A recent study by Stanford's Internet Observatory has unveiled a disturbing prevalence of child sexual abuse material (CSAM), otherwise known as child pornography, on Mastodon. The decentralized social media platform has been a popular destination for leftists fleeing from Twitter since Elon Musk purchased the platform.

In a two-day research period, the team discovered 112 instances of known child pornography across 325,000 posts on Mastodon. Alarmingly, the first instance of such material was identified within just five minutes of the investigation. “We got more photoDNA hits in a two-day period than we’ve probably had in the entire history of our organization of doing any kind of social media analysis, and it’s not even close,” said David Thiel, one of the report’s researchers.