The article headline is wildly misleading, bordering on just a straight up lie. Google didn’t ban the developer for reporting the material, they didn’t even know he reported it, because he did so anonymously, and to a child protection org, not Google. Google’s automatic tools, correctly, flagged the CSAM when he unzipped the data and subsequently nuked his account. Google’s only failure here was to not unban on his first or second appeal. And whilst that is absolutely a big failure on Google’s part, I find it very understandable that the appeals team generally speaking won’t accept “I didn’t know the folder I uploaded contained CSAM” as a valid ban appeal reason. It’s also kind of insane how this article somehow makes a bigger deal out of this devolper being temporarily banned by Google, than it does of the fact that hundreds of CSAM images were freely available online and openly sharable by anyone, and to anyone, for god knows how long.

CSAM images ATM machine