Matrix Has a Severe Problem With Illegal Images
Throughout the month this month we habitually spoke about Matrix (it's all in our IRC logs; they're public). It started when Ryan said the Debian rooms in Matrix had been littered with abuse, including child pornography (CP), worse than merely "gross" stuff like Goatse, which famously infested and harmed Slashdot (Gab was targeted with trans pornography). It became chaotic; people were sometimes asked to leave rooms for their own sake. Imagine trying to run a community whose communication channels become a legal risk and whose regulars you need to instruct to leave.
I asked Ryan if this was about Debian or something a lot broader, knowing that some very large IRC networks previously blocked Matrix users (or 'wholesale' burned the technical Matrix bridge [1, 2]) because user[m] could often be leveraged to insert illegally-obtained material into IRC networks (via Matrix). Ryan explained that the Matrix moderation teams were likely understaffed and/or overworked. To be clear, Ryan and I can agree that deleting illegal material (such as child abuse) isn't censorship and no sane person would try to justify keeping CP online*.
We don't know the scope of the problem; we cannot (at this point) assert that Free software-themed rooms are specifically targeted. But it is plausible [1, 2].
From what we can gather, the problem has become so big that IBM/Red Hat/GNOME people now openly speak about it (see image at the top). One problem is that many Matrix clients display images "in-line" (by default), so you can "image-bomb" people with pictures that are illegal to watch or store (if rendered, then they're already in some cache in the file system). Deleting CP is one thing; reporting it to the authority/ies is another (depending on jurisdiction) to ensure they know CP transmission was involuntary and unwanted, not driven by any genuine interest. It's different if you work for Bill Gates (leniency). I was told about 5 years ago that it had also become a problem in IPFS, but thankfully I never witnessed that myself.
I never used Matrix (I did use many other things), so I mostly rely on Ryan to explain these things to me. If Matrix cannot get the CP problem under control, many projects and people will dump Matrix. █
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* The "Free Software-Hostile Militants" attempted to do this to us through text. They're thugs, lunatics, and some are in prison right now.