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Meta in row after workers who saw smart glasses users having sex lose jobs

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Re: Meta in row after workers who saw smart glasses users having sex lose jobs

#311

Post by camgunz »

scarmig wrote: post #308
abdullahkhalids wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

CSAM exists on social media because they are so large that it's not possible to moderate them effectively. To me this is a a no-go. If a business is so large that it cannot respect laws, it needs to be shut down. The correct way to organize social media is in federated way. Each server only holds on average a few hundred or few thousand people. Server moderators should be legally responsible for content on their serv…

Having tens of thousands of decentralized, independently moderated servers would result in an order of magnitude more CSAM being shared than having a few oligopolies. The abusers just have to find the weakest link, and that weakest link will have fewer resources than multi trillion dollar companies. You would also likely not hear many news stories about it, because they won't have the expertise to even detect it. Tha…

This isn't an either or. X isn't the only place CSAM is, there are gazillions of other sources. It I'd probably the easiest place to find it tho.

Re: Meta in row after workers who saw smart glasses users having sex lose jobs

#312

Post by magicalist »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #303
magicalist wrote: post #300

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> To avoid collecting it despite the expressed wishes of the user, they'd need to be able to recognize it as untouchable. > And recognizing the data is the exact problem that this African firm was hired to help with. What do you want Meta to do? This is written as if logically exhaustive, but it misses the very obvious alternative that none of these videos should have been reviewed by a human at all (aka no reason to…

> This is written as if logically exhaustive, but it misses the very obvious alternative that none of these videos should have been reviewed by a human at all (aka no reason to "recognize it as untouchable"; they're all untouchable). No, taking that approach would mean that when someone sends you data that you aren't supposed to collect , you collect it anyway. This is the opposite of what was suggested above.

> No, taking that approach would mean that when someone sends you data that you aren't supposed to collect, you collect it anyway. This is the opposite of what was suggested above.

That was in reference to the original story, that human annotation is happening on videos that no one knew were getting reviewed. If you want to talk about not collecting at all, well:

> If you want to get stricter and talk about collecting at all, Meta already has that solution too, by leaving the video in the user's camera roll. Let the user manually add the video to the Meta AI app or whatever if they want to share it with others there.

Re: Meta in row after workers who saw smart glasses users having sex lose jobs

#313

Post by red_admiral »

haritha-j wrote: post #198
abdullahkhalids wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

CSAM exists on social media because they are so large that it's not possible to moderate them effectively. To me this is a a no-go. If a business is so large that it cannot respect laws, it needs to be shut down. The correct way to organize social media is in federated way. Each server only holds on average a few hundred or few thousand people. Server moderators should be legally responsible for content on their serv…

Also, if you've gone from zero to one of the biggest coroporations in the country, and have billions to throw at the 'metaverse', I find it hard to believe that removing CSAM is where you struggle.

The amount of CSAM online is completely out of control. There's already nation-level and sometimes international cooperation to catch any known images with perceptual hashing (think: the opposite of cryptographic hashing) as well as other automated and manual tools.

My impression is it would take Manhattan-Project levels of effort and funds to come close to "solving" this problem, especially without someone getting on a watchlist for having a telehealth-first primary care provider insurace plan and asking for advice on their toddler's chickenpox.

Human review? Meta has small armies worth of content moderators already that tend to burn out with psychological problems and have a suicide rate where you're probably better off going to fight in a real war. (This includes workers hired by Sama in Kenya, to link back to the OP.)

I will reluctantly grant Meta that they're up against a really hard problem here.

Re: Meta in row after workers who saw smart glasses users having sex lose jobs

#314

Post by BobbyJo »

SlinkyOnStairs wrote: post #186
prepend wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How else do you want companies to remove and prevent CSAM? It seems like you must have some human involvement to train and monitor. It’s a terrible job, I wouldn’t want to do it, but someone needs to. Perhaps one day, AI will be accurate enough to not need it, but even then you need someone to process complaints and waivers (like someone’s home photos being inaccurately flagged).

> How else do you want companies to remove and prevent CSAM? Different situation. Facebook has to do CSAM moderation because it's a publishing platform. People will post CSAM on facebook, so they must do moderation. And "just don't have facebook" isn't a solution because every publication of any sort has to deal with this problem; Any newspaper accepting mail has this problem. (Albeit to a much more scaled down versi…

> In contrast, OpenAI has no such problem. It did not have CSAM pushed onto it, it actively collected such data itself. It could have, at any point before and after, simply stopped scraping all of the web indiscriminately and switched to using more curated sources of scraped data.

You've just thrown the garbage over your fence. Instead of OpenAI contracting Sama to classify CSAM, the "Curators" have to.

At the end of the day, someone needs to classify it. If you say the platforms need to, and they miss some, and it ends up in OAI training data, OAI is going to be the entity paying the prices.

Re: Meta in row after workers who saw smart glasses users having sex lose jobs

#315

Post by magicalist »

red_admiral wrote: post #295
jaidhyani wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I used to work for Meta. I quit largely because of intense frustrations with the company. Meta has made a lot of mistakes, overlooked a lot of harms, and made a lot of short-sighted, selfish choices. Many things about the world are worse than they could be because of choices Meta has made. So that when I say that they really do have a zero tolerance policy for anyone using their internal systems to violate user priva…

Indeed, on this one point, Meta has higher standards than the NSA used to - Snowden mentioned that employees tracked their current wives/girlfriends so often it unofficially got the codename LOVEINT. Same for "Meta reads your E2E whatsapp messages". Meta does many things, is probably massively net negative for civilisation, but it doesn't do that.

It's kind of weird to have a subthread about "Meta doesn't do these other unrelated things" in a thread about a thing Meta is doing.

They don't boil live kittens either, I believe. Doesn't seem relevant though.

Re: Meta in row after workers who saw smart glasses users having sex lose jobs

#316

Post by red_admiral »

Barrin92 wrote: post #269
abdullahkhalids wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

CSAM exists on social media because they are so large that it's not possible to moderate them effectively. To me this is a a no-go. If a business is so large that it cannot respect laws, it needs to be shut down. The correct way to organize social media is in federated way. Each server only holds on average a few hundred or few thousand people. Server moderators should be legally responsible for content on their serv…

>CSAM on social media will be 100x suppressed because banning people is way easier on small servers. No it isn't. Small servers often don't have paid security or moderation, are run in anonymous fashion, and have no profit motive that can even be used to incentivize them against hosting illegal content. That's visible when it comes to porn. There's a million bootleg porn sites on the internet hosted that show off ill…

What stops Humbert Humbert from joining hundreds of small servers?

You now have 100x the total human effort for mods to review and ban him.

Re: Meta in row after workers who saw smart glasses users having sex lose jobs

#317

Post by freejazz »

prepend wrote: post #140
SlinkyOnStairs wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Fun" bonus fact: This isn't the first time Sama (the outsourcing company) has had these problems. OpenAI had them classify CSAM, so Sama fired them as a client back in 2022. https://time.com/6247678/openai-chatgpt-kenya-workers/ We're 4 years on, 3 years since that report broke. Not a single thing has improved about how tech companies operate.

How else do you want companies to remove and prevent CSAM? It seems like you must have some human involvement to train and monitor. It’s a terrible job, I wouldn’t want to do it, but someone needs to. Perhaps one day, AI will be accurate enough to not need it, but even then you need someone to process complaints and waivers (like someone’s home photos being inaccurately flagged).

I don't understand why their size is an excuse for them to not remove and prevent CSAM.

Re: Meta in row after workers who saw smart glasses users having sex lose jobs

#318

Post by jmye »

malshe wrote: post #112

A question for the HN folks who work for Meta - Is the pay so good that it makes it worth working for such a morally bankrupt organization?

I think it's the excitement because it's a morally bankrupt organization. Some people really get off on knowing that the sum total of everything they do professionally is bent around making kids depressed to the point of suicide, and angry to the point of shooting up their school.

I assume that every single person who still works at Meta has done that personal calculus and decided that they fall on the "this is fucking amazing, important work" side.

Re: Meta in row after workers who saw smart glasses users having sex lose jobs

#319

Post by freejazz »

scarmig wrote: post #308
abdullahkhalids wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

CSAM exists on social media because they are so large that it's not possible to moderate them effectively. To me this is a a no-go. If a business is so large that it cannot respect laws, it needs to be shut down. The correct way to organize social media is in federated way. Each server only holds on average a few hundred or few thousand people. Server moderators should be legally responsible for content on their serv…

Having tens of thousands of decentralized, independently moderated servers would result in an order of magnitude more CSAM being shared than having a few oligopolies. The abusers just have to find the weakest link, and that weakest link will have fewer resources than multi trillion dollar companies. You would also likely not hear many news stories about it, because they won't have the expertise to even detect it. Tha…

>That's a tradeoff you can choose to make, but you need to enter into it with open eyes.

No it's not. It's certainly not my choice. No one asked me if it's okay for Facebook to distribute CSAM because you insist it would be worse if it didn't.

Re: Meta in row after workers who saw smart glasses users having sex lose jobs

#320

Post by freejazz »

red_admiral wrote: post #313
haritha-j wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also, if you've gone from zero to one of the biggest coroporations in the country, and have billions to throw at the 'metaverse', I find it hard to believe that removing CSAM is where you struggle.

The amount of CSAM online is completely out of control. There's already nation-level and sometimes international cooperation to catch any known images with perceptual hashing (think: the opposite of cryptographic hashing) as well as other automated and manual tools. My impression is it would take Manhattan-Project levels of effort and funds to come close to "solving" this problem, especially without someone getting o…

>I will reluctantly grant Meta that they're up against a really hard problem here.

It is a problem of their own making.

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