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.
But that can't be true! From the article (with a probably irrelevant fact added by me):
"Sexual exploitation is horrific, and we work aggressively to keep it off our platform" a Meta [which in the past 2 years has laid off and disbanded all teams responsible for this] spokesperson says.
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.
Facebook literally trolls you when you report criminal activity, rampant well-documented scams, on their site. They write back and tell you it's not violating their policy and ask if you want to support for your personal problem.
I received a similar ad (mine was from the shark tank people), reported it and got a message similar to what you described. They were obviously stealing Mark Cuban’s likeness and peddling an obvious scam.
There are, but only for using IP of large corporations. If you put 12 seconds of a major label song in your video review of an album, that video belongs to the major label now.
It's a lot easier to automatically detect a match to 1 specific thing than detect a match to a completely novel thing that offends sensibilities in a similar way to other things.
There are basically always filters of some kind, though not necessarily the ones we want. The bigger the target that filter represents, the more effort is spent breaking it.
Use the unhook extension, ublock origin extension and firefox. Also don't hesitate to use the "Block element" feature for ublock. Get some control back from big tech :)
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.
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.
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.
10^9 is the standard definition of a billion, it's very wrong to call 10^12 a "standard billion." You can say "long scale billion" if you want to refer to the definitively non-standard 10^12 billion.
To quibble/add-nuance: The words have diverged into a false-friend [0] situation. It looks like the same word, but the correct/standard meaning depends on which language is being used at the time.
If someone is writing English and puts "billion" for 10^12, that's a translation error, much like writing "my grandfather became pregnant when he realized he'd locked the keys inside the car." (Instead of "embarrassed.")
Conversely, if I wrote a French or German sentence and put "billion" for 10^9, then I'd be the one making the translation mistake.
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.
Careful, I was called a "radical" on this site for suggesting a corporate death penalty. Because jobs are so important that when a corporation risks its own existence so it can break laws, dissolving the corporation as punishment is the government's fault and not the corporation's.
Ah, what a pleasure to imagine that scenario, however unlikely, for just a few seconds. People profiting from running unethical ads and child sexual abuse material, for whom financial gain is more important than any ethics, laws or health of others, who frankly speaking don't give a fuck about anyone else but themselves amassing more money, being held responsible and being moved to a new, very different kind of home behind bars. It would be as if angels started to sing and cleanse planet Earth just a tiny little bit. We would have reason to rejoice and celebrate. On the streets! On the roofs! Everywhere! Celebrate that the law still has teeth, and is upheld. It would also be a nice measure to heal other businesses from many bad practices.
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.)
Yes it's meaningful, and the fine amount should reflect that. But hypothetically, if it's (just throwing a random number out there) 1 image in 50 billion, and Facebook gets more benefit from the 50 billion good images than society loses from the 1 bad one, and society recovers its loss from Facebook via a fine, but the fine isn't big enough to make them change their behavior, how exactly is that a problem?
The problem is equating profitability with what societies want and don’t want.
Morality exists outside of the business world (and it should inside as well).
Further, it is a societies’ right to enforce the boundaries of what business are allow to do / not do.
For example: banning ads along roads and scenic areas.
Idk, the whole idea of “how much fines will I get doing X shitty business practice” is just gross. I’d rather see harsher enforcement to keep businesses on the straight and narrow more often than not.
First let's not use an unqualified label of "CSAM" when talking about generated images.
But if a thousand people see some ad then the amount of damage is not much compared to their overall business. I'd go for a healthy penalty on top, and adding in more transparency to make sure they don't hide the real extent of the problem, but it's still probably small to them.
Getting Facebook to put in a reasonable amount of blocking effort is good. But it wouldn't fully fix the problem.
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
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.
It’s mostly on her tv so I don’t really know how to get around that, at least not in a way that’s easier and more reliable than paying. I tell myself at least it’s cheaper than cable haha.
If you have a Google TV try SmartTube. It's an independently developed app with a custom interface, so that might put some people off. For just watching videos without obnoxious ads its great though.
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.
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.
The car industry is constantly innovating trying to prevent accidents and make them less damaging to occupants
> the school industry doesn't prevent bullying
They try to, though. There's all sorts of initiatives to reduce and prevent bullying. Whether or not they are effective, they are still trying and have been working on this for decades
> the nightlife industry doesn't prevent rape or drug use
There are tons of efforts in clubs and bars to make people aware of this problem and reduce occurrences of rapes. Drug use maybe less so.
> the telecom industry doesn't prevent scams
Yeah, they absolutely are shitting the bed on this one, I'll give you that. But they should be doing better.
> 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.
There was just an outbreak at Taco Bell - should we fine Yum! Brands out of existence. liquidate their assets and imprison the executives, like some people elsewhere in the discussion seem to be advocating for? Should we add a few billion dollars in operating costs in increased food safety regulations?
The societally optimal amount of regulation will most likely not completely eliminate outbreaks, presuming diminishing returns.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
I think AI should the point where companies take some responsibility for the content produced with their tools. When the entire purpose of a machine is a form of thinking there should be some responsibility for what it thinks. It is nothing like a general purpose tool that the user just invokes.
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.
I think there's also the "roll up a whole network at once" approach they prefer to take for things like this - hence nothing will happen for months/years whilst investigations happen in secret and then there'll be a day where you get 40 coordinated raids across 10 countries which lead to tens of people being arrested. Then of course there's another period of months/years where they have to work on the new stuff they've got from that raid and also preparing for trials, etc.
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.
No, it's the "local law enforcement struggles to handle largely anonymous international crimes" note. I'm not arguing anything; I'm just describing the reality.
> Teenagers who send each other nude photos are creating child exploitation material but you hardly want to put them jail for that.
Well rational thinking people wouldn't. A great many using CSAM as a wedge to de-anonymize the Internet or institute regressive "profanity" laws are often neither.
> 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.
---
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.
Well, tough. Maybe they should have to find a way. If that means requiring everybody to have to pay to afford the moderators then so be it. All the other companies would have to as well.
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. add in instagram (which is worse for CSAM) and its gotta be at least double that.
it would require millions on millions of employees, spread across ~every country. between the payroll, buildings and property, equipment, etc. i just dont think its possible at that scale.
(again, emphasizing that im not saying this as an excuse for facebook, but that i dont really think facebook/instagram should exist at all)
No, because most ads are created by automated systems (many of which are scam/spam ads) and Meta doesn't want to lose revenue by slowing the system down to human speed.
I agree and the obvious solution is: Nothing should exist at that scale. In fact, "Able to effectively moderate your product," strikes me as an excellent standard to hold them to, then let their product find the natural usercount and price point they can manage.
Who ever said that companies should have the right to exploit network effects to dominate online communications?
Facebook absolutely could remain a going concern while dealing with all of these problems, the problem is that they would be spending money to lose money.
One of the more perverse aspects of risk prevention is that riskier customers are often way more lucrative. It's kind of inherent to the notion that markets price risk into transactions. The thing is, illegal behavior is also just a particular kind of risk: if someone wants to sell nudify apps or scam old people, Facebook could conceivably be on the hook[0] for damages if they're caught. And in a sense, a risk premium is just a fancy kind of bribe: if Facebook won't take my ads because they think they're too risky, then I'll just pay more and more until Facebook accepts them.
With illegal behavior, we hope that we can make the punishment high enough that Facebook refuses any conceivable risk premium the perpetrators of that behavior would be willing to pay. The problem is that Facebook is really desperate for any increasing growth story, and when you're too big to fail, your growth story is to drip-feed enshittify your stack. Increasing tolerance for illegal behavior is downstream of this: you cut enforcement, tell them to automate more, they become easier to bypass... and you make more money. Because it turns out all that risky behavior... is only risky for normal people. Facebook can launder[1] the risk away and make a tidy profit.
[0] Do not tell me about CDA 230, I was there when the old magic was written.
[1] See also, HSBC turning themselves into a literal money laundering operation.
Right, which is why my suggestion is that we skip fines, because they demonstrably don't work, and we go directly to: you, $executive_at_facebook, have participated in the distribution of CSAM and will now be prosecuted.
Make that the policy, and I'd bet my life savings that Facebook, miraculously, will figure out how to detect this shit with bulletproof accuracy.
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
https://archive.ph/4LhoU
I didn't realize the original was behind a paywall.
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.
But that can't be true! From the article (with a probably irrelevant fact added by me):
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.
Yet you can’t run Linux on a Chromebook with a minor child user.
How did that work out for you? Safer? What was the experience switching, for you and for your kid?
Haven’t seen any bloody bodies advertised to my child… yet.
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.
Facebook literally trolls you when you report criminal activity, rampant well-documented scams, on their site. They write back and tell you it's not violating their policy and ask if you want to support for your personal problem.
Absolutely. My uncle got taken by an “investment club” supposedly endorsed by Warren Buffet and run day to day by some real financial person.
All communications were via WhatsApp. They started with real stock tips (which were pretty good actually!) and then did a pump and dump.
See: https://www.cleuremissionfund.com/
I received a similar ad (mine was from the shark tank people), reported it and got a message similar to what you described. They were obviously stealing Mark Cuban’s likeness and peddling an obvious scam.
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.
There are, but only for using IP of large corporations. If you put 12 seconds of a major label song in your video review of an album, that video belongs to the major label now.
It's a lot easier to automatically detect a match to 1 specific thing than detect a match to a completely novel thing that offends sensibilities in a similar way to other things.
There are basically always filters of some kind, though not necessarily the ones we want. The bigger the target that filter represents, the more effort is spent breaking it.
The filter you want is named 'uBlock Origin' :)
Indeed, and the Revanced apk customisation on Android, and SmartTube on Google TV.
I've not seen an ad from Youtube for probably 10+ years on my devices (since whenever Vanced made the apk customisations popular).
Without ublock origin internet is so dirty.
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.
Use the unhook extension, ublock origin extension and firefox. Also don't hesitate to use the "Block element" feature for ublock. Get some control back from big tech :)
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.
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.
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.
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.
10^9 is the standard definition of a billion, it's very wrong to call 10^12 a "standard billion." You can say "long scale billion" if you want to refer to the definitively non-standard 10^12 billion.
To quibble/add-nuance: The words have diverged into a false-friend [0] situation. It looks like the same word, but the correct/standard meaning depends on which language is being used at the time.
If someone is writing English and puts "billion" for 10^12, that's a translation error, much like writing "my grandfather became pregnant when he realized he'd locked the keys inside the car." (Instead of "embarrassed.")
Conversely, if I wrote a French or German sentence and put "billion" for 10^9, then I'd be the one making the translation mistake.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_friend
I doubt they are saying any services out there have 1,000,000,000,000 users.
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.
Careful, I was called a "radical" on this site for suggesting a corporate death penalty. Because jobs are so important that when a corporation risks its own existence so it can break laws, dissolving the corporation as punishment is the government's fault and not the corporation's.
Ah, what a pleasure to imagine that scenario, however unlikely, for just a few seconds. People profiting from running unethical ads and child sexual abuse material, for whom financial gain is more important than any ethics, laws or health of others, who frankly speaking don't give a fuck about anyone else but themselves amassing more money, being held responsible and being moved to a new, very different kind of home behind bars. It would be as if angels started to sing and cleanse planet Earth just a tiny little bit. We would have reason to rejoice and celebrate. On the streets! On the roofs! Everywhere! Celebrate that the law still has teeth, and is upheld. It would also be a nice measure to heal other businesses from many bad practices.
As long as we can also shoot tresspassers and thieves, you got a deal.
> 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?
Yes it's meaningful, and the fine amount should reflect that. But hypothetically, if it's (just throwing a random number out there) 1 image in 50 billion, and Facebook gets more benefit from the 50 billion good images than society loses from the 1 bad one, and society recovers its loss from Facebook via a fine, but the fine isn't big enough to make them change their behavior, how exactly is that a problem?
The problem is equating profitability with what societies want and don’t want.
Morality exists outside of the business world (and it should inside as well).
Further, it is a societies’ right to enforce the boundaries of what business are allow to do / not do.
For example: banning ads along roads and scenic areas.
Idk, the whole idea of “how much fines will I get doing X shitty business practice” is just gross. I’d rather see harsher enforcement to keep businesses on the straight and narrow more often than not.
Pretty sure this isn't what they are teaching at the best business schools.
First let's not use an unqualified label of "CSAM" when talking about generated images.
But if a thousand people see some ad then the amount of damage is not much compared to their overall business. I'd go for a healthy penalty on top, and adding in more transparency to make sure they don't hide the real extent of the problem, but it's still probably small to them.
Getting Facebook to put in a reasonable amount of blocking effort is good. But it wouldn't fully fix the problem.
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 believe that is referred to as: organised crime.
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.
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.
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.
I'm starting to wonder if any of this is better than local newspapers, where there's an editor with oversight over all content...
If stuff like this shows up in GAI I wonder what that means for how common such material is in the wild. Frightening.
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.
Could you elaborate?
I thought Meta wants to put the burden onto the platform, i.e. Apple and Google, is what they are lobbying for.
https://pluribusnews.com/news-and-events/meta-lobbies-for-ap...
What is the institutional moat?
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
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.
Install Brave Browser for your mom?
It’s mostly on her tv so I don’t really know how to get around that, at least not in a way that’s easier and more reliable than paying. I tell myself at least it’s cheaper than cable haha.
yeah have been struggling w that myself. Good luck!
If you have a Google TV try SmartTube. It's an independently developed app with a custom interface, so that might put some people off. For just watching videos without obnoxious ads its great though.
>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.
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.
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.
Although I agree, thats a textbook slippery slope you started out with there.
> The car industry doesn't prevent accidents
The car industry is constantly innovating trying to prevent accidents and make them less damaging to occupants
> the school industry doesn't prevent bullying
They try to, though. There's all sorts of initiatives to reduce and prevent bullying. Whether or not they are effective, they are still trying and have been working on this for decades
> the nightlife industry doesn't prevent rape or drug use
There are tons of efforts in clubs and bars to make people aware of this problem and reduce occurrences of rapes. Drug use maybe less so.
> the telecom industry doesn't prevent scams
Yeah, they absolutely are shitting the bed on this one, I'll give you that. But they should be doing better.
> 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.
There was just an outbreak at Taco Bell - should we fine Yum! Brands out of existence. liquidate their assets and imprison the executives, like some people elsewhere in the discussion seem to be advocating for? Should we add a few billion dollars in operating costs in increased food safety regulations?
The societally optimal amount of regulation will most likely not completely eliminate outbreaks, presuming diminishing returns.
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.
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…
Every advert for TV and radio has to pass a review in most jurisdictions. Billboard laws vary wildly, but some also require a review.
Why not ads online? The industry would adapt pretty much overnight, because it is something everyone already does.
Yeah, like $5 per unique ad would be basically nothing but it would pay for plenty of review.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
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://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10791198 (not restricted to India; multiple countries) and second, per Careless People https://www.amazon.com/Careless-People-Cautionary-Power-Idea... they were told about it and nothing got done about it
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.
Facebook is a pox on civilization, so one possibility is just firing it into the sun.
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.
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.
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
Classy as usual.
Weird how they never thought to require ID verification for advertisers hmmm
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.
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.
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.
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.
Repeal Section 230
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
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.
I think AI should the point where companies take some responsibility for the content produced with their tools. When the entire purpose of a machine is a form of thinking there should be some responsibility for what it thinks. It is nothing like a general purpose tool that the user just invokes.
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.
I think there's also the "roll up a whole network at once" approach they prefer to take for things like this - hence nothing will happen for months/years whilst investigations happen in secret and then there'll be a day where you get 40 coordinated raids across 10 countries which lead to tens of people being arrested. Then of course there's another period of months/years where they have to work on the new stuff they've got from that raid and also preparing for trials, etc.
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.
Because the point of power and wealth is to avoid accountability for harm.
That is literally what "freedom" means in the US. It's not the pursuit of happiness, it's the pursuit of immorality without consequences.
If this isn't obvious - how many people mentioned in the Epstein files have been arrested?
The US is already among the highest incarceration rate countries in the world. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_United_States_in...
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.
Facebook's policy conspicuously lacks any definition of CSAM.
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.
No, it's the "local law enforcement struggles to handle largely anonymous international crimes" note. I'm not arguing anything; I'm just describing the reality.
media without abuse is labelled csam
Seems they've mistaken child pornography (as per the US legal definition) as CSAM.
Because the overwhelming majority of these reports are for teens sexting each other.
> 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.
Doesn’t the M stand for Material? What are you saying the difference is? Their quote just sounds like another phrasing
> Doesn’t the M stand for Material?
Yes. So?
> What are you saying the difference is?
Child sexual exploitation content is broader.
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.
> Teenagers who send each other nude photos are creating child exploitation material but you hardly want to put them jail for that.
Well rational thinking people wouldn't. A great many using CSAM as a wedge to de-anonymize the Internet or institute regressive "profanity" laws are often neither.
It’s hard to discuss that topic properly because many people see pedophile rings everywhere.
They forget most child abuse happens in the family.
Because then half the world leaders would be in jail and the other half would lose their excuse for building mass surveillance systems
> AI-generated
How on earth can they know?
Read the article. Between the lines it doesn’t seem like the real issue is any specific image, it’s the ”nudify” AI apps.
This is why they pushed for the change from “child porn” to “child sexual assault material” because LOTS OF THINGS can be “materials”.
I did read the article. It does not answer the question.
> 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.
Yeah sure, I think we basically agree
I'm just bemoaning the fact FB can't even pretend they care when they're so busy banning people for nothing
Oh yeah, wasn't meaning to imply we didn't agree. I'm just expanding on your point.
Including this by the way
Part a) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24201306 part b) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24776748
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.
"While remaining a going concern."
Well, tough. Maybe they should have to find a way. If that means requiring everybody to have to pay to afford the moderators then so be it. All the other companies would have to as well.
>Well, tough.
right, that was my point.
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. add in instagram (which is worse for CSAM) and its gotta be at least double that.
it would require millions on millions of employees, spread across ~every country. between the payroll, buildings and property, equipment, etc. i just dont think its possible at that scale.
(again, emphasizing that im not saying this as an excuse for facebook, but that i dont really think facebook/instagram should exist at all)
I would think that they can classify most posts as safe with very high accuracy.
Certainly it’s not unreasonable to have them disprove that
And the scope could be further reduced by looking at posts with more then a few views.
Right, but the article isn't about posts, but about a paid ad campaign - surely those are started in numbers that could be moderated?
>Right, but the article isn't about posts, but about a paid ad campaign
the comment that started this thread says:
"these technologies have proven ineffective to moderate content. User posted and otherwise"
which is what i (and i assumed the parent to my comment) was replying to. i agree that paid ad campaigns alone is more tractable.
No, because most ads are created by automated systems (many of which are scam/spam ads) and Meta doesn't want to lose revenue by slowing the system down to human speed.
The point I'm making is they're not entitled to scale a business if they can't scale responsibly
i agree with that, and said the very same thing in my comment
I agree and the obvious solution is: Nothing should exist at that scale. In fact, "Able to effectively moderate your product," strikes me as an excellent standard to hold them to, then let their product find the natural usercount and price point they can manage.
Who ever said that companies should have the right to exploit network effects to dominate online communications?
Facebook absolutely could remain a going concern while dealing with all of these problems, the problem is that they would be spending money to lose money.
One of the more perverse aspects of risk prevention is that riskier customers are often way more lucrative. It's kind of inherent to the notion that markets price risk into transactions. The thing is, illegal behavior is also just a particular kind of risk: if someone wants to sell nudify apps or scam old people, Facebook could conceivably be on the hook[0] for damages if they're caught. And in a sense, a risk premium is just a fancy kind of bribe: if Facebook won't take my ads because they think they're too risky, then I'll just pay more and more until Facebook accepts them.
With illegal behavior, we hope that we can make the punishment high enough that Facebook refuses any conceivable risk premium the perpetrators of that behavior would be willing to pay. The problem is that Facebook is really desperate for any increasing growth story, and when you're too big to fail, your growth story is to drip-feed enshittify your stack. Increasing tolerance for illegal behavior is downstream of this: you cut enforcement, tell them to automate more, they become easier to bypass... and you make more money. Because it turns out all that risky behavior... is only risky for normal people. Facebook can launder[1] the risk away and make a tidy profit.
[0] Do not tell me about CDA 230, I was there when the old magic was written.
[1] See also, HSBC turning themselves into a literal money laundering operation.
Right, which is why my suggestion is that we skip fines, because they demonstrably don't work, and we go directly to: you, $executive_at_facebook, have participated in the distribution of CSAM and will now be prosecuted.
Make that the policy, and I'd bet my life savings that Facebook, miraculously, will figure out how to detect this shit with bulletproof accuracy.
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."
Non-paywall alternative:
https://www.engadget.com/2231100/meta-apps-displayed-ads-tha...
(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.