When Elon Musk bought Twitter, thousands of loud-mouth Twitter “progressives” trumpeted that they were leaving the platform and migrating to Mastodon. Unlike their previous threats to move to Canada, nearly half a million of them made good on it. Not that they abandoned Twitter of course: they were mostly still there, tweeting furiously that they were now on Mastodon.
But was it all just about Elon Musk and “hate speech”? Or is there a much darker reason that so many Twitter users flocked to Mastodon?
Not coincidentally, within a week of taking over Twitter, Musk banned several notorious pro-paedophilia hashtags and shut down thousands of accounts peddling child sexual abuse material.
Where’s a pedo to go, now?
Mastodon, apparently.
According to Secjuice, a volunteer led collective “focused on cybersecurity, information security, network security and open source intelligence”, Mastodon has a deeply troubling history of being a safe haven for child sexual abuse material (CSAM). The communities focused on CSAM content were a significant driver in the platforms early growth and one of those child porn groups became the largest instance in the fediverse.
The “fediverse” is a collection of community-owned, ad-free, decentralised, and privacy-centric social networks. Mastodon is probably the best-known and most popular platfrom on the fediverse.
And since 2017, it’s been a popular hangout for paedophiles.
You may think a term like “the great paedophile invasion” sounds ridiculously hyperbolic, but an invasion is exactly how the Mastodon community described it at the time. On April 14th 2017, Mastodon users across the fediverse started to see what users described as a “flood of child porn” federating across their instances, generated by what users described as “an organized invasion of paedophiles”.
This should be no surprise. According to journalist Roisin Michau, paedophiles “are rallying, and they have a strategy”.
Within days, the paedophiles had come to constitute roughly half of the fediverse population. Less than a week later, posts from the child porn “invaders” overtook the total number of posts on Mastodon in the six months to date of its existence. They were generating “insane amounts” of child porn on the platform.
Flash forward to 2022 and those two giant Mastodon child porn communities currently rank second and third on the fediverse leaderboard in terms of user numbers, making up the two largest instances on Mastodon after mastodon.social which holds first place with more users. But they are the two most active communities by a large margin in terms of total postings, ranking first and second with 60 million posts each against mastodon.social’s 40 million posts […]
These large communities are the visible tip of the Mastodon child porn iceberg, orbiting in a federation around these large instances are thousands of smaller groups federated into their ecosystem, these are the more extreme child porn communities.
Not that all the new arrivals from Twitter will necessarily be aware of just whom they’re rubbing virtual shoulders with. By design, “the search function on Mastodon is broken… so that new users cannot see all of the existing users, their content and their communities in the fediverse by default”. So, you’re not exactly going to stumble across Mastodon’s massive kiddy-fiddler userbase unless you go looking for it.
Which, apparently, a great many of its new users are doing.
Mastodon is really big in Japan (but for really uncomfortable reasons), and that is why the Japanese dominate its user base. Most of the Mastodon pedophiles who particiapted in the great paedophile invasion of 2017 were Japanese, but why on earth did the Japanese decide to invade Mastodon and flood it with child porn?
In Japan they do not feel as strongly as we do about pedophiles, and they only made possession of child porn illegal in 2014 […] But in 2016 when Japan suddenly cracked down hard and arrested a record amount of pedophiles panic spread through the pedophile community.
The paedophiles needed a safe harbour, and Mastodon was skinned to look like Twitter, which is easily the most popular social media platform in Japan. So, Mastodon was almost tailor-made.
How did Mastodon respond to this Great Paedophile Invasion? They hid it.
Because there is no central Mastodon authority nobody can stop the pedophiles from using Mastodon, and because there are so many pedophiles on Mastodon, the developers decided that it was best to just go ahead and hide them. They had to hide them if they wanted their platform to grow.
Which is how you accidentally moved to the pedoverse without knowing it […]
SecJuice
The largest community of pedophiles on the internet call Mastodon their home and consider Mastodon a safe space for child porn. It doesn’t matter that you can’t see them, as a Mastodon user you are sharing a social media platform with them.
Elon Musk’s free speech activism suddenly doesn’t seem so bad, does it?