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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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
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.
---
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.
the amount of content posted per second to facebook is unfathomable. a quick google (just for a rough order of magnitude) says ~65,000 posts per second.
it would require millions on millions of employees, spread across ~every country. between the payroll, buildings and property, etc. i just dont think its possible at that scale.
(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
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?
So that's why they are lobbying for age verification, i.e ID verification?
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.
All their fines are merely a cost of doing business, and they won't change their ways until the fines hurt.
https://archive.ph/4LhoU
I didn't realize the original was behind a paywall.
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.
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.
VPNs, hacked accounts, no jurisdiction, etc., I'd presume.
Ah, yes. That's the Privacy is bad for Children argument. FB and Twitter never fudge with the appropriateness of their contents.
grok is this you
Not enough hitler
> 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.
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.
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
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.
---
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.
Don’t they have like an 80% gross margin?
the amount of content posted per second to facebook is unfathomable. a quick google (just for a rough order of magnitude) says ~65,000 posts per second.
it would require millions on millions of employees, spread across ~every country. between the payroll, buildings and property, etc. i just dont think its possible at that scale.
(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
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?
Shut it all down.