Comment by meric_

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.

> 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.

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.

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.

> 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?

> 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.

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.

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.

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.

> 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.

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.

>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.

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.

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.

> 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.

Their right to a business model doesn't outweigh the right of the public to not be harmed.

Facebook is a pox on civilization, so one possibility is just firing it into the sun.

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.