Reported the add but damn YouTube, the freaky fake medical ads are bad enough.

>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.

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.

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

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.

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

I reported the ad and a week later it was still there. I switched to Apple.

---

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.

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

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.

Don’t buy into Meta’s narrative that there’s nothing that can be done while they continue to make money hand over fist.

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.

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

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 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.

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.

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....

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.

It effectively mandates a lower-limit on spend for budgeting purposes.

Sure, that money might be spent ineffectively... but corporations will figure it out if their only options are to

1. Not invest in regulatory compliance at all and get fined for noncompliance.

2. Throw money at the problem, spend it inefficiently, and STILL get fined for noncompliance.

3. Throw money at the problem, spend it well enough to pass muster, avoid fines.

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

Step 2: wait for it to get out of the news cycle.

Step 3: donate heavily via lobbyists to the opponents of the politicians who called you out

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.

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.

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.

I haven't seen any Epoch Times ads in Youtube for a while... maybe it worked !

For a lot of people, government regulation of this sort is not desirable, but at what point does someone need to drop the hammer to stop this?

Results:

- Reporting a message does nothing no matter how much the content breaks their terms of use. 100% of messages I reported bounced back in a matter of minutes with "no action"

- However, using the "request another review" function, which is available after the initial "no action" response, actually seems to work. How quickly this works seems to vary, I've had actions taken as result of this from 1 day to multiple weeks.

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.

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

No, not at all.

"removing over 36 million pieces of child sexual exploitation content last year"

Not CSAM.

This is why they pushed for the change from “child porn” to “child sexual assault material” because LOTS OF THINGS can be “materials”.

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.

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 societally optimal amount of regulation will most likely not completely eliminate outbreaks, presuming diminishing returns.

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.

Brave browser is a thing by the way.

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 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 don't remove apps like Facebook or Twitter for displaying CSAM, but apparently ganked Telegram at the first single report of an extortionist trying to remove a public Telegram group because they posted CSAM in it.

https://www.reuters.com/business/retail-consumer/telegram-sa...

It's only okay when the American companies get away with CSAM.

Sadly, the dirty money is luring them in too.

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?

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)

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.

F Droid comes close and can even auto update now (never understood why that didn't work on the past), but most apps I want or need like banking, health insurance etc aren't on F Droid.

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.

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 more verification, or more hoops. And likely Meta crunched the numbers and was looking at billions of dollars lost in legit ad traffic and that just doesn't fly for a publicly traded company.

I'd guess that the folks at Meta would absolutely love CSAM to stop showing up, It's simply too dangerous, likely costs more than it earns, makes them look bad when it shows up, and alienates users who don't want to see it.

But those negative effects are probably all quantifiable to some dollar value that's less than the alternatives.

Executives don't get bonuses for altruism or ethical behavior. They get bonuses for making more money than they did last quarter. real fix is changing the game but that's a lot harder than it seems and can have many unintended consequences of it's own.

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.

AIUI, Android simply didn't support it. The original way for apps to install other apps was via ACTION_INSTALL_PACKAGE, which is a user-visible action. The InstallPackage API did not support silent updates until sdk version 31: https://developer.android.com/reference/android/content/pm/P...

Also not a copyright violation, but using Elon Musk's likeness without permission for investment scams seems to be a big thing.

Who ever said that companies should have the right to exploit network effects to dominate online communications?

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.

And then were okay with letting that person sit in jail longer because they thought it'd be better for Facebook PR if they did...

And then when they finally got that person out of jail, and later had him show up at a meet-n-greet with said executive team, Zuck didn't look up from his phone, looked confused, and said to his PA as he was leaving "who was that guy anyway, and why did he need to meet us?"

Or when Burmese dissidents, even the Burmese government itself, said that a FB feature would be used to track down and imprison, torture people the government didn't like, Zuck and FB leadership said "the feature is doing a lot to improve platform engagement, it needs to stay".

So the answer is worse. It's a combination of "the money" and pure psychopathy and sociopathy at the head of the dragon.

But I like your take on it as institutionalised crime because it is now publicly overt.

The corruption is complete.

Presumably not dangerous enough.

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.

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.

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.

Nobody is advocating for a one strike you’re out policy, just that at some point there should be more severe consequences than a fine.

Yes. So?

> What are you saying the difference is?

Child sexual exploitation content is broader.

Why not ads online? The industry would adapt pretty much overnight, because it is something everyone already does.

I'm just bemoaning the fact FB can't even pretend they care when they're so busy banning people for nothing

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.

They forget most child abuse happens in the family.

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)

Instead it's a "I don't like this" and they will continue to ignore it.

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.

right, that was my point.

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?

https://www.etymonline.com/word/billion

I would vote to revert it.

Empathy for other people and the environment is a sign of intelligence. Those that don't think of how their actions affects those around them and the neighbors they will never meet nor the environment have an lack of intelligent.

Those that lack empathy are the same that idolize bad actors like Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg. Greed and the desire for it is a high indicator of lack of intelligence.

There is a difference between being well off and greedy. I would argue that Steve Wozniak is a great example and better of the two Steves from Apple to highlight this.

I have created jobs and brought in international commerce to where I live. I produce solutions for companies I don't even know their names. I have kept people safe and will never know their names nor will their families know mine. None of which has deluded my empathy for others, human and non-human, and the environment.

My previous statement was codified in another thread. This statement is a two part. One to re-enforce my empathy and a social experiment.

I feel sorry for those that lack empathy. Empathy is the only way to put yourself in someone else's shoes. Intelligence is a by-product. There is no other way to live a life you can never have nor experience.

Label of _radical_ is something I welcome. When former co-workers and people you meet want to shake your hand before leaving after giving them constructive criticize, it is a surreal experience. Not when it first happens, when it repeats itself.

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.

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

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.

Part a) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24201306 part b) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24776748

And at the same time, they make bigger and bigger cars which make more serious accidents for pedestrian, young children, etc.

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.

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.

I've not seen an ad from Youtube for probably 10+ years on my devices (since whenever Vanced made the apk customisations popular).

Concrete example: If you run a construction business, even if you take all the required precautions, statistically you're going to get 9.2 of your employees killed for every 100,000 man-hours they work.[1] Is that proof all construction companies are evil, and we should shut them down for murdering their employees? Is it a problem that having to buy life insurance is "just a cost of doing business" for these companies?

[1]: https://www.bls.gov/charts/census-of-fatal-occupational-inju...

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.

They will be given more leeway for small scale "screwups" if they can show that they are working to reduce large scale issues. As it is we are dealing with organisations that don't give a shit, so peoples attitudes reflect that back at them.

It's been a very well known problem on Facebook for years[1][2], and the pathetic part is that its so obvious. It really tells you how bad Facebook is with AI, because even I as a regular 1x engineer could wire up some very cheap inference that would lay waste to this fraud pattern as a part-time weekend project.

[1] https://consumer.ftc.gov/consumer-alerts/2024/05/looking-buy...

[2] https://www.bbb.org/scamtracker/lookupscam/807274

Also, speaking of statistics, what?

> statistically you're going to get 9.2 of your employees killed for every 100,000 man-hours they work.

No, you're not. This would mean if you employed 50 full-time employees you'd expect 9 of them to die per year.

What that graph actually says: "In a population where there are 100,000 construction workers, you can expect 9 fatal workplace accidents per year".

The lack of accountability here is astounding.

> "Our automated review found nothing wrong with [this ad that implies a young child performing sexual activities]"

That's also a screw-up, and they should be fined accordingly, proportional to the amount of harm this screw up is causing to society. If there are any practical steps they can take to fix the problem, that should incentivize them to do so.

But if for whatever reason it turns out the only possible way to fix such screw-ups is for them to hire 100,000 employees to manually review every single ad, and the cost of that both exceeds the cost of paying the fines and the opportunity cost of turning off this feature completely, so they choose not to do that, is that a problem?

It's like if you tried to insist construction companies evacuate all workers from the construction site before operating any heavy machinery. Maybe that would save some lives, but it would also be completely impractical.

No. I don't. uBO suffices. Maybe with some additional rules and lists which aren't in its default setup.

Maybe it also depends on the sort of content one watches, but I tried, and it did nothing for me, except one extension more running. Which I tend to try to minimize.

There's a degree of "consent" here - yes, certainly, one can choose not to be a FB user. But if the sites you visit utilize FB's ad program, well, you can still get hit. Construction workers understand that their work is not zero risk (as are many jobs - I used to work in Fire/EMS), but that is tempered by OSHA etc., that have teeth. You can't (at least in theory) keep operating a construction company that operates unsafely and outside regulations or laws and say "it's all good, I'm just going to pay the fines" - OSHA will shut you down and render you liable to criminal prosecution.

If OSHA was dismantled yesterday (and state-level agencies), and people knowing how some corporations value the dollar versus people, there'd be a lot less people willing to work for riskier companies or in riskier professions.

> It's like if you tried to insist construction companies evacuate all workers from the construction site before operating any heavy machinery.

In an admittedly limited subset of situations, this happens: "Lock out/tag out" systems that can physically prevent the operation of certain equipment if anyone is in the risk zone or performing maintenance. In some cases this is literally akin to a padlock workers carry at all times and put through the power switch of machinery when they go to work on it so someone else doesn't come along and turn it on.

I think I remember some sponsored crap in 'der8auer' or something like 'linus tech tips' eons ago, but I don't watch them anymore.

So I can't really tell, but for my use case it seems redundant.

I also remember having imported uBo-lists from somewhere, allegedly enabling sponsor-blocking somehow. But that was another install. I don't have these anymore, ATM.