WhatsApp has an encrypted child porn problem

The part I'm having a hard time with is that blockchain's specific strength relative to other distributed approaches is the ledger. That's not really the crux of the decentralized messaging problem.

Unless you need the immutable ledger, other approaches solve identity, privacy, and persistence aspects of messaging just as well or better without the overhead that blockchain approaches introduce.

Like what? Does no one who looked at this article (before publishing) have any idea how the internet works? Do they have this wonderful illusion that just because something is made slightly easier to access that it suddenly boosts how many pedophiles in the world? Little Johnny doesn't just browse a WhatsApp directory listing and say, "You know what? I've never really wanted to see children abused but now that there's a nice 'Adult' section containing this sort of content... I think I'm a pedophile now!" Anyone viewing that crap voluntarily was a pedophile to begin with, and like every single one of them, public castration should be an acceptable form of punishment (legalize it).

CP (a known abbreviation) has been circulated on the world wide web since the first big wave wherein more than a few thousand people were using it (back before it was referred to as the 'internet'). Hell i remember accidentally running across several images in my early teen years (when I was moderating for a forum), surprise surprise, it didn't "growth-hack" that vile garbage into my life, you know what it did? It ruined my day that's what it dig, and I absolutely hated the fact that I even saw that, it made me want to never see it again! Flagged for deletion, offender's account was terminated, and a report was filed (with the authorities).

It was also around this time that me and some of my friends decided to have some fun on IRC, I was bored enough that I would often troll IRC for hours, found several questionable channels, where RP (a known abbreviation) was huge and a few of the members were looking for someone to RP as... well children. Yikes! So... we didn't RP, what we did was act like real 12 yr. olds just to mess with them, and after a while of conversing, we'd sometimes get these creeps to get on a greyhound and make a trip (several times across the country) to send them to non-existent meetings, often humorously sending them to a place right across from a police station or whatever we thought was funniest.

Innocent fun I'd say, but anyway, more to the point of the article. No this does not "growth-hack" pedophilia, it just makes it all the more apparent that people are not inherently good and it's stupid to think you can stop the rot. Though I do support the push to limit this as much as possible, though I'd like to see arrests, I'd like to see these bastards rot in prison till they drop dead, and any solution that just covers up the issue without actual consequences for the offenders does not get my consideration. Children are our future, they must be protected.

I have no doubts that the big companies which this seems mostly for will be doing everything to decentralize and remove themselves from the problem citing "systemic weakness" and then doing nothing for the government.

I can't imagine these people are writing something like "child porn in this chat --> ".

I haven't the faintest idea how people who're interested in that sort of thing're finding these links.

Definitely a problem which seems potentially intractable to me, although perhaps more familiarity with the platform and the offending chat groups would help (or... more likely... leave me rather disturbed).