Linked List: August 9, 2023

Wednesday, 9 August 2023

Stanford Study on CSAM on Mastodon ★

David Thiel and Renee DiResta, announcing their own report for Stanford’s Internet Observatory investigating child sexual abuse material on Mastodon servers:

Analysis over a two-day period found 112 matches for known child sexual abuse material (CSAM) in addition to nearly 2,000 posts that used the 20 most common hashtags which indicate the exchange of abuse materials. The researchers reported CSAM matches to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children.

The report finds that child safety challenges pose an issue across decentralized social media networks and require a collective response. Current tools for addressing child sexual exploitation and abuse online — such as PhotoDNA and mechanisms for detecting abusive accounts or recidivism — were developed for centrally managed services and must be adapted for the unique architecture of the Fediverse and similar decentralized social media projects.

Their report is interesting and nuanced, and points to aspects of the problem you might not have considered. For example, tooling:

Administrative moderation tooling is also fairly limited: for example, while Mastodon allows user reports and has moderator tools to review them, it has no built-in mechanism to report CSAM to the relevant child safety organizations. It also has no tooling to help moderators in the event of being exposed to traumatic content — for example, grayscaling and fine-grained blurring mechanisms.

I cannot agree with the headlines regarding this report:

The Washington Post: “Twitter Rival Mastodon Rife With Child-Abuse Material, Study Finds”
The Verge: “Stanford Researchers Find Mastodon Has a Massive Child Abuse Material Problem”
Engadget: “Mastodon’s Decentralized Social Network Has a Major CSAM Problem”

Every instance of CSAM is a heinous crime. But it’s impractical to think that any large-scale social network could be utterly free of CSAM, or CSAM-adjacent material. Words like rife, massive, and major to me do not fairly describe the report’s findings. My conclusion is that while Mastodon server admins can do a better job — and seem sorely in need of better content moderation tooling for handling CSAM — the overall frequency of such material on the top 25 instances is lower than I expected, especially from the headlines.

(I also suspect, simply through gut feeling, that much if not most CSAM in the fediverse occurs on smaller fly-by-night instances, not the big public ones which the Stanford study examined.)

Remembering Mimi Sheraton, Innovative New York Times Food Critic ★

In the course of researching that previous item, wherein then-NYT restaurant critic Mimi Sheraton accompanied Colonel Sanders to a Manhattan KFC in 1976, I learned that she died just a few months ago, at age 97. Truly a groundbreaking career:

An adventurer with a passion for offbeat experiences, an eclectic taste for foods and the independence to defy pressures from restaurateurs and advertisers, Ms. Sheraton was the first woman to review restaurants for The Times. She pioneered reviewing-in-disguise, dining in wigs and tinted glasses and using aliases for reservations, mostly in high-end places where people would have otherwise known her from repeat visits and lavished their attentions on her.

“The longer I reviewed restaurants, the more I became convinced that the unknown customer has a completely different experience from either a valued patron or a recognized food critic,” she wrote in her 2004 memoir, “Eating My Words: An Appetite for Life.” “For all practical purposes, they might as well be in different restaurants.”

Knowing what I know about the restaurant industry, it’s hard to believe reviews were ever conducted not in disguise. That regular patrons (and recognized critics) get better service and food couldn’t be more obvious, which is the reason it’s such a joy to find your favorite spots and become a valued regular at them.

Colleagues and other restaurant critics described her reviews as tough but fair and scrupulously researched. The Times required three visits to a restaurant before publishing a review; she dined six to eight times before passing judgment. For an article on deli sandwiches, she collected 104 corned beef and pastrami samples in one day to evaluate the meat and sandwich-building techniques. [...]

Another of her reviews, based on blind tastings by several Times staff members, favored private-label liquors over popular brand names of Scotch, bourbon, rye, vodka and gin. The review ran weeks before Christmas, the busy liquor-selling season.

“I heard that two million dollars’ worth of advertising had been canceled,” Ms. Sheraton recalled in her memoir. She approached the executive editor. “I asked Abe Rosenthal if that was true. He said, ‘That’s none of your business. It was a great story.’”

‘For the Colonel, It Was Finger‐Lickin’ Bad’ ★

MrBeast being displeased with the quality of MrBeast Burgers brings to my mind Colonel Harland Sanders, who founded Kentucky Fried Chicken, sold the company to a conglomerate in 1964, and then remained their paid spokesman for the remainder of his life, despite the fact that he despised their food and professed deep regret that he sold the chain. In 1976, New York Times restaurant critic Mimi Sheraton accompanied the then-86-year-old Sanders to a KFC in midtown Manhattan:

Once in the kitchen, the colonel walked over to a vat full of frying chicken pieces and announced, “That’s much too black. It should be golden brown. You’re frying for 12 minutes — that’s six minutes too long. What’s more, your frying fat should have been changed a week ago. That’s the worst fried chicken I’ve ever seen. Let me see your mashed potatoes with gravy, and how do you make them?”

When Mr. Singleton explained that he first mixed boiling water into the instant powdered potatoes, the colonel interrupted. “And then you have wallpaper paste,” he said. “Next suppose you add some of this brown gravy stuff and then you have sludge.” “There’s no way anyone can get me to swallow those potatoes,” he said after tasting some. “And this cole slaw. This cole slaw! They just won’t listen to me. It should he chopped, not shredded, and it should be made with Miracle Whip. Anything else turns gray. And there should be nothing in it but cabbage. No carrots!”

Mr. Singleton replied, “I just do what I’m told, sir,” and Colonel Sanders then said gently to the now stunned manager, “Well, it’s not your fault. You’re just working for a company that doesn’t know what it’s doing.”

Sanders was being paid $200,000 a year at the time to represent the chain in commercials. But what were they going to do — fire him? I wonder how many kids today realize Sanders was a real man who actually founded the chain, and not a fictional mascot, like Ronald McDonald, or the great pizza connoisseur Charles Entertainment Cheese?

MrBeast Sued for $100 Million by Company Behind His Virtual Burger Restaurant Chain ★

Elizabeth Wagmeister, reporting for Variety:

The biggest YouTube star in the world — Jimmy Donaldson, aka MrBeast — is being sued by Virtual Dining Concepts, the ghost kitchen company that operates his virtual restaurant chain, MrBeast Burger. [...]

In Donaldson’s original lawsuit against VDC, he blamed the company for poor food quality and said that the majority of MrBeast Burger virtual restaurants have negative culinary reviews from fans who are “deeply disappointed by the fact that MrBeast would put his name on this product.” The lawsuit said that VDC “has caused material, irreparable harm to the MrBeast brand and MrBeast’s reputation,” and claimed that while the business has made millions of dollars, he has “not received a dime.” In response, last week, VDC asserted that the YouTube star’s brand grew “exponentially” in part “because of the MrBeast Burger brand itself.”

The argument that Donaldson’s brand grew because of the burger brand seems specious. But perhaps I’m out of touch with the latest trends in fast food — I’d never heard of MrBeast Burger until recently, but it turns out they have “ghost kitchens” all over the place, including here in Philadelphia.

Yankee Stadium Drone Fly-Through ★

I suspect even those who dislike the Yankees will enjoy this. Captivating. Also, this might be the only good thing to happen at Yankee Stadium this entire season.

Update: Turns out this was made by the same team, JayByrd Films, that made Right Up Our Alley, a remarkably fun drone fly-by film I linked to a few years ago.