‼️ Discord users report a ban wave after being falsely flagged for posting child abuse material, when in fact they're posting ordinary images with grid patterns. Minecraft inventories, spreadsheets, chessboards, game textures.
The problem may reach beyond Discord. An itch[.]io developer says the site received automated child abuse reports on plain gray grid images after moving its image hosting to Cloudflare. Most platforms scan uploads against the same shared databases of digital fingerprints of known abuse material, and simple repetitive images like grids can produce fingerprints that wrongly match entries in those lists. If the fault sits in that shared system rather than in one company's AI, every platform using it could misfire on grids at the same time. Unconfirmed for now, but it would explain why two unrelated services tripped on the same pattern in the same week.
Discord has not publicly acknowledged the issue. Affected users say appeals are coming back automated.