I hate having to make this post. I enjoy the Matrix software, I enjoy the fact that it’s open source, developed by a non-profit, and that the protocol is completely original rather than built on top of existing standards. The layout of Element, the flagship client, is great, and I have met a great amount of enjoyable people on the protocol. However, what I saw from the Matrix admin the other day was straight up abysmal and shockingly ineffective with their moderation, and their prolonged lack of action has me debating if I should move away from Matrix as a whole considering this happened under the flagship Matrix.org instance in what is their official and second-biggest room.
So about two days ago or so, I was seeing that there were multiple notifications coming from the Matrix HQ room, of which I had the notifications for all messages turned on. I decided to take a look as to what was being talked about there, and the chat was being inundated with images of CSAM by two accounts. While it did take a bit of time for someone to ping the admin account, the resulting response, or rather, lack of response, was simply unacceptable by any stretch of the imagination.
It took over an hour and a half of these two accounts constantly sending images of CSAM for the admin account to step in and ban the accounts, and delete the images in question. In this time the admin account was pinged nine times, with moderators of the chat also all being pinged at once in one message. After the accounts posting the CSAM were banned, it took at least an extra two hours for all the pictures of CSAM to be deleted, as the admins left some photos undeleted before users started notifying them that they still remained.
This is the official Matrix instance hosted by the Matrix Foundation. Assuming that the admin account operates off the same timezone the Matrix Foundation is based in, this all happened in the middle of the day around noon. This is the second biggest room on the official Matrix server, and likely, the second biggest room on the entire Matrix protocol with over 60K members. This room is often people’s first introduction to using Matrix, and for an hour and a half visitors to the room would be greeted with CSAM, and for an extra two hours, would be greeted with it if they were to simply scroll up in the message history.
This is beyond unacceptable. While I understand efforts to prevent CSAM from being posted to begin with can be an issue considering Matrix may not have the same tools to detect that content and delete it automatically, the fact that there was no action from Matrix moderation in their official room on their official instance for such an extended amount of time is inexcusable. I’ve since left the Matrix HQ room out of sheer disappointment, and am now considering if I should swap to using XMPP.
I really hope that the moderation on the official Matrix instance, especially within their official space, improves in the near future, but it honestly the fact that this kind of thing can happen this late into the room’s existence already speaks volumes to me about how ineffective the moderation likely has been prior to me using Matrix on a near daily basis, and while I understand that the protocol is decentralized and that this doesn’t reflect the administration of all instances, rooms, and spaces, it really has me questioning if I should be utilizing and/or supporting a protocol where the people behind it are stunningly ineffective at dealing with some of the most heinous, vile things someone can do or see.
I’m currently on tchncs. As said in my last paragraph, that while I understand this doesn’t reflect on all servers, rooms, and spaces, it still makes me wonder if I should be using a protocol where the official space for it ran by the foundation building the protocol has such ineffective moderation to the extent that CSAM can exist in their biggest official room for multiple hours.
To give a comparison, let’s take Tor. Tor is used for people to stay anonymous online. Now this of course is a bit of a double-edged sword since on the one hand, you have the intended purpose where people utilize it to circumvent censorship or just as a method to increase their privacy in their daily browsing habits. The other side is people who use it to access and distribute illegal services or content such as buying and selling drugs, or distributing and viewing CSAM.
Now do I feel uncomfortable utilizing Tor because I see them as not doing enough to prevent the bad people from being on their network? Of course not, there’s a lot of great people who use the network from hobbyist projects to simply enhancing people’s privacy. However, if the Tor project had an onion site directly administered by them that constantly had moderation issues with CSAM or illegal services, then I would be more likely to utilize something like I2P because I wouldn’t be comfortable utilizing a service where the developing organization didn’t properly moderate that stuff on their own onion site.
That’s the case with Matrix. I’m not even quite expecting them to be on top of everything sent to their server immediately, but this was the biggest room in their official space, and it becomes a question of whether I’d be comfortable using a protocol where the foundation behind it’s development doesn’t take adequate action dealing with CSAM in their own rooms.