Meta Ran Ads That Contained AI-Generated Child Sexual Abuse Imagery
wired.com317 points by malshe a day ago
317 points by malshe a day ago
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.
The play store is pretty bad. About half the time I search for an app, BY NAME, without any way to confuse it with another app, the top result is a scam or copy cat, or adware. And always, without fail, they are paid-for ads instead of real search results. How can it still be somehow advantageous to trick your users into installing an app they clearly don't want. I wish there was a real alternative to the play store.
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.
> never understood why that didn't work on the past
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...
Listen, we need you to verify your identity in order for us to not serve these ads to your kids. It's very important that you do this.
Apple is equally pointless.
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.
Yet you can’t run Linux on a Chromebook with a minor child user.
What do you mean? You can use Linux on a Chromebook just fine if the user is an adult but if the user is a child there is some Chromebook restriction?
Reported an obvious sexual ad the other day and got a very AI generated response that started with "Dear Username" stating that they reviewed the ad and found nothing wrong with it.
Before I gave up on Facebook entirely, I reported an ad that was an explicit blow job and received a similar response and this was before AI was huge. I really don't think they've ever cared.
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 to what you described. They were obviously stealing Mark Cuban’s likeness and peddling an obvious scam.
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.
In my case I wasn't even reporting ads. These are plain old Facebook accounts and groups using very obvious AI-generated slop images of pets for 'adoption' or 'rehoming', so Facebook isn't even making money on this directly. They are participating in the fraud purely out of the malice (more realistically, incompetence spiced with greed) in their own hearts.
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...
Section 230 doesn't say the advertiser can't go to jail or Facebook doesn't have to tell the police who the advertiser is.
Who goes to jail for displaying the ad in a public place? If I ran say, a shop, and put CSAM up on my notice board (because I was paid to) that would see me in prison, surely.
The lack of accountability here is astounding.
My example was a comment that said "only a shame more [hard r n word]s didn't die. we need to get this place cleaned up" and told that was not in violation of community standards.
The other answer is that the people creating these ads have the resources to continuously try and bypass filters/moderation.
If there is filters/moderation.
There are, but only for using IP of large corporations. If you put 12 seconds of a major label song in your video review of an album, that video belongs to the major label now.
It is really interesting how YouTube can detect short snippets of movies and songs but there are many full audiobooks illegally uploaded for years.
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' :)
Indeed, and the Revanced apk customisation on Android, and SmartTube on Google TV.
I've not seen an ad from Youtube for probably 10+ years on my devices (since whenever Vanced made the apk customisations popular).
I don't need Revanced as I already have uBlock Origin.
For YouTube on a desktop OS you also want Sponsorblock. On a mobile OS, you want Revanced/Morphe as it integrates Sponsorblock into the app.
> For YouTube on a desktop OS you also want Sponsorblock.
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.