: How should one deal with illegal content such as child pornography? I'm planning to host my first user-based site soon. I wrote the system behind it and it logs the action of every poster.

@Si4351233

The first thing that you should do in this regard is get legal advice within your own jurisdiction from a lawyer as the laws can differ depending on the country you are in but as a basic guide only...


Access to the image should be blocked as soon as it has been detected.
You should absolutely notify law enforcement with all the information they require. On this regard you could probably get in touch with your local police and ask them how they wish it handled moving forward as they may deal with it themselves and need you to come down and make a statement in person each time, or may simply accept an emailed report containing the relevant information.
You should not delete the file from the server until police say it is okay to do so as they may need a copy of the file for the investigation.


Now that the specific question has been answered let me point out a few things...


Sites that provide free user publishing of media often get into trouble, not just for child exploitation media but also for copyright infringement, etc. You can add a disclaimer to the site disclaiming responsibility all you want but the legality of such disclaimers can be questionable at best as all sites are expected to provide adequate controls to prevent illegal behaviour.
Providing an anonymous service the way you state where only the IP address is logged is not necessarily a good idea and the argument could be made that you have not logged the appropriate level of information to mitigate against illegal conduct. It would be better to also require an email address of some description as it provides an additional layer of identity, even if the identity is not shown to end users.
Every site like this on the web has rapidly spun out of control with more reports being made than can be kept up with. Unless you can implement some sort of scoring system whereby a certain number of reports will result in the listing being removed you will find that you will not be able to keep up and things will get past you.

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