I mentioned somewhere around here that I used to play ROBLOX back in 2010-2014 when I was just a spud. I had wild claims that one would attribute as attention-seeking hearsay.
Until now.
ROBLOX blew up in popularity around 2015 when twitch streamers advertised shitty Call of Duty and Battlefield clones, bringing forth millions of new users many of which weren't even children. Around 2017, ROBLOX would suddenly shut down the forums and by extension kill the Clans and Guilds scene at ROBLOX. This was almost certainly to prevent the exponentially increasing possibility that the child porn ring ring in the ROBLOX forums would be discovered by the media, which could kill ROBLOX's future.
For the uninitiated:
Back in ye old days, one of ROBLOX's biggest attractions was not the games. While there were many fun games back then, Robux (ROBLOX's currency), could not be exchanged into the US Dollar. There was no profit motive in making a ROBLOX game, and so games were primarily made by individual children of generally poor coding abilities. No studios, no companies, no groups. In the absence of AAA clones and games with more microtransactions than gameplay, there was the social scene. Instead playing the games for their own merits, users would play games to interact with others, make friends, and join communities.
While at the beginning (circa 2006-2009) this was innocuous, the social scene would rapidly develop alongside the hormones of its user and become focused on... uhhh 
"ODing", or Online Dating. No longer were you going to the "Town of Robloxia" to make new pals, you were there to attract the opposite s*x too. New places - what users then called ROBLOX games - popped up to fill a market need. Strip clubs, bars, and cafes became the most routinely popular games. "The Iron Cafe" and "Club Christie" were infamous for horny singles desperate to get in a relationship and have virtual s*x. Where a need for erotic satisfaction arose for a growing generation of ROBLOXians, so did a need for glory. 
Groups was a public function available to all users, in which anyone could found a group and recruit followers. While this may have originally intended to be so that you could create a group of friends, the overwhelmingly popular usage of the Groups function was for the creation of Clans and Guilds. Militaries with byzantine ranks and extensive lore grew to dominate the social landscape of ROBLOX. In addition, to execute their wars (larpfest) new places were designed as fortresses, headquarters, and arenas. At this time, some of the most prominent militaries were: F.E.A.R, Roblox Assault Team (RAT), United Clans of Roblox (UCR), Vaktovian Empire (VAK), and the X-101st Legion.
The size of these Clans and Guilds were massive, numbering in the tens of thousands. Yet there was a constant race to maintain growth so that no one clan loses dominance. While aggressive marketing was one way of doing it, some Clans and Guilds had another more.... effective way. 
Underaged girls, in addition to Robux, became a widely traded currency; ODing its mechanism of inflation. Places like The Iron Cafe became hot spots for Clans and Guilds officers and recruiters, who offered free promotions to female users that would join. Girls swelled up in the ranks of the Clans and Guilds, and a new wave of enthusiastic recruits engorged the rank-and-file conscripts, with luxurious promises of effortless dating.
Due to the nature of ODing, relationships were often """passionate""" but shortlived, its users promiscuous. One female recruit could pass through twenty officers. This resulted in a phenomenon where ROBLOX users maintained massive collections of nudes of their underaged girlfriends. Nudes themselves became an auxiliary currency in which the treasuries of Clans and Guilds balanced like a budget sheet. While all Clans and Guilds practiced trading sexual favors for recruitment and promotions to some degree, none were as notorious as the X-101st Legion.
The X-101st Legion was led by a user by the name of LordNathan, the Jeff Bezos of child pornography. While not enjoying as many public wars as FEAR and VAK, nor the exquisite technology in RAT's Fort Celeste and Fort Borealis, X-101st put all their eggs in one basket so to speak with recruiting. If you wanted women, there was no better clan to enroll in than the Legion. 
X-101st was well known for their progressive gender equality among their HR's (High Ranks, commissioned officers). Bullets and babes were aplenty for Nathan's most loyal soldiers. But Nathan had a rule: ALL soldiers were the property of the Legion. Much like Fidel Castro, Nathan profited from his position of power and became one of the most wealthy ROBLOX users - in the form of an astoundingly massive stash of child porn. Although he had a rapacious sexual appetite, Nathan was also in a high profile, long-term, committed relationship with the Princess of the Legion, a 12 year old by the name of Katt4Ever.
Although Katt4Ever was uniquely off-limits to the other High Ranks of the Legion, Katt and Nathan were also known for their public.... displays of affection. 
This was the Golden Age of ROBLOX, no clan could secure a clear advantage, all groups enjoyed steady recruitment rates, the Robux was valued at 1 : 1,000 Tix, and the underaged sexual marketplace was booming. With economic prosperity and an uneasy multipolar peace, a blossoming community culture began to take root. Unfortunately, these days would not last. As ROBLOX began to grow its userbase, the admins became more wary of negative media attention. Televised scandals with Club Penguin Neopets bore an omen.
The admins began making widely unpopular changes to the site that would mark the beginning of the end. In addition, high profile scandals erupted among ROBLOX celebrities, such as the feud between XiaoXiaoMan and Christina, and the leader of F.E.A.R caught red-handed in a Robux laundering scheme. Things would take a turn for the worse as the value of the Robux would crash after ROBLOX introduced two tiers of Builder's Club membership that provided monthly stipends, triggering runaway inflation.
As if things couldn't get worse, the sexual marketplace went into disarray as child porn became overwhelmingly prolific to the point that the value of the nude collapsed. Leaks and trading between individual collections were the norm, crippling the dominance of the Clans and Guilds as they could no longer afford to maintain recruitment rates. The popularity of ODing centers like The Iron Cafe diminished as games like Survive the Natural Disasters and Call of Robloxia took their place. Users had to adjust to a stark new reality that games should be made for fun, not for s*x. 
As the influence of Clans and Guilds dwindled, ROBLOX users sought other forms of community. The activity of other subforums such at Let's Make a Deal (LMaD), Roblox Talk (RT), and Off Topic (OT) would begin to match that of C&G. Of the largest clans on ROBLOX, Nathan's X-101st Legion began to fade into irrelevance as the war between DonkeyO4's RAT and Vaktus's empire consumed all C&G attention. That is, until the nudes of Nathan's 12 year old girlfriend were leaked.
In one of the largest scandals in early ROBLOX history, Nathan, a legal adult, would be imprisoned on charges of possession and distribution of child pornography. His Legion would go on to be headless, while Katt4Ever would emerge from the darling princess of the X-101st to the whore of the C&G forums. Katt4Ever continued to use ROBLOX and enter/exit relationships with various clan officers, and spread her nudes as much as demand necessitated it. Meanwhile the ROBLOX admins would begin one of the first of many coverups in an attempt to keep the site clean for customers and shareholders alike. 
The Katt4Ever incident was the first of its kind, but certainly not the last. The forums became rife with child porn exchanges, leaked nudes, and an increasingly off-site presence. ROBLOX forumers found respite in nightly video chatrooms such as TinyChat. While ROBLOX cracked down on imgur links, that did not stop users from finding ways around the imgur filter, or bypassing it altogether by hosting their collections on ROBLOX's own servers, by uploading them as decals. None of this would limited to C&G, other subforums fostered their own cultures with their fair share of scandals...
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Wait, are you saying they were sharing CP on sites like Imgur? How does that even work, aren't those images detected and if so how would that not be forwarded to the
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Only known images can be algorithmically detected using hashes and some more sophisticated techniques to fight changing pictures enough to beat the hash match while not materially changing their content. But if it'sa new image that hasn't been logged by the state there would need to be a direct report of it to be found. This is a very difficult crime to fight technologically and we can only really reliably catch the very stupid.
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This was back in 2010-2015. These detection algorithms did not exist at the time.
Believe me man, I was asking the same thing
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Which is strange seeing how you often read about those international undercover glowie operations on the deep web, using complicated methods to track down
and arrest them in fifteen countries all at once. I believe it's mostly a staffing problem, and the fact that with the advent of smartphones much of today's CP is actually being produced by the children themselves and then shared on social media platforms. Glowies (presumably) don't have direct access to this content since it's property of social media corporations. It becomes hard to discover unless the glowies actively integrate themselves into these grooming circles (which would require a ton of staff and know-how). That's probably why Apple was pushing for that auto-scan feature.
I doubt privacy will hold much longer, AI algorithms scanning for this shit are inevitable.
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You know, I wonder sometimes about those. Materially, law enforcement don't care about crime, only how it appears to the public. Police would be gladdest if they had no work, politicians might pressure for drug ring crackdowns and all because they have obvious, public effect but with pedos, you know, except for a few kids in countries no one cares about no one is affected negatively. So allocating so much resources to bust pedos seems very suspicious, knowing how bureaucrats think.
Accuse someone of being a pedo and literally no one will listen to him and as far as the evidence goes, it'd be very easy to plant.
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These arenβt traffic cops running these anti-CP task forces. FBI careers are built on cases so the bigger the case, the better chance you are promoted. Your entire opinion is r-slurred and you should keep yourself safe.
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Yes but fbi has to put people on cp who could be on islamic terrorism or drugs or really anything. Look at the other stuff the fbi investigates, the stuff it must ignore because it doesn't have enough even manpower, how does something like cp even feature alongside terrorism or drugs. All the glowshit they supposedly do on the darknet would soak up lots of manpower. And for what? To save some Flip or Thai child prostitute from being videod? Come on, you should realize that makes no sense. Most of their arrests will be legitimately of pedos, I don't doubt that. But when people like Epstein can operate for years it makes me really doubt the missionary zeal of the fbi in saving children.
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Because itβs a vile crime and ruins lives just as much as drugs and violent crime. You seem to think CP production and distribution is no big deal and should be ignored for some reason.
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The actual kids being trafficked will continue to be trafficked. With or without sexpats or white cp watchers. There was an earthquake in Nepal and among the first responders there were people offering to buy daughters. Sex trade is too much money for anyone to shut it down, even the Muslims can't do it as autistic about religion as they are. As long as there are shitpoor thirdworlders there will be child prostitutes.
I don't mind either way, I'm never going to annoy
so they won't ever bother me. I just get very suspicious whenever any government does anything altruistic. That's not how governments operate.
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keep being wrong
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Allow me to be a Redditor and talk about shit that I don't actually know about, but spew what I think as though it's fact.
Based upon the charging information that often comes out, as well as some of the INTERPOL/EUROPOL photo appeals (where they hope for random neurodivergents to recognise obscure objects found in photos), I think those operations generally target groups that are sharing actual sexual abuse materials - i.e. grim materials where children are being forced/coerced.
Rather depressingly, I think actual self-shot CP is probably common enough that for the majority of libertarians they have to be fricking r-slurred to actually get caught.
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Would they even work nowadays if children take those picture themselves?
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How does who took the photo change the contents of the photo? Why would an algorithm care or even know who took the photo?
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I assume the algorithm compares a recently submitted image against known cp images to see if there's a match, but how would it know whether or not a recently submitted image is cp if it's not in their database?
Or idk Im just stupid
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