Meta Ran Ads That Contained AI-Generated Child Sexual Abuse Imagery

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?

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.

Tiny providers have to scramble, because they'll be destroyed by a single failure to handle it fast enough.

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

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.

Is this firehose of social media actually a societal benefit? I’m less and less convinced that it is.

no, it's just more work, and it's not like facebook could not afford to pay more people

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.

Ad pipeline is malware at this point.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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....

“Just stop using meta properties then”. Sure but some of us have wives, friends, etc

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.

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.

On the other hand, now try to ban that telecom. Gods will laugh.

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

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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.

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.