I recently listened to a disturbing episode of Sam Harris’ podcast with New York Times reporter Gabriel J.X. Dance. The topic of the episode was child sexual abuse material (CSAM) as it pertains to technology products like Facebook Messenger, Zoom, Tor and others.
One of the crucial points they emphasized was that any technology leader should pull whatever levers he can, to fight the battle against CSAM on his or her platform. I found this to be a very compelling plea.
The injection of any unintended content on our network is exceedingly unlikely, let alone CSAM content. But out of an abundance of caution—and out of professional curiosity—I began to look into how we might do our part to fight this issue.
I was delighted to find that one of our most trusted and valuable technology partners, Cloudflare, is offering a beta program to integrate with the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC), and I’ve completed the process of enrolling several of our sites, including lexblog.com.
One excellent feature of this program is that it blocks the url where the content was found, but provides the file path. In this manner, LexBlog staff would be able to permanently delete the file without ever viewing it.
Because this program is still in beta, there is not a scalable way for us to enroll all of our hosted sites. But since we aggregate content from almost all of our hosted sites into lexblog.com, we achieve almost 100% coverage in one stop.
To learn more about this program, or request that your blog be enrolled in it ad hoc, contact LexBlog support.