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Comment by andsoitis | Hacker News Reader

> At her home in western Germany, a woman told a team of visiting researchers from Meta that she did not allow her sons to interact with strangers on the social media giant’s virtual reality headsets. Then her teenage son interjected, according to two of the researchers: He frequently encountered strangers, and adults had sexually propositioned his little brother, who was younger than 10, numerous times.

It seems to me possible solutions could be a mix of:

a) company monitors all conversations (privacy tradeoff)

b) validates age

c) product not available to kids

d) product available to kids, leave up to parents to monitor

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How about:

e) the product records a window on behalf of each customer, and the customer can report an incident like this to both Meta and legal authorities including such a recording. Strangers who sexually proposition kids get removed from the platform and may face legal consequences. The virtual space is like a public physical space where anyone else can report your crimes.

If this were a physical space (e.g. a park?) and your pre-teen kids were able to hang out there, the analogs to a-c would all sound crazy. Being carded upon entry to a park, or knowing that everything you say there will be monitored by a central authority would both be really weird. Saying "parents must watch their kids" seems less practical in a VR space where you can't necessarily just keep line-of-sight to your kids.

this is predicated on customers' identity (and contact info?) to be known and validated, right?

i think if there is a crime authorities care enough about, they seem to immediately get to the true identity and contact info of the criminal.

e) is probably not effectively scalable, like the rest of Meta's products which are oases for pedos

I'm flabbergasted whenever I read this argument.

It's like saying Amazon's business is not scalable because they need warehouse workers.

Says more about you than anything else. They have completely different business models, so I don't get the shock, let alone the relation. Facebook can't scale if they have to have human moderation at an amount that would actually prevent the pedos. It's just also facially incorrect - Amazon does hire warehouse workers. Facebook does not hire enough content monitors.

> It's just also facially incorrect - Amazon does hire warehouse workers. Facebook does not hire enough content monitors.

This is the whole point. Amazon had to hire hundreds of thousands of warehouse workers to scale. They have 1.5 million employees. Facebook is capable of doing the same. The idea that they "can't scale" if they have to stop unloading their negative externalities is absurd. Amazon scaled, while hiring 1.5 million employees. Meta can scale and do the same.

Amazon actually delivers things. Facebook still has a pedo problem, so no, I don't think you're right and it's certainly not even a good example to make your point with anyway as there is no similarity at all. It's pretty clear facebook's business model doesn't work when you have to actually sift through everything they spread. Amazon has nothing to do with it.

Facebook still has a pedo problem because they still haven't hired 1 million employees to deal with it. Amazon would still have a logistics problem if they hadn't hired 1 million employees to move boxes around.

That doesn't support the conclusion that facebook could, stop beating your dead horse.

The idea that this is literally an unsolvable problem is just absurd. If every Amazon warehouse worker instead became a Facebook pedo monitor making a >95% decrease happen would be pretty trivial.

I think we can't actually know this unless Meta tries it. I think there are two main open questions:

1. With aggressive, noisy referrals to prosecution, and banning people who report others in bad faith, can you get these people to stop approaching kids on the platform? Can you get the human review burden to a tractable level b/c the rate of real issues and the rate of false reports is sufficiently low?

2. Can better moderation / safety measures _facilitate_ growth b/c people won't be scared or disgusted away from your product? We have plenty of people whose advice is "don't let your kids use their products unsupervised" and assuming you don't have the free time to _watch_ your kids use their product that quickly turns into "don't let your kids use their products". A safe platform that people _believe_ is safe might experience faster growth.

1. That presupposes the problem is bad faith referrals or that pedos aren't sufficiently aware they can get popped on FB. I don't think either are likely true.

2. I don't think the scalability issues are related to the size of the social network, so I don't think this is ever a relevant question, at least from my perspective. My point is that it would not be commercially reasonable for Meta to actually employ the number of people required to run down, verify and then forward reports.

The website that's one of the hardest to use anonymously, that won't let you use an account without verifying with a phone number, won't let you even view content when not logged in, is an "oasis for pedos"?

Sorry, but from my point of view, they serve pedos to police on a silver platter. If the police don't take action, that's not Facebook's fault.

>Sorry, but from my point of view, they serve pedos to police on a silver platter. If the police don't take action, that's not Facebook's fault.

That's a bit of a strawman. I've never seen it suggested that the problem is that govts do not prosecute enough of what Facebook reports and that is why so much of it happens on Facebook. I certainly wasn't making that suggestion. My point is that a lot of child solicitation does happen on Facebook. Despite phone verification, so I'm not sure what point you are really making. It seems more like you are coming about it from an abstract privacy perspective, which is valid, but not what you are claiming. Facebook is an oasis for pedos. They are all over Facebook and Instagram trying to interact with kids. Plenty of articles about it and how meta takes very few if any simple precautionary steps, and sometimes even connects these people through the applications of its social algorithms. You are acting like children hang out on the dark web or something. They don't. They are on Facebook. They are on Instagram, YouTube and on video games.

> I've never seen it suggested that the problem is that govts do not prosecute enough of what Facebook reports

How odd, I wonder if there's a reason for that.

I remember in one transparency report, FB itself sent over 12 million referrals to NCMEC, yet we don't see stories about all those being rounded up for justice

How. Odd.

Isn't e) how a bunch of sting operations already work? And doesn't really require much cooperation from Facebook - there's nothing stopping people from recording, and given enough evidence (e.g. that the stranger knew (or thought they knew) the user was underage, and continued their sexual advances), this would turn into a police warrant to Facebook to deanonymize the perp. As far as I know Facebook already complies with such requests (and makes it extremely hard to use their products anonymously), so... what more do we want them to do? Isn't the space they're providing much safer than being out in public, for a child?

> validates age

This is what legislators are generally going for; but it turns out there’s plenty of other stuff on the Internet deserving age restrictions by the same logic.

I’m at the point where I know we’re not going back; that battle is already lost. The question is how to implement it in the most privacy preserving manner.

I’m also at the point where I believe the harm to children exceeds, and is exceeding, the harm of losing a more open internet. Kids are online now, parental controls are little used and don’t work, that’s our new reality.

For anyone who responds this is a “think of the children,” that ignores we have tons of laws thinking about the children, because sometimes you do need to think of the children. One glance at teen’s mental health right now proves that this is one of those times. Telling parents to do better after a decade of trying is not a realistic solution.

I guarantee that a 20 hour workweek would fix this problem without having to invade anyone’s privacy, but we can’t have that for obvious reasons.

My friends with healthy attachments to social media had healthy and present parents. You have to make sure your kid doesn’t want to drop out of society by being too overbearing, and obviously you need to be there to tell them the pitfalls of addiction and superficiality that only experience can reveal. Walking this line every day while your kid is kicking and screaming at you is way harder if you’ve already been kicked and screamed at work for 8 hours, so you just put them on the iPad and hope for the best -> and that’s how we get here. It begins and ends with capitalism’s productivity fetish

I don’t believe that for a second.

If parents only had to work 20 hours… watch half care more about their kids, while the other half gets a second job anyway to buy a boat, or immediately goes into an addiction spiral, their job previously being the time restraint. The jobs that keep us from our hobbies, are also checks on the darker sides of human nature.

On that note, even this doesn’t fix the problem; as now the iPad is still an all-or-nothing device, unless the parent knows how to fluently manage multiple endpoints on multiple operating systems - and this is so universal the law can safely consider it handled. I think that’s less likely to work than a genocide-free communist state.

For every addiction you enable with more free time there’s an overworked but capable and loving parent on the other side of the equation. That’s why your argument isn’t really a rebuttal but a counterfactual based on an opinion.

The reason your argument is wrong is because it’s a restatement of Hobbes, who is a pessimist and can be refuted in many many many ways. Moreover it ignores the very real economic reality that many parents face, which is simply that they have less money or time to provide quality care for their children than they did before, and that’s evidenced by the rising wealth inequality among iPad-owning populations.

I do agree that parents can sometimes be unequipped to raise children, but you seem to be saying that decreasing the amount of work they have to do outside of raising children would make it harder for them to raise well and I can’t really agree with that.

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