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
Absolutely!
Related story... my wife works in a regulated industry and she was running facebook ads for one of their new products. Facebook had just introduced Ai generated ad-copy and the ad agency didn't know that option was turned on by default so they uploaded all of the ad-copy that was approved by legal and then facebook was running all of these alternative ads that were actually illegal because the copy it wrote were all claims they are not allowed to make in that industry. They only caught it because one of the ads was served to my wife and she immediately noticed it was copy that was not approved and something they could not claim.
I always assumed these shady ads were created by shady people, and I think a lot are, but I wonder how many companies are unintentionally running shady ads because facebook generated those ads.
The car industry is constantly innovating trying to prevent accidents and make them less damaging to occupants
> the school industry doesn't prevent bullying
They try to, though. There's all sorts of initiatives to reduce and prevent bullying. Whether or not they are effective, they are still trying and have been working on this for decades
> the nightlife industry doesn't prevent rape or drug use
There are tons of efforts in clubs and bars to make people aware of this problem and reduce occurrences of rapes. Drug use maybe less so.
> the telecom industry doesn't prevent scams
Yeah, they absolutely are shitting the bed on this one, I'll give you that. But they should be doing better.
And at the same time, they make bigger and bigger cars which make more serious accidents for pedestrian, young children, etc.
It's Facebook's problem if Facebook can't do the things Facebook is required to do. "Oh no it is hard"? Tough. Either they find a way or find they're no longer allowed to do this business.
> 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
AI *might* solve this, or Meta's AI may be trapped in an arms race with advertisers trying to get around it for whatever reason has driven them to do this in the first place; but fully automated mass-generation of personalised ads was never a mandatory part of their business plan, so it was a problem they never needed to have.
The societally optimal amount of regulation will most likely not completely eliminate outbreaks, presuming diminishing returns.
Nobody is advocating for a one strike you’re out policy, just that at some point there should be more severe consequences than a fine.
Don’t buy into Meta’s narrative that there’s nothing that can be done while they continue to make money hand over fist.
Is this firehose of social media actually a societal benefit? I’m less and less convinced that it is.
How is this our problem? We make the rules, the obey them. If they can't they ought to be shut down. If they want to argue that at their scale they can't abide by the rules society lays down for them we can cut them down to something human sized.
It doesn't matter how many people are consuming the ads, it matters how many companies are placing the ads.
Let's not invent excuses for the trillion-dollar tech companies. Meta has plenty of money to put humans in the loop. It just chooses not to because some upper manager needs to buy a fifth house, or a third private island.
Why not ads online? The industry would adapt pretty much overnight, because it is something everyone already does.
In this case, we are talking about ad images.
1000 moderators x 5 second per image to click deny or approve.
So 1000 moderators review 720000 ads/hour
Per 8 hour workday: 5,760,000 ads
Per full 24h day: 17,280,000 ads
So we will use 3k for 3 shifts.
51,840,000 new image ads moderated per day.
At ~$1,000 per moderator per month (most jobs are outsourced to Africa and Asia):
$3 million per month $36 million per year
I don't see any public numbers for how many new ads they add daily but meta reported removing 159 million scam ads during 2025, so equivalent to around 436,000 scam ad removals per day.
no, it's just more work, and it's not like facebook could not afford to pay more people
Well that means don't do the thing that you can't control, or they shouldn't be legally allowed to do the thing they can't control.
Additionally, for one of the biggest companies in the planet, that has done mind bogglingly difficult things in order to make profit, that's the lamest excuse ever.
Fine them out of existence.
Ad pipeline is malware at this point.
Always has been.
Occasionally my girlfriend will comment on something she saw in an ad, even buy things off them. Thing is though that ad platforms don't seem to be doing anything meaningful to stop bad actors.
So really, clicking any ad and interacting with it amounts to placing your trust in a total stranger with the only criteria being they paid a little bit of money for you to see them. To which you will then download their software, give them your credit card, or whatever the end goal is.
It's far easier to assume anything in an advertisement is a scam and block them accordingly.
So you'd think that a sophisticated tech company that had paid that financial penalty would find it pretty easy to have a simple text filter for "Martin Lewis" and perhaps even an image filter for his very distinctive face which pushed those ads into a moderation queue, particularly if they both appear together in the scam-ridden investment opportunity category and the advertiser is a new one (that's probably not going to stick around under that name for very long). But no, they remained a common theme for years afterwards...
And, as the sibling ad points out, if you report stuff that's obvious scams you get told they've reviewed it and found it to be OK. Plus you get more of it promoted into your feed because hitting the report button is a form of interaction with it...
I actually had some sympathy for Facebook when they were condemned for not moderating fake news from Myanmar they have no real capacity to moderate, or condemned for daring to slap the gentlest of content warnings on antivax stuff in contexts they understand perfectly well... but when it comes to ads they get paid for, which is a much smaller fraction of Facebook content that is unambiguously not protected speech or a matter of opinion, their lack of effort is quite something to behold.
They could just set the minimum ad spend at a level that makes moderation possible.
Let's say it costs $15 to have a human spend 15 minutes checking an ad. If the minimum spend per ad is $100 it'd easily cover the costs of the check. And I imagine most ad campaigns are spending a lot more than $100.
Secondly, if I’m wrong and it’s not possible, then you stop providing the dangerous service! There’s no reason Meta has to exist in its current form. If it can’t meet basic standards of human dignity in its product offerings, then it should change or cease to exist.
For software, sometimes paying off that debt means getting rid of some of your features/code/stuff. i.e. there's another alternative to "let's AI the AI".
scale the business down. shrink the number of users. make less money.
They can also choose to show fewer ads, i.e., only show manually human reviewed ads, and if there are too many to review, charge more per ad until there aren't too many.
Just because the social property giant corporations steal is somewhat abstract doesn't change any of the fundamentals of right and wrong. I'm so tired of this ultra-capitalist "right to be massive" assumption which places the value of unhinged monopolistic growth over maintaining social commons. What these companies "should do" is face penalties until they can safely manage their scale, or scope their scale to a level they can maintain safely.