this post was submitted on 11 Apr 2025
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I don't know if others have, I only know that we (Lemmy.World, Fedihosting Foundation) have not reported it to the police.
I don't have high hopes that the police would be able to do anything about this. For the harassment against the person shown in the images, that would likely have to be reported by them directly for the police to take that up.
For random online spam, as in harassment of fediverse users receiving the PMs, that seems like it would be an extremely low priority for police. It's also likely fairly difficult to impossible to follow up on, considering that the person sending the PMs most likely used a VPN to access these accounts.
Hmm.
The people receiving the spam are not being harassed, obviously.
The woman depicted is very likely the target of harassment.
Sharing the images depicting violence is tantamount to a threat of violence.
As admins, you're not just witnesses but the stewards of a community and the representatives of many thousands of people in this matter.
Pre-empting what the police will do is not a reason not to report. You don't know what they will do. They might do nothing at you would have wasted 15 minutes. On the other hand perhaps Nicole has been trying to get a restraining order against some creep but has been unable to due to lack of evidence.
Agreed, but there is no proof of this. We also don't know their true identity to check with them directly.
The images did not depict violence directly, it was a gory image of a dead person. They were very likely sent by a copycat not involved in the original harassment campaign and intended to fuck up fediverse users more than anything else. They did not appear to imply any kind of threat.
This would require a lot more than 15 minutes to file a proper report. First we have to collect all relevant information that we have available and compile them in a format that can be submitted. Once we have this information we have to identify a police department to report this to. We are legally based in NL, as that's where our non-profit Fedihosting Foundation is located. I'm based in Germany, so it would also be an option to report it here. The depicted person is claimed to be in Canada, so maybe this should be reported to a police department over there. Or maybe to all of them.
All of this would easily add up to 2 hours or more if you want to do it properly and not just look for 3 online forms to write "hey there is someone sending spam".
If this was a paid job and I was doing this during working hours I wouldn't mind, but all the time I spend here is taken out of my personal time, the same as with anyone else on our team, and also the same you'll see with most other fediverse instances.
If we receive a request for information from (real) law enforcement we'll be more than happy to provide relevant data, but doing this for the (perceived low) chance of that somehow being linked from a random police report is a fairly high time investment as described above.
Tell you what: log the time it takes, and I will personally pay you $60/hour for your time to make a proper report.
And no, Iβm not being sarcastic.
I truly appreciate the offer, but my concern isn't about money, it's about this taking away even more of my personal time. If this was a regular day job I was doing, rather than my actual day job, which I have in addition to the time I spend on Lemmy.World related activities, then I could file this during my regular working hours. After all, it's time I'd spend being at work anyway.
I've recently been spending countless hours already dealing with other stuff that is not directly tied to Lemmy.World but came up "around" it, including sending abuse reports to various instances about CSAM that federated to them a long time ago. This includes time spent on identifying such material, then finding suitable abuse report mechanisms, providing instructions for how to deal with it. Afterwards it needs reviewing whether the content has been removed or requires further escalation steps, such as one case where I've filed a police report today for a case where neither the instance itself nor the hosting provider deals with abuse reports at all.
As mentioned before, there also seem to have been two different people involved in sending these messages, the original person, where most of the information is/was available publicly and has been collected by various people already, who would be in a much better position to report this content to law enforcement.
The person sending the gore images did in fact use a Lemmy.World account in one case, which we do have more information about than publicly available or available for users on other instances, so this would be the only case for which we'd be in a privileged position for reporting. This however would also most certainly not be a report that would help any sort of harassment investigation, as this copycat probably doesn't have any ties to the original harasser.
If we had a significantly larger amount of donations towards our foundation we'd also be able to pay someone to deal with things like this, but we're currently just over the hosting costs with our monthly donations.
No need, this info isn't hard to compile, only took a few hours. If anyone does intend to take this to law enforcement, please PM me as I have compiled what I think to be almost all of the public information available about this case.
you could easily report this to the police yourself then. i don't really have anything more than what is publicly available, with the exception being one of the gore spam accounts.
I'm not saying you have to, but given that various people already collected a lot of information related to that stuff, they would be much better suited in actually reporting this to police somewhere.