Mastodon, an alternative social network to Twitter, has a serious problem with child sexual abuse material according to researchers from Stanford University. In just two days, researchers found over 100 instances of known CSAM across over 325,000 posts on Mastodon. The researchers found hundreds of posts containing CSAM related hashtags and links pointing to CSAM trading and grooming of minors. One Mastodon server was even taken down for a period of time due to CSAM being posted. The researchers suggest that decentralized networks like Mastodon need to implement more robust moderation tools and reporting mechanisms to address the prevalence of CSAM.
Super useful, it’s very similar to how magnet links for torrenting works.
A lot of other areas online make use of hashes as identifiers already too. If you search for a hash of a file you’ve downloaded, just the hash alone, there’s a very good chance you’ll get multiple results.