(The NCMEC is mentioned, and they probably have a decent feel for whether the headline's claim is true...but they might be reluctant to talk on this subject.)
The question here is not how bad it is in other places but how much does Meta do against it and is this another lobby approach to push through things abusing the suffering of children as an excuse.
Through then the "single largest market" claim might be a try to carter public outrage beyond what a fully honest reporting might have produced. Through also it depends a lot on how much Meta actually does against it. If the answer is Meta doesn't care at all then that would be a very reasonable thing to do. Through as far as I can tell Meta does care at least to the degree they legally have too. But it's hard to say because it's always easy to pic examples where it looks like they do not with a company of that size but all the cases where they did care you likely will never hear about. So if this court case goes ahead we might gain some interesting insights.
And if we assume that the Good Guys (hopefully the NM AG is one) have limited resources - then "where can we do the most good?" becomes an issue. It'd be nice to have some hint that they are grown-ups who care about that. Vs. talking smack about going after Meta right now because that's currently trending online.
Elon Musk has been very clear on that this kind of activity will get you permanently banned.
They are also actively following known pedo hashtags across X/Twitter to ensure this kind of content gets wiped, without waiting for individual users to report it first.
The difference between Facebook and X seems pretty stark.
You can scan for hashtags all day long but bad actors will come up with hashtags that are not on your list rather quickly.
The same for facebook groups people can setup like train enthusiasts group that would look like one posting photos of trains and then hide bad content in between.
You don’t have even computing power to scan everything.
If they really have some sort of secret channel that no one else can infiltrate, why not just use that to distribute stuff directly instead of running an evil cabal of hashtags?
Surely, even given the evil cabal of hashtags, you could find a lot with simple heuristics? When you ban a tag, track which new new hash tags suddenly explode in popularity. Pull a list of hashtags with an unusually high number of links/images to sites that don't normally get linked? Track the people who follow these hashtags, and see what hashtags they go to next
If you actually want to fight the problem, it doesn't require a huge amount of resources - the problem is entirely that Meta has no actual desire to fight the problem (after all, it costs money and doesn't produce any benefit to them)
> How are these bad actors coordinating hashtags in a way that can't be detected?
They manage to do it in China despite the massive censorship there. https://sg.news.yahoo.com/chinese-vpn-providers-hide-literat...
> it doesn't require a huge amount of resources
Are you suggesting that the Chinese government just isn’t trying hard enough, and if they really wanted to they could stop all dissidents in China for forever?
China would be a perfect example of my point: they've succeeded in vastly reducing the amount of censored content available, and the average person has no real desire to work around that.
I really don't get how you think your example disagrees with me - do you think China hasn't accomplished anything there?
Flipping the question around, I’m not really sure how Facebook’s current systems don’t fit your definition of “it’s not perfect but it works”?
I think there's a lot of low-hanging fruit we could easily address with a small increase in spending, and I think it's fair to shame companies for not doing that.
I also think there's a lot of mid-height fruit that could plausibly be addressed with a lot of spending. I think it's fair to praise companies that ARE doing that, but it's hardly a source of shame.
And of course, there's plenty of fruit we're never going to deal with, no matter how much we spend.
I think Facebook is under-spending and missing out on low hanging fruit
Think more about how memes spread in the internet - there is no “meme administration” that picks what is funny and what not.
You still have to make difference between trends of normal hashtags and evil hashtags how do you do that? Also how do you even think there would be explosion when bad actors are aware they have to hide.
Main point is simple heuristics won’t work and you don’t have to be evil mastermind to circumvent them.
> how do you do that?
I already listed a few examples. If it was unclear, the other part of the process is "have a human check the hashtag", sorry
> Also how do you even think there would be explosion when bad actors are aware they have to hide.
You'd be really amazed how much low-hanging fruit there is here. If someone is posting publicly on social media AND using hashtags, they're not exactly in the top half of OpSec
I do agree that there is a lot that can be caught with a bit more effort and that Meta does not really want to spend resources because it doesn't earn them money.
But also I argue that there still will be a lot of bad stuff and there is not enough money/resources to stop all.
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2023/aug/10/twitter-x...
> The company formerly known as Twitter has faced heat from politicians in a combative hearing over X’s tackling of child abuse material, after the company restored an account that shared such material last month, despite claiming to have a “zero tolerance approach”.
https://www.business-humanrights.org/en/latest-news/twitter-...
> But a review by The New York Times found that the imagery, commonly known as child pornography, persisted on the platform, including widely circulated material that the authorities consider the easiest to detect and eliminate.
please stop spreading bullshit
Hugely downsizing the content moderation team definitively isn't helping preventing such content on X/Twitter.
And one thing which companies which take this topic seriously is to not disclose too many details about their actions to avoid the targets knowing what they need to avoid. So the public pretty much _doesn't know about the actual difference_ in actions done. We can only observe the outcome, where a platform doing more still might end up looking worse due to simply their audience containing different groups of people and the number of cherry picked bad examples which is highly correlated with platform size but nearly always reported in absolute numbers.
But Elon Musk also has been frequently deceptive in many ways when it was beneficial for his ventures (some would say that is required from a CEO) so I really wouldn't take _anything_ he says as truth. Instead look at his actions. Which involve washing out the seriousness and meaning of claiming someone is a pedo (weather he intended that or not). A trend pretty widespread on Twitter as far a as I know. A Trend which helps people harming children by given them the excuse that someone calling them out is just another toxic Twitter(user) hate campaign you shouldn't take serious.