Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

wired.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

231–240 of 293 posts

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

#231

Post by happymellon »

ticulatedspline wrote: post #230
happymellon wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Disagree with essentially all of this. To get a Facebook account they require all sorts of PII. Why not have people give their PII to set up an advertising account and if they distribute CSAM then they are banned. Removing access to WhatsApp will stop a large portion of the world from participating. And the parts that can't? Well, they can't advertise on Facebook/Instagram anymore.

Probably a case of "hate the game not the player" CSAM is highly illegal, no doubt these accounts are getting banned but likely not charged (who knows what jurisdiction the advertiser is even in) clearly they're able to pass the current bar. This is conjecture but I'd bet that in all likelihood someone at some meeting at Meta has floated the idea of moving impedance to the signup to try to limit this phenomena. Maybe…

> 'd guess that the folks at Meta would absolutely love CSAM to stop showing up, It's simply too dangerous

Presumably not dangerous enough.

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

#232

Post by ticulatedspline »

happymellon wrote: post #231
ticulatedspline wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Probably a case of "hate the game not the player" CSAM is highly illegal, no doubt these accounts are getting banned but likely not charged (who knows what jurisdiction the advertiser is even in) clearly they're able to pass the current bar. This is conjecture but I'd bet that in all likelihood someone at some meeting at Meta has floated the idea of moving impedance to the signup to try to limit this phenomena. Maybe…

> 'd guess that the folks at Meta would absolutely love CSAM to stop showing up, It's simply too dangerous Presumably not dangerous enough.

Which could be a "change to the game" but that might be worse. Protections like Section 230 are absolutely abused by large companies. But protections like that are also what has made the internet even possible

Overly strict rules can also be weaponized. Imagine running a site that supports user content, but any appearance of CSAM on your site was jail-worthy, and you get an email demanding bitcoin or you're about to get hit with some posts that will shut you down. You have good moderation but you know you can't withstand a literal attack, someone who can automate that attack and has a financial motive to get illegal content onto your site. what do you do?

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

#233

Post by Too »

ticulatedspline wrote: post #217

Personally I find these kinds of things fascinating. Partially for the practical problem it represents and it's facets but also the one sided backlash of it all. Moderation is an interesting conglomerate of so many factors. First of all I don't think Meta is a good or honest company, but that doesn't mean they're not trying at all. In reality even if they were good and honest I genuinely believe their task is probabl…

> 36 billion ads needing review annually

This would mean every single user gets 10 uniquely personalized ads per year.

Even if that wasn't hilariously unreasonable by several orders of magnitude, if the moderation cost was was included in the cost of serving ads, this would all self regulate and only serious actors would participate. Treating it as a public bulletin board while still raking in a percentage of the impressions for sure is a nice business model, but not what's best for the rest of the society. Maybe ads just shouldn't be such a lucrative business.

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

#234

Post by WorldMaker »

Spooky23 wrote: post #209
mullingitover wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Section 230 should have never applied to ads. Ads are a commercial relationship. Facebook and YouTube gets paid by these scammers so why would they want to accurately police them? The incentives are broken. Newspapers had to invent all sorts of ways to make sure that they had clear markers between ads, editorial content, and sponsored editorial content. Such things were enforced by lawsuits and a couple of Ad Bureaus. All of those rules should have applied to Meta (Facebook, WhatsApp, Instagram) and Google (YouTube). Just as it was a sign that you were reading a bad/unreliable tabloid when you couldn't tell what was an ad and what was an article, Meta and Google should have that reputation already as vendors accepting payments for bad ads and whitewashing them as other sorts of content and it is still sometimes surprising to me that they don't.

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

#235

Post by padjo »

meric_ wrote: post #57

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 hopef…

They could absolutely moderate this at scale. They would just make less money so they have no incentive to do that.

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

#236

Post by lostlogin »

ryanjshaw wrote: post #135
craftkiller wrote: post #60

I've noticed on YouTube I see a lot of adult sexual ads. Things like home cleaning ads that have an unmistakable wood-grain image of fellatio. I've always wondered "how are these getting past the moderators?". I guess the answer is the obvious one: no one is moderating anything.

Google Play Store showed my child an ad of a bloody body on a bed for a murder mystery game. The game was rated 18+ and the account had my daughter’s correct single digit age. I reported the ad and a week later it was still there. I switched to Apple.

> I switched to Apple.

Sadly, the dirty money is luring them in too.

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

#237

Post by ben_w »

michaelt wrote: post #157
ben_w wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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' :)

How is me installing that going to help prevent Facebook hosting unlawful adverts?

I barely visit the FB feed these days, about half of those visits being a notification that turns out to be someone's birthday.

Unlike FB themselves for the content they host, I find it easy to avoid them without needing the help of a filter, because on the rare occasion when I find myself being sucked into scrolling down the feed, this almost always stops within 3 items because that's how quickly I find the first utterly irrelevant item owing to how Facebook keeps trying to suggest (and advertise) nonsense.

The filter I want to see in the world is the legislative kind, the "Meta delenda est" style. This is of course *not* what Facebook would want: spammers want to break FB's filters, and FB would try to get past legislative filters. I count FB as a spammer trying to put ads into every third message you try to exchange with your friends.

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

#238

Post by [deleted] »

craftkiller wrote: post #60

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.

[deleted]

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

#239

Post by Cpoll »

ticulatedspline wrote: post #217

Personally I find these kinds of things fascinating. Partially for the practical problem it represents and it's facets but also the one sided backlash of it all. Moderation is an interesting conglomerate of so many factors. First of all I don't think Meta is a good or honest company, but that doesn't mean they're not trying at all. In reality even if they were good and honest I genuinely believe their task is probabl…

> 550,000 moderators

You can bring this number down by only reviewing new/low-reputation advertisers, increasing minimum spend, rate limiting, etc.

You can also pre-filter for "definitely not CSAM" and only review the more ambiguous stuff.

I think your numbers are low too, surely a moderator can review over one ad per minute on average. And it may be more effective to split-screen multiple ads (with redundancy).

But at the end of the day it's a numbers game, something is going to slip through.

Post reply on HN