I've noticed on YouTube I see a lot of adult sexual ads. Things like home cleaning ads that have an unmistakable wood-grain image of fellatio. I've always wondered "how are these getting past the moderators?". I guess the answer is the obvious one: no one is moderating anything.
Google Play Store showed my child an ad of a bloody body on a bed for a murder mystery game. The game was rated 18+ and the account had my daughter’s correct single digit age.
I reported the ad and a week later it was still there. I switched to Apple.
Reported an obvious sexual ad the other day and got a very AI generated response that started with "Dear Username" stating that they reviewed the ad and found nothing wrong with it.
Before I gave up on Facebook entirely, I reported an ad that was an explicit blow job and received a similar response and this was before AI was huge. I really don't think they've ever cared.
The worst ads are the shady games with all sorts of sexual references. They don't end no matter how many times you report it, block the ads or select the "less gaming ads" option.
The more surprising thing with YouTube is how much obvious copyright infringement is in ads. The whole platform seems oriented around copyright enforcement, but ads seem to get a pass.
Metas ads are all over the place. Thomas Kehl, one of the founders of "Finanzfluss" (a german site/content creation company about finance) is currently suing meta because scammers keep using his picture.
There really needs to be some harder punishments for this kind of behavior, after all meta profits by selling scammy ads.
This is so true. When you have a billion users, you can literally lose hundreds of millions of users and it wouldn't make a dent. The only way is to get the government involved and regulate this and just keep hammering them with massive fines that really make a dent in their bottom line.
For a lot of people, government regulation of this sort is not desirable, but at what point does someone need to drop the hammer to stop this?
I guess you're used to standard billions (a million millions). A US billion would certainly suffer from losing hundreds of millions, you're talking about a double-digit percent.
Something like three strikes and the CEO, top executives, and three primary share holders go to jail while forcing the company to dissolve seems to be the only solution to removing bad actors in corporate settings.
What if they make a shadow profile for you? Do you count as a user? What if you've tried to delete your account and you can't? (I meant a real account here, not even a shadow profile. People have had the things reactivated years later)
As it should be. If the cost of fixing the problem is greater than the amount of harm the problem is actually causing to society, then it shouldn't be fixed. Set fine amounts accordingly. (Whether we actually do set fines this way is, of course, questionable. And probably this particular problem would get fixed even if there were no fine merely because of the reputational damage it's causing, but I'm speaking in generalities here.)
What's crazy is how long it takes to report something like this to a big company and actually have them take action on it. I remember 10 years ago I reported a Giphy ad for the same thing, and it took them months to take action.
Out of curiosity, I've ran some experiments on Facebook for stuff like this.
Results:
- Reporting a message does nothing no matter how much the content breaks their terms of use. 100% of messages I reported bounced back in a matter of minutes with "no action"
- However, using the "request another review" function, which is available after the initial "no action" response, actually seems to work. How quickly this works seems to vary, I've had actions taken as result of this from 1 day to multiple weeks.
Interesting, I've kind of made a hobby of reporting scams and hate speech and watching it take a week to come back with "it's no violation", requesting another and getting the same response in another week. I've never seen them do anything no matter how obvious or awful it is.
Step 1: establish a process and business unit to "address the problem"
Step 2: wait for it to get out of the news cycle.
Step 3: donate heavily via lobbyists to the opponents of the politicians who called you out
Step 4: de-fund the unit down until just barely enough that you're not lying when you say you "have a team working very hard on the problem." A dozen people in some third world country you pay a dollar a month each, for example.
but they lobby for specific (often pretty bad) forms of age verification to be able to
- spy on people better
- have a regulatory moat where due to beady designed laws new alternatives have a much higher hurdle/initial investments and in turn never get anywhere
I'm wondering what people expect these companies to do? Human moderators? Sure, but Meta products have approximately half the worlds population using them. At this scale it's pretty mind bogglingly difficult to moderate down everything. The ads/posts served per second is an astronomical number.
This truly is a case where AI is the solution. There's no way to automate this at scale with humans. As AI gets better hopefully detection and moderation will catch up
In many industries, if you can't do something safely, you simply can't do it at all. Maybe yeah, if you can't build a sufficiently strong automated system, then you need human moderators across a huge number of locations. Them's the breaks for running a wildly profitable service that half the world's population uses.
> In many industries, if you can't do something safely, you simply can't do it at all.
Absolutely!
Related story... my wife works in a regulated industry and she was running facebook ads for one of their new products. Facebook had just introduced Ai generated ad-copy and the ad agency didn't know that option was turned on by default so they uploaded all of the ad-copy that was approved by legal and then facebook was running all of these alternative ads that were actually illegal because the copy it wrote were all claims they are not allowed to make in that industry. They only caught it because one of the ads was served to my wife and she immediately noticed it was copy that was not approved and something they could not claim.
I always assumed these shady ads were created by shady people, and I think a lot are, but I wonder how many companies are unintentionally running shady ads because facebook generated those ads.
Then let's not have any infrastructure or services because some people use it to commit crimes. The car industry doesn't prevent accidents, the telecom industry doesn't prevent scams, the school industry doesn't prevent bullying, the nightlife industry doesn't prevent rape or drug use and i can go on and on. You can't have a perfect system, people will do what they do, all you can do is trying to prevent those crimes but don't expect 100% success rate and certainly you can't stop everything.
> I'm wondering what people expect these companies to do? Human moderators? Sure, but Meta products have approximately half the worlds population using them. At this scale it's pretty mind bogglingly difficult to moderate down everything. The ads/posts served per second is an astronomical number.
It's Facebook's problem if Facebook can't do the things Facebook is required to do. "Oh no it is hard"? Tough. Either they find a way or find they're no longer allowed to do this business.
> This truly is a case where AI is the solution. There's no way to automate this at scale with humans. As AI gets better hopefully detection and moderation will catch up
AI *might* solve this, or Meta's AI may be trapped in an arms race with advertisers trying to get around it for whatever reason has driven them to do this in the first place; but fully automated mass-generation of personalised ads was never a mandatory part of their business plan, so it was a problem they never needed to have.
Your right! We should also reduce food safety requirements for McDonalds and other large restaurants. At their scale it’s just too hard to keep everything clean.
Posts? Fair. But adverts? There is literally no reason they cannot all be human moderated. Every single one. People are paying to have their adverts placed. Put a small fee on each ad, if they must, for the initial review. Done.
Don’t buy into Meta’s narrative that there’s nothing that can be done while they continue to make money hand over fist.
They have the resources to hire a vast number of people. So yes they probably could manually review every ad. And either way it is their problem to solve. They are not entitled to be hugely profitable or free from the obligations that smaller organisations have.
Surely there is no need to review every ad. Coke and Apple and whatnot are not going to be doing this. New companies or companies with a history of complaints can face extra scrutiny. With AI capabilities so far along you have tier 1 ready for free…
Have you considered that some service just shouldn’t exist in their current form if they cannot be made to not offer illegal content representing minors?
There are two separate content moderation issues at play here: user-generated content and Meta & advertisers-generated content. The moderation challenge related to the fomer is much harder. But this article is about the latter. The researchers literally found these ads in Meta's own ad library. Meta sells these ads so they must content moderate them. There is no excuse.
> I'm wondering what people expect these companies to do? Human moderators?
They could just set the minimum ad spend at a level that makes moderation possible.
Let's say it costs $15 to have a human spend 15 minutes checking an ad. If the minimum spend per ad is $100 it'd easily cover the costs of the check. And I imagine most ad campaigns are spending a lot more than $100.
Occasionally my girlfriend will comment on something she saw in an ad, even buy things off them. Thing is though that ad platforms don't seem to be doing anything meaningful to stop bad actors.
So really, clicking any ad and interacting with it amounts to placing your trust in a total stranger with the only criteria being they paid a little bit of money for you to see them. To which you will then download their software, give them your credit card, or whatever the end goal is.
It's far easier to assume anything in an advertisement is a scam and block them accordingly.
The entire world has social standards that people generally abide by in private residences -- set by the owners of those residences. Just because something is happening everywhere, doesn't mean another thing can't happen too.
> At this scale it's pretty mind bogglingly difficult to moderate down everything.
Well that means don't do the thing that you can't control, or they shouldn't be legally allowed to do the thing they can't control.
Additionally, for one of the biggest companies in the planet, that has done mind bogglingly difficult things in order to make profit, that's the lamest excuse ever.
tbf they generally don't even try with moderation. A few years back they made a multimillion pound settlement with a UK consumer finance guru who was sick his face being used to fake endorsements of scam products promoted mainly via Facebook ads
So you'd think that a sophisticated tech company that had paid that financial penalty would find it pretty easy to have a simple text filter for "Martin Lewis" and perhaps even an image filter for his very distinctive face which pushed those ads into a moderation queue, particularly if they both appear together in the scam-ridden investment opportunity category and the advertiser is a new one (that's probably not going to stick around under that name for very long). But no, they remained a common theme for years afterwards...
And, as the sibling ad points out, if you report stuff that's obvious scams you get told they've reviewed it and found it to be OK. Plus you get more of it promoted into your feed because hitting the report button is a form of interaction with it...
I actually had some sympathy for Facebook when they were condemned for not moderating fake news from Myanmar they have no real capacity to moderate, or condemned for daring to slap the gentlest of content warnings on antivax stuff in contexts they understand perfectly well... but when it comes to ads they get paid for, which is a much smaller fraction of Facebook content that is unambiguously not protected speech or a matter of opinion, their lack of effort is quite something to behold.
>I'm wondering what people expect these companies to do?
How is this our problem? We make the rules, the obey them. If they can't they ought to be shut down. If they want to argue that at their scale they can't abide by the rules society lays down for them we can cut them down to something human sized.
It's not everyone else's fault that executives etc. decided to grow their userbase/business/profits at all costs, i.e. with no concerns for the harms they've been causing. It's similar to how adding more and more code, more and more features, more and more stuff into software increases technical debt. Apparently "growth at all costs" for a business equates to ethical/moral debt, quite obviously in this case. Which shouldn't be surprising to anyone who understands/recognises the mechanisms of greed.
For software, sometimes paying off that debt means getting rid of some of your features/code/stuff. i.e. there's another alternative to "let's AI the AI".
scale the business down. shrink the number of users. make less money.
> I'm wondering what people expect these companies to do? Human moderators? Sure, but Meta products have approximately half the worlds population using them
In this case, we are talking about ad images.
1000 moderators x 5 second per image to click deny or approve.
So 1000 moderators review 720000 ads/hour
Per 8 hour workday:
5,760,000 ads
Per full 24h day:
17,280,000 ads
So we will use 3k for 3 shifts.
51,840,000 new image ads moderated per day.
At ~$1,000 per moderator per month (most jobs are outsourced to Africa and Asia):
$3 million per month
$36 million per year
I don't see any public numbers for how many new ads they add daily but meta reported removing 159 million scam ads during 2025, so equivalent to around 436,000 scam ad removals per day.
They make 200 billion dollars a year, 60 billion of which is profit, so they could afford to hire a million more moderators at first world wages (50k/yr) and still be making 10 billion dollars a year in profit, and that's assuming nothing else changed, if they stopped spending money on VR, AI, and other horseshit, they'd have even more money for moderators.
They can also choose to show fewer ads, i.e., only show manually human reviewed ads, and if there are too many to review, charge more per ad until there aren't too many.
Human moderators? Sure, but Meta products have approximately half the worlds population using them.
It doesn't matter how many people are consuming the ads, it matters how many companies are placing the ads.
Let's not invent excuses for the trillion-dollar tech companies. Meta has plenty of money to put humans in the loop. It just chooses not to because some upper manager needs to buy a fifth house, or a third private island.
Think of it as an individual and instead of social property real property. If a person is stealing retail goods every day, no one asks "what should he do?" what he "should do" is face consequences until he is not a person who steals every day.
Just because the social property giant corporations steal is somewhat abstract doesn't change any of the fundamentals of right and wrong. I'm so tired of this ultra-capitalist "right to be massive" assumption which places the value of unhinged monopolistic growth over maintaining social commons. What these companies "should do" is face penalties until they can safely manage their scale, or scope their scale to a level they can maintain safely.
What a terrible outlook. “It’s not possible to do this thing safely at Meta’s scale” is an apologist cop-out. First of all, yes it is, Meta makes tens of billions of dollars of pure profit every year. They were that profitable while blowing tens of billions on the Metaverse debacle! They are not resource-constrained in any meaningful sense.
Secondly, if I’m wrong and it’s not possible, then you stop providing the dangerous service! There’s no reason Meta has to exist in its current form. If it can’t meet basic standards of human dignity in its product offerings, then it should change or cease to exist.
> Reuters also reported that Meta internally projected in 2024 that it would earn about 10% of its overall annual revenue – or $16 billion – from running ads for scams and banned goods, internal company documents show.
At $employer we're CONSTANTLY fighting fake ads cloning our brand. Their various brand protection features seem deliberately inept and ineffective.
If I had to guess, this is to try and distance child sexual assault from the concept of "pornography", and maybe make it more abundantly clear that "child porn" is always, 100% of the time, sexual abuse.
I dunno, language evolves like this sometimes. Like "smoking" which is now called "tobacco use" or "cannabis use" to clarify more what is being smoked
I'd be interested to know if the same amount of leniency shown here would be applied if we were talking about ads depicting violence against elected politicians.
Somewhat related: open YouTube in an incognito window.
Search something rather innocuous like "news". Click the first thing then go back to the main page. You have to watch through the ad.
The amount of slop you will get suggested as soon as the algorithm warms up is nuts. The ad you are first served might also be slop. I mean AI generated video advertising overt bogus cures (a memorable one recently - "did you know the Bible has the answer to Alzheimer's?") over AI slop footage.
When I compare to my normal/auth'd Youtube experience, it feels like a totally different app. I have never really experienced such a cheap illustration of the "Youtube rabbit hole" effect. The degree to which AI authored advertising is participating in this is imo pretty concerning if you have, in particular, older parents or relatives.
I tried this experiment out and it is right on the money. The ad I got was AI generated video with AI script & audio selling fake 16TB SSDs. Wonder if anybody has some insider info on how these ads are produced at scale / who's behind them
There is a whole dark ecosystem now for “UGC” (user generated content) and that includes services trying to disrupt it with AI. Ironically, (or fittingly?) the best research I’ve seen was via youtube videos.
Part of me would like to stop paying for a youtube premium family subscription because they keep raising the price, but my mom watches it a lot and I don’t want her to see (or have to see) those ads. They’re so unbelievably bad. It can’t be good for your brain to watch, the few times I’ve seen them on my work computer I can’t help but watch part of them.
Youtube is pushing a lot of AI features without creators' consent. Some of it can be turned off but others cannot. It's becoming a major problem. Can't wait till they lose so much money on the infrastructure that they have to remove it all.
The auto-translation especially bothers me. Kinda cool for casual viewing... but the inability to disable it gives me an immediate skeptical "this entire channel is probably AI slop" response before I recognize what's happened.
By the by, if you watch a video while logged in that someone sent you as being batshit crazy, and it's affecting your recommendations, you can go into your watch history and delete it from there so you don't get recommended similar videos.
Beyond these obviously deplorable ads, my wife got sniped by an ecommerce lookalike ad on Google the other day: a near-identical match of the vendor she was looking for, with a paid for sponsored ad (that was clearly linked to some chinese firm upon further review). Site had prices that were just a bit too good to be true, and a slightly different TLD that _I_ would've caught, but she missed because the price was a bit too good to be true. Only caught it when Citi asked me if I was spending 9000EGD on some random website.
And my point here is, we're in this great revolution of AI empowered everything and... these companies can't be bothered to scan this volume of AI ad slop to make sure we're not being actively scammed? Or having porn or CSAM spread? I understand it's a "perverse incentive" in the truest sense: they make money by taking the scammers money, but I was scammed once by an insanely clever lookalike Facebook ad, and had trusted their verified checkmark (about a decade ago)... with AI, these things should be a thing of the past.
That's a really common reaction to people first hearing about the delta between how society talks about the subject vs what they actually do about it. Its a bit like the fiction of the social safety net or strong institutions.
The truth is impunity is the rule, victims especially of CSA and CSAM, or revenge porn, or of Mark or Musk's companies generating naked images of their body have basically no power, and its an exception when someone who is an abuser AND has any amount of social standing is put away.
it can take awhile for things to work their way from NCMEC (national center for missing & exploited children) to the appropriate local agency, then have that agency do their investigation, get a warrant (if they can), etc. and that is assuming that there is even a cooperative jurisdiction for NCMEC to send the initial report to.
but, plenty of people do end up in prison, especially if its facebook/dropbox/gmail/etc... they just dont make the headlines (especially nationally) unless its especially heinous.
In most western countrys, is often more than 50% from CSAM from underaged teenagers, like selfies etc. And then are cases like some overmotivated parents post nude baby pictures. I guess such pictures also get flaged. But even if its just 50%, 18 million, your point still standes. Why are not more people in jail.
Does their definition of CSAM exclude material that's not unlawful in the US? People can be (let's say) tactical about its inclusion from case to case. But I can't say if it's the case here, nor how much it explains the 36 million not explained by other better replies.
I asked my grandpa about the business idea of self-serve magazine advertising. He said if you do that wait till you see the weird shit people will try to publish.
I wonder if we could learn anything from these cranky old timers.
If any of us did that clearly we’d be in jail for several years and put on the sex offenders register but when Meta appear to be hugely responsible for increases in teen suicide or crimes like these we get nothing. If corporations want the rights of individuals they equally should shoulder our shared societal responsibilities as well. I honestly don’t get how they can just pretend they aren’t responsible somehow because it’s slightly expensive to not commit crimes or something…
If you are downvoting this please explain why, it’s important that we come to a shared understanding how these things are ever okay for corporations and not individuals…
Our regulatory framework is so asleep at the wheel. It is as if there is this unpierceable veil if you operate as a corporate entity, as if multiple people's combined transgressions are less than a single person doing it.
Is it really asleep at the wheel or is it that decades of intense lobbying have crippled it? I mean of course it’s both, but I think it’s important to point out that it’s not just negligence, it’s more nefarious and selfish than that.
Move fast and break literally everything. I am so depressed by what the internet has become. Such potential only to become monopolist behemoth bullshit.
Meta is better than anyone at anti-ad-blocking. Even the best ad blockers struggle to keep ahead of the ever-changing structure served up by their websites, and the websites are intentionally bad to make you use the apps instead. But the apps are nearly immune to ad-blocking.
“Just stop using meta properties then”. Sure but some of us have wives, friends, etc
> but as Wired notes, it relies on "automated tools" as part of the process, which may have been how the more than 50 ads TTP discovered made it through.
Again, and again, and again, these technologies have proven ineffective to moderate content. User posted and otherwise. Until we have a legal mechanism in place to hold these companies meaningfully liable for this, it will not stop.
Every single one of these has the same damn list of excuses about cost of hiring human moderators, but I promise everyone reading this if you make the executives of a social network legally liable for distributing CSAM on their platforms, they will find all kinds of money to get human moderators really fucking quick.
The article also mentions that a ton of even worse ads were posted between when they contacted Meta and when they were ready to go live with the article, and some of the offending ads which were taken down had just been re-uploaded again and automatically approved.
Not only are their AI tools ineffective at what they claim they should be doing, they can't even be bothered to prevent removed ads from being re-uploaded later on.
I think people have been demanding this for ages but lobbying by social media companies against any change in the law is enormous.
As for the cost of content moderation, Meta has zero interest in any type of moderation to begin with. The cost is just a public-facing excuse. In Careless People, Wynn-Williams mentions that Facebook didn't do anything to stop anti rohingya posts in Myanmar because they did not have any fact checkers who could read Burmese. In other words, they did not have a single moderator in the damn country.
FB might or might not have a right to exist in someone's eyes, but the question remains: is 0.5c-like latency messaging across the world acceptable? Because facebook or not, given internets this is what you will end up with. People are people.
On the other hand, now try to ban that telecom. Gods will laugh.
Yeah and/but also the case it's not bidirectional enough
The eternal question of tech platforms - should we be responsible for what users post? (Ads are not user posted, so we can eliminated that factor. Even if posted by 'users' it's a separate pipeline) But with companies like Meta it doesn't even have to go that far - the philosophical conversation - because it's so hostile to users. People get banned for mild things all the time (apparently extra the case, since the 'pivot' to AI) while the absolutely horrible things you report never get taken down
> The eternal question of tech platforms - should we be responsible for what users post?
I would never say a platform has to be responsible for what a user posts, and to be clear, I mean either a user of the platform, or a user of the platform's ad tooling, or anything else. Anything that arrives via an upload button of some sort. However: If you as a platform then distribute what has been posted, yes, you are responsible for it. Your service is now broadcasting that content. If that content is harmful, you should be held responsible.
Who else conceivably could be? And if the response to this is "well we have way too much stuff coming in to moderate it" okay, then restrict how much stuff comes in. Require approval on individual posts or on accounts.
Like, this is such basic shit. If a newspaper printed CSAM on the front page, they would be arrested within the day. But because Facebook is real super big they just don't have to take care of their house? Ridiculous.
But they couldn't possibly do it at that the scale they're operating at. They couldn't hire enough people in the countries they operate, or know the language, or trust that who they do hire aren't corrupt or working against their interest. And they can't manually approve every ad, or make sure targeting isn't illegal or otherwise harmful.
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This is sarcasm, by the way. Most decent people make sure what they're about to do won't harm other people and if would cause harm they wouldn't do it. But social media companies and ad networks aren't run by decent people. They're run by people who believe their business is entitled to infinite scale regardless of how many people are harmed along the way.
>But they couldn't possibly do it at that the scale they're operating at. They couldn't hire enough people in the countries they operate, or know the language, or trust that who they do hire aren't corrupt or working against their interest. And they can't manually approve every ad, or make sure targeting isn't illegal or otherwise harmful.
you say sarcasm, but i think this is literally true.
this isn't a defense of facebook, i think that their scale makes it actually impossible (while remaining a going concern). the result should be that they arent allowed to operate at a scale that they cant handle, instead of being able to brush it under the rug every ~6 months when an incident hits the news cycle.
We used to say computers can't make decisions because they can't meaningfully be held responsible for those decisions. Now the vibe seems to be that computers should make decisions because instead of anyone being held responsible we can just say "the computer made a mistake and it is very sorry" and effectively shield anyone from being responsible. But the thing is, machines don't do stuff. Not from a responsibility standpoint. My car doesn't drive, I do. It may provide the means, but I decide where we're going and how we're going there. Even with the active cruise on, the car didn't speed, I did. The car may have hit the wall, but I caused the accident. the car ran that person over, but I killed someone, not the car. The machine did what someone told it to do. If someone told it to do a bad thing, or someone did a bad job telling it not to a bad thing, that person is responsible.
When people started using Grok to make CSAM the platform's response was to paywall image generation. If we don't start making the driver responsible for what the car does, the coder responsible for what the code does, the CEO responsible for what the company does, they will continue to exploit people in increasingly horiffic ways.
So you throw theZuck in the hoosegow. Now what? FB will continue printing money and doing the things it always has even if under new management. Why do you think it'll change with just throw theZuck in jail?
Because at that point, the last guy to run a company that displayed gross negligence to CSAM distribution is sitting in prison.
That serves as an example, a deterrent. "Clean up the act, or you too can go from being a hyper-wealthy executive to the biohazard cleanup detail in a cell block at Leavenworth."
(This reminds me of, and not to be political. This is a technological, rather than political angle) There's a TED talk by Carole Cadwalladr about "Facebook's role in Brexit" in which she talks about the ads the Leave campaign ran. This is what is meant by Facebook's "breaking democracy", where campaigns don't have to go through the usual disclosure avenues
Are there reasons why Brexit might have been popular? Yes, in the sense I've heard about them. Should we then be blaming Facebook?
The problem is consolidated power. Carole herself said in her talk that it's not about Trump vs no Trump (sorry. It's been a bit since I've seen the talk. I shouldn't just paraphrase), it's about citizens' right to meaningfully choose in an information landscape
This is the problem with Facebook. It becomes an Everything App. Who cares about fraud (say, on marketplace, needless to say the site itself, the way it's screwed over businesses) on the platform when you can grow big? Let's say in this case, the actual case I'm commenting on - "Facebook didn't know". Well then that's the problem, isn't it? It's a company set up by someone of low moral reasoning (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1692122) that doesn't set out to make a good product, something people will actually like. It's about dominating an industry and ads can be totally unvetted or scummy or scammy if it enables them to do this
I've noticed on YouTube I see a lot of adult sexual ads. Things like home cleaning ads that have an unmistakable wood-grain image of fellatio. I've always wondered "how are these getting past the moderators?". I guess the answer is the obvious one: no one is moderating anything.
Google Play Store showed my child an ad of a bloody body on a bed for a murder mystery game. The game was rated 18+ and the account had my daughter’s correct single digit age.
I reported the ad and a week later it was still there. I switched to Apple.
Listen, we need you to verify your identity in order for us to not serve these ads to your kids. It's very important that you do this.
How did that work out for you? Safer? What was the experience switching, for you and for your kid?
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Reported an obvious sexual ad the other day and got a very AI generated response that started with "Dear Username" stating that they reviewed the ad and found nothing wrong with it.
Before I gave up on Facebook entirely, I reported an ad that was an explicit blow job and received a similar response and this was before AI was huge. I really don't think they've ever cared.
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The Dead Internet Theory is real!
The other answer is that the people creating these ads have the resources to continuously try and bypass filters/moderation.
If there is filters/moderation.
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Man I got a “clothing brand” last night on YouTube of a VERY young girl wearing… not much, and it didn’t fit well in all the wrong / revealing places…
Reported the add but damn YouTube, the freaky fake medical ads are bad enough.
I just don't get their algorithm. I used to show YT videos to my students but I stopped that totally because of this kind of crap.
There have been Youtube ads that are undeniable scams for years, so it's no surprise it's compleatly unmoderated.
The worst ads are the shady games with all sorts of sexual references. They don't end no matter how many times you report it, block the ads or select the "less gaming ads" option.
The more surprising thing with YouTube is how much obvious copyright infringement is in ads. The whole platform seems oriented around copyright enforcement, but ads seem to get a pass.
Is it surprising? Google and Facebook can barely police the content their human users post.
Metas ads are all over the place. Thomas Kehl, one of the founders of "Finanzfluss" (a german site/content creation company about finance) is currently suing meta because scammers keep using his picture.
There really needs to be some harder punishments for this kind of behavior, after all meta profits by selling scammy ads.
All their fines are merely a cost of doing business, and they won't change their ways until the fines hurt.
This is so true. When you have a billion users, you can literally lose hundreds of millions of users and it wouldn't make a dent. The only way is to get the government involved and regulate this and just keep hammering them with massive fines that really make a dent in their bottom line.
For a lot of people, government regulation of this sort is not desirable, but at what point does someone need to drop the hammer to stop this?
I guess you're used to standard billions (a million millions). A US billion would certainly suffer from losing hundreds of millions, you're talking about a double-digit percent.
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Something like three strikes and the CEO, top executives, and three primary share holders go to jail while forcing the company to dissolve seems to be the only solution to removing bad actors in corporate settings.
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> When you have a billion users
What if they make a shadow profile for you? Do you count as a user? What if you've tried to delete your account and you can't? (I meant a real account here, not even a shadow profile. People have had the things reactivated years later)
As it should be. If the cost of fixing the problem is greater than the amount of harm the problem is actually causing to society, then it shouldn't be fixed. Set fine amounts accordingly. (Whether we actually do set fines this way is, of course, questionable. And probably this particular problem would get fixed even if there were no fine merely because of the reputational damage it's causing, but I'm speaking in generalities here.)
you don't think one of the world's biggest media platforms disseminating CSAM is causing meaningful harm to society?
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Meta is still running ads that suggest violence against politicians, when reported they say it does not contravene their policies.
Politicians don't count.
Guys, it's fine.
Relax.
It's only a crime if someone else does it or is not sufficiently wealthy, otherwise it's a mistake.
I'm starting to wonder if any of this is better than local newspapers, where there's an editor with oversight over all content...
What's crazy is how long it takes to report something like this to a big company and actually have them take action on it. I remember 10 years ago I reported a Giphy ad for the same thing, and it took them months to take action.
Out of curiosity, I've ran some experiments on Facebook for stuff like this.
Results:
- Reporting a message does nothing no matter how much the content breaks their terms of use. 100% of messages I reported bounced back in a matter of minutes with "no action"
- However, using the "request another review" function, which is available after the initial "no action" response, actually seems to work. How quickly this works seems to vary, I've had actions taken as result of this from 1 day to multiple weeks.
Interesting, I've kind of made a hobby of reporting scams and hate speech and watching it take a week to come back with "it's no violation", requesting another and getting the same response in another week. I've never seen them do anything no matter how obvious or awful it is.
Meta doesn't have to give a shit, because they're huge.
Tiny providers have to scramble, because they'll be destroyed by a single failure to handle it fast enough.
Step 1: establish a process and business unit to "address the problem"
Step 2: wait for it to get out of the news cycle.
Step 3: donate heavily via lobbyists to the opponents of the politicians who called you out
Step 4: de-fund the unit down until just barely enough that you're not lying when you say you "have a team working very hard on the problem." A dozen people in some third world country you pay a dollar a month each, for example.
It’s not crazy when you consider that their customers are the advertisers, not you. They want to keep their customers happy and buying more ads.
So that's why they are lobbying for age verification, i.e ID verification?
Meta is lobbying for age verification because it helps provide an institutional moat for them against the open web.
no age verification is not ID verification
through meta might have lobbied on both
but they lobby for specific (often pretty bad) forms of age verification to be able to
- spy on people better
- have a regulatory moat where due to beady designed laws new alternatives have a much higher hurdle/initial investments and in turn never get anywhere
Even if they are caught and it’s illegal, as long as the fine for it is less than the roi of running them the companies will not stop.
I'm wondering what people expect these companies to do? Human moderators? Sure, but Meta products have approximately half the worlds population using them. At this scale it's pretty mind bogglingly difficult to moderate down everything. The ads/posts served per second is an astronomical number.
This truly is a case where AI is the solution. There's no way to automate this at scale with humans. As AI gets better hopefully detection and moderation will catch up
In many industries, if you can't do something safely, you simply can't do it at all. Maybe yeah, if you can't build a sufficiently strong automated system, then you need human moderators across a huge number of locations. Them's the breaks for running a wildly profitable service that half the world's population uses.
> In many industries, if you can't do something safely, you simply can't do it at all.
Absolutely!
Related story... my wife works in a regulated industry and she was running facebook ads for one of their new products. Facebook had just introduced Ai generated ad-copy and the ad agency didn't know that option was turned on by default so they uploaded all of the ad-copy that was approved by legal and then facebook was running all of these alternative ads that were actually illegal because the copy it wrote were all claims they are not allowed to make in that industry. They only caught it because one of the ads was served to my wife and she immediately noticed it was copy that was not approved and something they could not claim.
I always assumed these shady ads were created by shady people, and I think a lot are, but I wonder how many companies are unintentionally running shady ads because facebook generated those ads.
Then let's not have any infrastructure or services because some people use it to commit crimes. The car industry doesn't prevent accidents, the telecom industry doesn't prevent scams, the school industry doesn't prevent bullying, the nightlife industry doesn't prevent rape or drug use and i can go on and on. You can't have a perfect system, people will do what they do, all you can do is trying to prevent those crimes but don't expect 100% success rate and certainly you can't stop everything.
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> I'm wondering what people expect these companies to do? Human moderators? Sure, but Meta products have approximately half the worlds population using them. At this scale it's pretty mind bogglingly difficult to moderate down everything. The ads/posts served per second is an astronomical number.
It's Facebook's problem if Facebook can't do the things Facebook is required to do. "Oh no it is hard"? Tough. Either they find a way or find they're no longer allowed to do this business.
> This truly is a case where AI is the solution. There's no way to automate this at scale with humans. As AI gets better hopefully detection and moderation will catch up
AI *might* solve this, or Meta's AI may be trapped in an arms race with advertisers trying to get around it for whatever reason has driven them to do this in the first place; but fully automated mass-generation of personalised ads was never a mandatory part of their business plan, so it was a problem they never needed to have.
Your right! We should also reduce food safety requirements for McDonalds and other large restaurants. At their scale it’s just too hard to keep everything clean.
To my mind the simplest answer is that if it isn’t possible to do it safely then you shouldn’t be able to do it.
Is this firehose of social media actually a societal benefit? I’m less and less convinced that it is.
Posts? Fair. But adverts? There is literally no reason they cannot all be human moderated. Every single one. People are paying to have their adverts placed. Put a small fee on each ad, if they must, for the initial review. Done.
Don’t buy into Meta’s narrative that there’s nothing that can be done while they continue to make money hand over fist.
They have the resources to hire a vast number of people. So yes they probably could manually review every ad. And either way it is their problem to solve. They are not entitled to be hugely profitable or free from the obligations that smaller organisations have.
Surely there is no need to review every ad. Coke and Apple and whatnot are not going to be doing this. New companies or companies with a history of complaints can face extra scrutiny. With AI capabilities so far along you have tier 1 ready for free…
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> At this scale it's pretty mind bogglingly difficult to moderate down everything.
no, it's just more work, and it's not like facebook could not afford to pay more people
Have you considered that some service just shouldn’t exist in their current form if they cannot be made to not offer illegal content representing minors?
There are two separate content moderation issues at play here: user-generated content and Meta & advertisers-generated content. The moderation challenge related to the fomer is much harder. But this article is about the latter. The researchers literally found these ads in Meta's own ad library. Meta sells these ads so they must content moderate them. There is no excuse.
> I'm wondering what people expect these companies to do? Human moderators?
They could just set the minimum ad spend at a level that makes moderation possible.
Let's say it costs $15 to have a human spend 15 minutes checking an ad. If the minimum spend per ad is $100 it'd easily cover the costs of the check. And I imagine most ad campaigns are spending a lot more than $100.
AI is generating ads that will be reviewed by AI that will then be pushed to humans largely to ignore.
Ad pipeline is malware at this point.
> Ad pipeline is malware at this point.
Always has been.
Occasionally my girlfriend will comment on something she saw in an ad, even buy things off them. Thing is though that ad platforms don't seem to be doing anything meaningful to stop bad actors.
So really, clicking any ad and interacting with it amounts to placing your trust in a total stranger with the only criteria being they paid a little bit of money for you to see them. To which you will then download their software, give them your credit card, or whatever the end goal is.
It's far easier to assume anything in an advertisement is a scam and block them accordingly.
The ads make money though. The cost to approve the media use and have someone quickly glance at it is going to be tiny compared to their revenue.
The entire world has social standards that people generally abide by in private residences -- set by the owners of those residences. Just because something is happening everywhere, doesn't mean another thing can't happen too.
> At this scale it's pretty mind bogglingly difficult to moderate down everything.
Well that means don't do the thing that you can't control, or they shouldn't be legally allowed to do the thing they can't control.
Additionally, for one of the biggest companies in the planet, that has done mind bogglingly difficult things in order to make profit, that's the lamest excuse ever.
Fine them out of existence.
tbf they generally don't even try with moderation. A few years back they made a multimillion pound settlement with a UK consumer finance guru who was sick his face being used to fake endorsements of scam products promoted mainly via Facebook ads
So you'd think that a sophisticated tech company that had paid that financial penalty would find it pretty easy to have a simple text filter for "Martin Lewis" and perhaps even an image filter for his very distinctive face which pushed those ads into a moderation queue, particularly if they both appear together in the scam-ridden investment opportunity category and the advertiser is a new one (that's probably not going to stick around under that name for very long). But no, they remained a common theme for years afterwards...
And, as the sibling ad points out, if you report stuff that's obvious scams you get told they've reviewed it and found it to be OK. Plus you get more of it promoted into your feed because hitting the report button is a form of interaction with it...
I actually had some sympathy for Facebook when they were condemned for not moderating fake news from Myanmar they have no real capacity to moderate, or condemned for daring to slap the gentlest of content warnings on antivax stuff in contexts they understand perfectly well... but when it comes to ads they get paid for, which is a much smaller fraction of Facebook content that is unambiguously not protected speech or a matter of opinion, their lack of effort is quite something to behold.
FB can't even be absolved for Myanmar, first off because they try to actively be a monopoly https://www.amazon.com/Careless-People-Cautionary-Power-Idea... they were told about it and nothing got done about it
>I'm wondering what people expect these companies to do?
How is this our problem? We make the rules, the obey them. If they can't they ought to be shut down. If they want to argue that at their scale they can't abide by the rules society lays down for them we can cut them down to something human sized.
Facebook is a pox on civilization, so one possibility is just firing it into the sun.
It's not everyone else's fault that executives etc. decided to grow their userbase/business/profits at all costs, i.e. with no concerns for the harms they've been causing. It's similar to how adding more and more code, more and more features, more and more stuff into software increases technical debt. Apparently "growth at all costs" for a business equates to ethical/moral debt, quite obviously in this case. Which shouldn't be surprising to anyone who understands/recognises the mechanisms of greed.
For software, sometimes paying off that debt means getting rid of some of your features/code/stuff. i.e. there's another alternative to "let's AI the AI".
scale the business down. shrink the number of users. make less money.
> I'm wondering what people expect these companies to do? Human moderators? Sure, but Meta products have approximately half the worlds population using them
In this case, we are talking about ad images.
1000 moderators x 5 second per image to click deny or approve.
So 1000 moderators review 720000 ads/hour
Per 8 hour workday: 5,760,000 ads
Per full 24h day: 17,280,000 ads
So we will use 3k for 3 shifts.
51,840,000 new image ads moderated per day.
At ~$1,000 per moderator per month (most jobs are outsourced to Africa and Asia):
$3 million per month $36 million per year
I don't see any public numbers for how many new ads they add daily but meta reported removing 159 million scam ads during 2025, so equivalent to around 436,000 scam ad removals per day.
They make 200 billion dollars a year, 60 billion of which is profit, so they could afford to hire a million more moderators at first world wages (50k/yr) and still be making 10 billion dollars a year in profit, and that's assuming nothing else changed, if they stopped spending money on VR, AI, and other horseshit, they'd have even more money for moderators.
They can also choose to show fewer ads, i.e., only show manually human reviewed ads, and if there are too many to review, charge more per ad until there aren't too many.
Human moderators? Sure, but Meta products have approximately half the worlds population using them.
It doesn't matter how many people are consuming the ads, it matters how many companies are placing the ads.
Let's not invent excuses for the trillion-dollar tech companies. Meta has plenty of money to put humans in the loop. It just chooses not to because some upper manager needs to buy a fifth house, or a third private island.
Their right to a business model doesn't outweigh the right of the public to not be harmed.
Think of it as an individual and instead of social property real property. If a person is stealing retail goods every day, no one asks "what should he do?" what he "should do" is face consequences until he is not a person who steals every day.
Just because the social property giant corporations steal is somewhat abstract doesn't change any of the fundamentals of right and wrong. I'm so tired of this ultra-capitalist "right to be massive" assumption which places the value of unhinged monopolistic growth over maintaining social commons. What these companies "should do" is face penalties until they can safely manage their scale, or scope their scale to a level they can maintain safely.
What a terrible outlook. “It’s not possible to do this thing safely at Meta’s scale” is an apologist cop-out. First of all, yes it is, Meta makes tens of billions of dollars of pure profit every year. They were that profitable while blowing tens of billions on the Metaverse debacle! They are not resource-constrained in any meaningful sense.
Secondly, if I’m wrong and it’s not possible, then you stop providing the dangerous service! There’s no reason Meta has to exist in its current form. If it can’t meet basic standards of human dignity in its product offerings, then it should change or cease to exist.
Meta will do whatever it can to run any and all ads.
Meta knowingly runs scam ads, they just charge more to run them: https://www.reuters.com/legal/litigation/consumer-watchdog-g...
> Reuters also reported that Meta internally projected in 2024 that it would earn about 10% of its overall annual revenue – or $16 billion – from running ads for scams and banned goods, internal company documents show.
At $employer we're CONSTANTLY fighting fake ads cloning our brand. Their various brand protection features seem deliberately inept and ineffective.
Non-specific terms are a pet peeve of mine in accusations.
Is this new term broader than the old term of CP or is it the same? Why did we even switch?
> Is this new term broader than the old term of CP or is it the same? Why did we even switch?
The purpose of the new term was to emphasize that producing it involves the actual abuse of an actual child.
And then somehow it got applied to drawings and lately computer-generated stuff.
> Why did we even switch?
If I had to guess, this is to try and distance child sexual assault from the concept of "pornography", and maybe make it more abundantly clear that "child porn" is always, 100% of the time, sexual abuse.
I dunno, language evolves like this sometimes. Like "smoking" which is now called "tobacco use" or "cannabis use" to clarify more what is being smoked
I'd be interested to know if the same amount of leniency shown here would be applied if we were talking about ads depicting violence against elected politicians.
Depends on the politician.
No, ads which are ANTI-pedophile aren't allowed.
Somewhat related: open YouTube in an incognito window.
Search something rather innocuous like "news". Click the first thing then go back to the main page. You have to watch through the ad.
The amount of slop you will get suggested as soon as the algorithm warms up is nuts. The ad you are first served might also be slop. I mean AI generated video advertising overt bogus cures (a memorable one recently - "did you know the Bible has the answer to Alzheimer's?") over AI slop footage.
When I compare to my normal/auth'd Youtube experience, it feels like a totally different app. I have never really experienced such a cheap illustration of the "Youtube rabbit hole" effect. The degree to which AI authored advertising is participating in this is imo pretty concerning if you have, in particular, older parents or relatives.
I tried this experiment out and it is right on the money. The ad I got was AI generated video with AI script & audio selling fake 16TB SSDs. Wonder if anybody has some insider info on how these ads are produced at scale / who's behind them
There is a whole dark ecosystem now for “UGC” (user generated content) and that includes services trying to disrupt it with AI. Ironically, (or fittingly?) the best research I’ve seen was via youtube videos.
>Search something rather innocuous like "news". Click the first thing then go back to the main page. You have to watch through the ad.
>The amount of slop you will get suggested as soon as the algorithm warms up is nuts. The ad you are first served might also be slop.
This did not happen for me. I got news about the SpaceX rocket and then more suggestions for news on the homepage, many related to politics.
I did notice that a bunch of the videos were in languages I did not understand though.
Part of me would like to stop paying for a youtube premium family subscription because they keep raising the price, but my mom watches it a lot and I don’t want her to see (or have to see) those ads. They’re so unbelievably bad. It can’t be good for your brain to watch, the few times I’ve seen them on my work computer I can’t help but watch part of them.
Install Brave Browser for your mom?
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Youtube is pushing a lot of AI features without creators' consent. Some of it can be turned off but others cannot. It's becoming a major problem. Can't wait till they lose so much money on the infrastructure that they have to remove it all.
The auto-translation especially bothers me. Kinda cool for casual viewing... but the inability to disable it gives me an immediate skeptical "this entire channel is probably AI slop" response before I recognize what's happened.
By the by, if you watch a video while logged in that someone sent you as being batshit crazy, and it's affecting your recommendations, you can go into your watch history and delete it from there so you don't get recommended similar videos.
Classy as usual.
Weird how they never thought to require ID verification for advertisers hmmm
https://archive.ph/4LhoU
I didn't realize the original was behind a paywall.
Beyond these obviously deplorable ads, my wife got sniped by an ecommerce lookalike ad on Google the other day: a near-identical match of the vendor she was looking for, with a paid for sponsored ad (that was clearly linked to some chinese firm upon further review). Site had prices that were just a bit too good to be true, and a slightly different TLD that _I_ would've caught, but she missed because the price was a bit too good to be true. Only caught it when Citi asked me if I was spending 9000EGD on some random website.
And my point here is, we're in this great revolution of AI empowered everything and... these companies can't be bothered to scan this volume of AI ad slop to make sure we're not being actively scammed? Or having porn or CSAM spread? I understand it's a "perverse incentive" in the truest sense: they make money by taking the scammers money, but I was scammed once by an insanely clever lookalike Facebook ad, and had trusted their verified checkmark (about a decade ago)... with AI, these things should be a thing of the past.
Non-paywall alternative:
https://www.engadget.com/2231100/meta-apps-displayed-ads-tha...
36 million CSAM media removed in 2025? Why aren't millions of people in jail? Wtf?
That's a really common reaction to people first hearing about the delta between how society talks about the subject vs what they actually do about it. Its a bit like the fiction of the social safety net or strong institutions.
The truth is impunity is the rule, victims especially of CSA and CSAM, or revenge porn, or of Mark or Musk's companies generating naked images of their body have basically no power, and its an exception when someone who is an abuser AND has any amount of social standing is put away.
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it can take awhile for things to work their way from NCMEC (national center for missing & exploited children) to the appropriate local agency, then have that agency do their investigation, get a warrant (if they can), etc. and that is assuming that there is even a cooperative jurisdiction for NCMEC to send the initial report to.
but, plenty of people do end up in prison, especially if its facebook/dropbox/gmail/etc... they just dont make the headlines (especially nationally) unless its especially heinous.
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In most western countrys, is often more than 50% from CSAM from underaged teenagers, like selfies etc. And then are cases like some overmotivated parents post nude baby pictures. I guess such pictures also get flaged. But even if its just 50%, 18 million, your point still standes. Why are not more people in jail.
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Well, 36 million images doesn't necessary imply 36 million people (in fact, it could possibly just imply 36...)
Does their definition of CSAM exclude material that's not unlawful in the US? People can be (let's say) tactical about its inclusion from case to case. But I can't say if it's the case here, nor how much it explains the 36 million not explained by other better replies.
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VPNs, hacked accounts, no jurisdiction, etc., I'd presume.
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Because the overwhelming majority of these reports are for teens sexting each other.
media without abuse is labelled csam
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> 36 million CSAM media removed in 2025?
No, not at all.
"removing over 36 million pieces of child sexual exploitation content last year"
Not CSAM.
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Bots, good luck finding the people responsible for them.
Also how much of the child exploitation material was created by the children themselves?
Teenagers who send each other nude photos are creating child exploitation material but you hardly want to put them jail for that.
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Because then half the world leaders would be in jail and the other half would lose their excuse for building mass surveillance systems
I asked my grandpa about the business idea of self-serve magazine advertising. He said if you do that wait till you see the weird shit people will try to publish.
I wonder if we could learn anything from these cranky old timers.
If any of us did that clearly we’d be in jail for several years and put on the sex offenders register but when Meta appear to be hugely responsible for increases in teen suicide or crimes like these we get nothing. If corporations want the rights of individuals they equally should shoulder our shared societal responsibilities as well. I honestly don’t get how they can just pretend they aren’t responsible somehow because it’s slightly expensive to not commit crimes or something…
If you are downvoting this please explain why, it’s important that we come to a shared understanding how these things are ever okay for corporations and not individuals…
Our regulatory framework is so asleep at the wheel. It is as if there is this unpierceable veil if you operate as a corporate entity, as if multiple people's combined transgressions are less than a single person doing it.
Is it really asleep at the wheel or is it that decades of intense lobbying have crippled it? I mean of course it’s both, but I think it’s important to point out that it’s not just negligence, it’s more nefarious and selfish than that.
Move fast and break literally everything. I am so depressed by what the internet has become. Such potential only to become monopolist behemoth bullshit.
>If any of us did that...
You don't have Metas legal team nor does the power structure find your valuable to have helping them out nor can you harm them if you don't like them.
There was, quite famously, a man who got away with these sorts of things for quite some time. He owned an island. I can't recall his name....
Oh yeah — you’re thinking of Sergey Brin’s buddy. They were neighbors for a while, they used to go kite surfing together. Great guy.
Repeal Section 230
This is what happens when you let a company be controlled by one person who has no reason to be accountable to anyone.
If Zuckerberg wants total voting control, then he can also deal with the consequences of being caught hosting CSAM.
Digital feudalism. Musk is building a city where he can prohibit worker organizing. Joe Hill died for nothing.
grok is this you
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Shut it all down.
As if you didn't need another reason to use an ad blocker.
Meta is better than anyone at anti-ad-blocking. Even the best ad blockers struggle to keep ahead of the ever-changing structure served up by their websites, and the websites are intentionally bad to make you use the apps instead. But the apps are nearly immune to ad-blocking.
“Just stop using meta properties then”. Sure but some of us have wives, friends, etc
> and ran across Facebook, Threads, Messenger and Instagram.
So it's the SAME AD PLATFORM? Even in MESSENGER? My god. Not only is this whole thing horrible but it's doubly so
> AI-generated
How on earth can they know?
> but as Wired notes, it relies on "automated tools" as part of the process, which may have been how the more than 50 ads TTP discovered made it through.
Again, and again, and again, these technologies have proven ineffective to moderate content. User posted and otherwise. Until we have a legal mechanism in place to hold these companies meaningfully liable for this, it will not stop.
Every single one of these has the same damn list of excuses about cost of hiring human moderators, but I promise everyone reading this if you make the executives of a social network legally liable for distributing CSAM on their platforms, they will find all kinds of money to get human moderators really fucking quick.
The article also mentions that a ton of even worse ads were posted between when they contacted Meta and when they were ready to go live with the article, and some of the offending ads which were taken down had just been re-uploaded again and automatically approved.
Not only are their AI tools ineffective at what they claim they should be doing, they can't even be bothered to prevent removed ads from being re-uploaded later on.
I think people have been demanding this for ages but lobbying by social media companies against any change in the law is enormous.
As for the cost of content moderation, Meta has zero interest in any type of moderation to begin with. The cost is just a public-facing excuse. In Careless People, Wynn-Williams mentions that Facebook didn't do anything to stop anti rohingya posts in Myanmar because they did not have any fact checkers who could read Burmese. In other words, they did not have a single moderator in the damn country.
More specifically, these were for ads. They received compensation to distribute this matierial.
FB might or might not have a right to exist in someone's eyes, but the question remains: is 0.5c-like latency messaging across the world acceptable? Because facebook or not, given internets this is what you will end up with. People are people.
On the other hand, now try to ban that telecom. Gods will laugh.
Yeah and/but also the case it's not bidirectional enough
The eternal question of tech platforms - should we be responsible for what users post? (Ads are not user posted, so we can eliminated that factor. Even if posted by 'users' it's a separate pipeline) But with companies like Meta it doesn't even have to go that far - the philosophical conversation - because it's so hostile to users. People get banned for mild things all the time (apparently extra the case, since the 'pivot' to AI) while the absolutely horrible things you report never get taken down
> The eternal question of tech platforms - should we be responsible for what users post?
I would never say a platform has to be responsible for what a user posts, and to be clear, I mean either a user of the platform, or a user of the platform's ad tooling, or anything else. Anything that arrives via an upload button of some sort. However: If you as a platform then distribute what has been posted, yes, you are responsible for it. Your service is now broadcasting that content. If that content is harmful, you should be held responsible.
Who else conceivably could be? And if the response to this is "well we have way too much stuff coming in to moderate it" okay, then restrict how much stuff comes in. Require approval on individual posts or on accounts.
Like, this is such basic shit. If a newspaper printed CSAM on the front page, they would be arrested within the day. But because Facebook is real super big they just don't have to take care of their house? Ridiculous.
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But they couldn't possibly do it at that the scale they're operating at. They couldn't hire enough people in the countries they operate, or know the language, or trust that who they do hire aren't corrupt or working against their interest. And they can't manually approve every ad, or make sure targeting isn't illegal or otherwise harmful.
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This is sarcasm, by the way. Most decent people make sure what they're about to do won't harm other people and if would cause harm they wouldn't do it. But social media companies and ad networks aren't run by decent people. They're run by people who believe their business is entitled to infinite scale regardless of how many people are harmed along the way.
>But they couldn't possibly do it at that the scale they're operating at. They couldn't hire enough people in the countries they operate, or know the language, or trust that who they do hire aren't corrupt or working against their interest. And they can't manually approve every ad, or make sure targeting isn't illegal or otherwise harmful.
you say sarcasm, but i think this is literally true.
this isn't a defense of facebook, i think that their scale makes it actually impossible (while remaining a going concern). the result should be that they arent allowed to operate at a scale that they cant handle, instead of being able to brush it under the rug every ~6 months when an incident hits the news cycle.
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We used to say computers can't make decisions because they can't meaningfully be held responsible for those decisions. Now the vibe seems to be that computers should make decisions because instead of anyone being held responsible we can just say "the computer made a mistake and it is very sorry" and effectively shield anyone from being responsible. But the thing is, machines don't do stuff. Not from a responsibility standpoint. My car doesn't drive, I do. It may provide the means, but I decide where we're going and how we're going there. Even with the active cruise on, the car didn't speed, I did. The car may have hit the wall, but I caused the accident. the car ran that person over, but I killed someone, not the car. The machine did what someone told it to do. If someone told it to do a bad thing, or someone did a bad job telling it not to a bad thing, that person is responsible.
When people started using Grok to make CSAM the platform's response was to paywall image generation. If we don't start making the driver responsible for what the car does, the coder responsible for what the code does, the CEO responsible for what the company does, they will continue to exploit people in increasingly horiffic ways.
Zuckerberg needs to be arrested and imprisoned. These sociopaths aren't going to understand right and wrong on their own. It requires an intervention.
So you throw theZuck in the hoosegow. Now what? FB will continue printing money and doing the things it always has even if under new management. Why do you think it'll change with just throw theZuck in jail?
Presumably the new CEO would like to stay out of jail and will fix things?
Court monitor that ensures compliance. It's not that hard.
Because at that point, the last guy to run a company that displayed gross negligence to CSAM distribution is sitting in prison.
That serves as an example, a deterrent. "Clean up the act, or you too can go from being a hyper-wealthy executive to the biohazard cleanup detail in a cell block at Leavenworth."
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So according to you 60% of Americans are all pedophiles and “retarded” because they use AI. Glad to have such constructive discourse with you bud.
Saying X if for A and B, implies a non exclusive logical or.
Income is for daily necessities and long term investment.
(This reminds me of, and not to be political. This is a technological, rather than political angle) There's a TED talk by Carole Cadwalladr about "Facebook's role in Brexit" in which she talks about the ads the Leave campaign ran. This is what is meant by Facebook's "breaking democracy", where campaigns don't have to go through the usual disclosure avenues
Are there reasons why Brexit might have been popular? Yes, in the sense I've heard about them. Should we then be blaming Facebook?
The problem is consolidated power. Carole herself said in her talk that it's not about Trump vs no Trump (sorry. It's been a bit since I've seen the talk. I shouldn't just paraphrase), it's about citizens' right to meaningfully choose in an information landscape
This is the problem with Facebook. It becomes an Everything App. Who cares about fraud (say, on marketplace, needless to say the site itself, the way it's screwed over businesses) on the platform when you can grow big? Let's say in this case, the actual case I'm commenting on - "Facebook didn't know". Well then that's the problem, isn't it? It's a company set up by someone of low moral reasoning (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1692122) that doesn't set out to make a good product, something people will actually like. It's about dominating an industry and ads can be totally unvetted or scummy or scammy if it enables them to do this
We were better off with landlines and local journalism.
Just shut the company down, throw the executives in a deep dark hole and forget they exist. The world will be better off.