What if someone put a child abuse picture on Steemit
Child abuse material on the blockchain
Say someone uploaded a child abuse picture onto the Steem blockchain. Being a blockchain, it would be close to impossible to delete it. So there it was, that image that would haunt the child for the rest of it's life.
The same goes for revenge porn, or any other type of content posted without consent.
Censorship may be a good thing
This type of case if a major concern of mine when it come to blockchain-based social media platforms. On centralized platforms such as Facebook, there is at least a small chance of such content being taken down and practically taken off the internet for good. With the Steem blockchain, you can't.
Jailtime for miners
With a child abuse picture on the Steem blockchain, a copy of that picture will find it's way onto all the Steem miners. What will they do when the FBI comes knocking on their door, only to find child abuse material on their mining rig?
If you flag the message, it will be removed. If you chat on the steem chat with the abuse team, they can also take down the links. But I feel your concern... there's definitely a need for security and improvement here.
That's true, but that would only affect the user interface (i.e. frontend) such as Steemit. My understanding is that there's no technical reasons why someone couldn't dig out those pictures as long as the blockchain exists.
As you say, there's definately some improvements that could be taken to mitigate this risk.
I don't think the pictures or videos or whatever are uploaded to the blockchain.
What's uploaded is the body of the message with text and links to those images.
I haven't really checked where the images are going, but if it's something like dtube, it would be stored on IPFS (not blockchain). https://steemit.com/dtube/@viewangle/dtube-where-are-the-videos-stored
Nevertheless, with so many people's privacy groups in the world, it's only a matter of time until some extreme case comes up. Privacy law in many countries gives you the right to delete all your information from a specific online site, so if that is not possible, some court might want to either ban or go after the witness servers to try to shut down the system.
A joint collaboration between US and Europe (think piratebay) would probably be enough to shut down most witness servers... thus exchange would be affected heavily too.
That's some very good points. Let's hope Steem will go under the radar of those who's out to posts illegal stuff.
that is an excellent question. Not so much about the FBI - that might be worrisome but I think it can be proven that the person couldn't do anything about it.
But the image being there forever is troublesome and how that can be prevented is one of those questions which would be good to have an answer for.
The sad thing is that ideas, projects, things are started with the good in mind. But not everyone has the best for their fellowmen in their intentions.
Wished I even had the faintest idea how to solve that - nada.
Steem, like (I assume) all other social platforms, started out with good intentions, but are prone to misuse. The ethical dilemma is difficult - should we ban an entire technology just because it may be used for evil? Probably not. But in my view, the Steem blockchain, with anarchy build into the platform, gives the wrong kind of people a playground for all sorts of illegal stuff.
Let's spread our concerns to the Steem community, and hope that this will influnce the developers to take appropriate actions, if such exists.
I don't think it can ever be erased, but it seems that even now, certain accounts and their posts are made invisible. I have no idea how that all works
it's the same as reddit, when you flag you are actually downvoting... and when it goes under zero, it's hidden.
Yes, but my understanding is that it's hidden on Steemit. Other sites that are based on the same blockchain may have different rules. In fact, they could decide to to the opposite, they could make a forum where downvote posts are promoted. Although not a very likely application to be created, it's very possible.
Well, the blockchain is basically just the database, and Steemit is the application which fetch data from the database and display it in your web browser. Steemit have computer code that says something in the lines of "when I come across downvoted users or posts, hide that data in the web browser". But other people my chosse to build websites that fetch only those downvoted posts, only posts tagged as "science", or in the worst case, only posts containing childe abuse material.
Thanks for explaining that. I have no clue how all of that works. That is a problem - not that I have no clue, but that others do who might abuse it....
Exactly. For a computer techie it should be easy to develop those type of sites I mentioned.
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