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

Posted by malshe |2 hours ago |70 comments

craftkiller 9 minutes ago[1 more]

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.

CrzyLngPwd an hour ago[2 more]

All their fines are merely a cost of doing business, and they won't change their ways until the fines hurt.

froobius 15 minutes ago

I'm starting to wonder if any of this is better than local newspapers, where there's an editor with oversight over all content...

Kalanos 25 minutes ago

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.

meric_ 11 minutes ago[7 more]

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

type0 40 minutes ago

So that's why they are lobbying for age verification, i.e ID verification?

godwinson__4-8 21 minutes ago[2 more]

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.

lp4v4n 43 minutes ago[2 more]

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.

dotcoma 28 minutes ago

Classy as usual.

22 minutes ago

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lenerdenator 18 minutes ago

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.

xgulfie 11 minutes ago

Weird how they never thought to require ID verification for advertisers hmmm

malshe an hour ago

https://archive.ph/4LhoU

I didn't realize the original was behind a paywall.

steveBK123 an hour ago[1 more]

grok is this you

bigbuppo 10 minutes ago

As if you didn't need another reason to use an ad blocker.

stephenhuey an hour ago[1 more]

Non-paywall alternative:

https://www.engadget.com/2231100/meta-apps-displayed-ads-tha...

snitzr an hour ago

Shut it all down.

ToucanLoucan an hour ago[7 more]

> 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.

25 minutes ago

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daun_gee an hour ago[1 more]

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josefritzishere an hour ago[1 more]

Zuckerberg needs to be arrested and imprisoned. These sociopaths aren't going to understand right and wrong on their own. It requires an intervention.

alex1138 an hour ago

(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

alex1138 26 minutes ago

> 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