Meta Ran Ads Containing AI-Generated Child Sexual Abuse Imagery

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.

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

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 probably nearly impossible. Humans just suck too much. It certainly doesn't help that Meta has at least some perverse incentive to be permissive with ads, as they get money from them. Though Meta execs aren't stupid. Inflammatory political ads are one thing, kiddie porn is another I suspect they lose more money over CSAM than all the ad revenue from them. I believe them when they say they removed over 36 million pieces of child sexual exploitation content last year.

Which is a number that I should let sink in. Basically more than one piece of CSAM shows up in their ad stream every second of every day all year. If their moderation techniques are 99% effective that results in 360,000 CSAM ads leaking to the public annually.

Another interesting thought is how much would it cost to actually get that rate to 100%? let's assume human moderators aren't paid much but are infallible. That all-in a single moderator employee costs $65K , that's salary, benefits, HR ratio, psychological therapy, equipment, the works, all factored in.

let's say on average you get about 1 ad review ~ […]

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.

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.

Meta is still running ads that suggest violence against politicians, when reported they say it does not contravene their policies.

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.