was to not unban on his first or second appeal. And whilst that is absolutely a big failure on Google's part, I find it very understandable that the appeals team generally speaking won't accept "I didn't know the folder I uploaded contained CSAM" as a valid ban appeal reason.
It's also kind of insane how this article somehow makes a bigger deal out of this devolper being temporarily banned by Google, than it does of the fact that hundreds of CSAM images were freely available online and openly sharable by anyone, and to anyone, for god knows how long.
so they got mad because he reported it to an agency that actually fights csam instead of them so they can sweep it under the rug?
They didn't get mad, they didn't even know THAT he reported it, and they have no reason or incentive to swipe it under the rug, because they have no connection to the data set. Did you even read my comment ?
I hate Alphabet as much as the next person, but this feels like you're just trying to find any excuse to hate on them, even if it's basically a made up reason.
they obviously did if they banned him for it; and if they're training on csam and refuse to do anything about it then yeah they have a connection to it.
Also, the data set wasn't hosted, created, or explicitly used by Google in any way.
It was a common data set used in various academic papers on training nudity detectors.
Did you seriously just read the headline, guess what happened, and are now arguing based on that guess that I, who actually read the article, am wrong about it's content ? Because that's sure what it feels like reading your comments......
So you didn't read my comment then did you ?
He got banned because Google's automated monitoring system, entirely correctly, detected that the content he unzipped contained CSAM. It wasn't even a manual decision to ban him.
His ban had literally nothing whatsoever to do with the fact that the CSAM was part of an AI training data set.
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Why confront the glaring issues with your "revolutionary" new toy when you could just suppress information instead
This was about sending a message: "stfu or suffer the consequences". Hence, subsequent people who encounter similar will think twice about reporting anything.
Did you even read the article ? The dude reported it anonymously, to a child protection org, not google, and his account was nuked as soon as he unzipped the data, because the content was automatically flagged.
Google didn't even know he reported this, and Google has nothing whatsoever to do with this dataset. They didn't create it, and they don't own or host it.
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So in a just world, google would be heavily penalized for not only allowing csam on their servers, but also for violating their own tos with a customer?
They were not only not allowing it, they immediately blocked the user's attempt to put it on their servers and banned the user for even trying. That's as far from allowing it as possible.
We really don't want that first part to be law.
Section 230 was enacted as part of the Communications Decency Act of 1996 and is a crucial piece of legislation that protects online service providers and users from being held liable for content created by third parties. It is often cited as a foundational law that has allowed the internet to flourish by enabling platforms to host user-generated content without the fear of legal repercussions for that content.
Though I'm not sure if that applies to scraping other server's content. But I wouldn't say it's fair for the scraper to review everything. If we don't like that take, then we should illegalize scraping altogether, but I'm betting there are unwanted side effects to that.
Oh my, yes, you are correct. That was sort of knee jerk, as opposed to it being the reporting party's burden somehow. I simply cannot understand the legal gymnastics needed to punish your customers for this sort of thing; I'm tired but I feel like this is not exactly an uncommon occurrence. Anyways let us all learn from my mistake and do not be rash and curtail your own freedoms.
While I agree with Section 230 in theory, it is often only used in practice to protect megacorps. For example, many Lemmy instances started getting spammed by CSAM after the Reddit API migration. It was very clearly some angry redditors who were trying to shut down instances, to try and keep people on Reddit.
But individual server owners were legitimately concerned that they could be held liable for the CSAM existing on their servers, even if they were not the ones who uploaded it. The concern was that Section 230 would be thrown out the window if the instance owners were just lone devs and not massive megacorps.
Especially since federation caused content to be cached whenever a user scrolled past another instance’s posts. So even if they moderated their own server’s content heavily (which wasn’t even possible with the mod tools that existed at the time), then there was still the risk that they’d end up cacheing CSAM from other instances. It led to a lot of instances moving from federation blacklists to whitelists instead. Basically, default to not federating with an instance, unless that instance owner takes the time to jump through some hoops and promises to moderate their own shit.
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It goes to show: developers should make sure they don't make their livelihood dependent on access to Google services.
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