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Comment by craftkiller | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

How did that work out for you? Safer? What was the experience switching, for you and for your kid?

Haven’t seen any bloody bodies advertised to my child… yet.

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.

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?

Unfortunately, I’ve seen MA ads for kids games on iPhone as well. Possibly not as bad but not great. It seems to be better than it was two years ago.

> I switched to Apple.

Sadly, the dirty money is luring them in too.

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.

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...

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.

The Dead Internet Theory is real!

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.

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.

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...

[2] https://www.bbb.org/scamtracker/lookupscam/807274

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 AI is a gooner

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's a lot easier to automatically detect a match to 1 specific thing than detect a match to a completely novel thing that offends sensibilities in a similar way to other things.

It is really interesting how YouTube can detect short snippets of movies and songs but there are many full audiobooks illegally uploaded for years.

Movie and music studios are far more litigious

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' :)

Without ublock origin internet is so dirty.

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.

Did it block sponsors?

That's the thing. I rarely watch, just listening to music doodling in a background tab.

I think I remember some sponsored crap in 'der8auer' or something like 'linus tech tips' eons ago, but I don't watch them anymore.

So I can't really tell, but for my use case it seems redundant.

I also remember having imported uBo-lists from somewhere, allegedly enabling sponsor-blocking somehow. But that was another install. I don't have these anymore, ATM.

Sponsorblock can also skip non-music intros to music videos.

Didn't Revanced get replaced by Morphe?

How is me installing that going to help prevent Facebook hosting unlawful adverts?

I barely visit the FB feed these days, about half of those visits being a notification that turns out to be someone's birthday.

Unlike FB themselves for the content they host, I find it easy to avoid them without needing the help of a filter, because on the rare occasion when I find myself being sucked into scrolling down the feed, this almost always stops within 3 items because that's how quickly I find the first utterly irrelevant item owing to how Facebook keeps trying to suggest (and advertise) nonsense.

The filter I want to see in the world is the legislative kind, the "Meta delenda est" style. This is of course *not* what Facebook would want: spammers want to break FB's filters, and FB would try to get past legislative filters. I count FB as a spammer trying to put ads into every third message you try to exchange with your friends.

There have been Youtube ads that are undeniable scams for years, so it's no surprise it's compleatly unmoderated.

I just don't get their algorithm. I used to show YT videos to my students but I stopped that totally because of this kind of crap.

Use the unhook extension, ublock origin extension and firefox. Also don't hesitate to use the "Block element" feature for ublock. Get some control back from big tech :)

Thanks! I will try this

I've noticed this with obvious scam ads on the YouTube app or even Google search results. I've determined that (much like Twitter/X) the "verification" (or "moderation") is simply just "did they [the advertiser] pay us?"

Every time I got an ad for Falung Gong or Epoch Times related properties or that annoying Epoch Times Russian-American ( Roman in this article https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/05/technology/epoch-times-yo... ) I used to screenshot it and email it individually to every single Google Board member I could find.

I haven't seen any Epoch Times ads in Youtube for a while... maybe it worked !

Man I got a “clothing brand” last night on YouTube of a VERY young girl wearing… not much, and it didn’t fit well in all the wrong / revealing places…

Reported the add but damn YouTube, the freaky fake medical ads are bad enough.

The more surprising thing with YouTube is how much obvious copyright infringement is in ads. The whole platform seems oriented around copyright enforcement, but ads seem to get a pass.

What copyright infringement did you see in an ad?

Anime characters they clearly haven't paid for the rights to use seem popular (anime studios typically announce their partnerships).

Also not a copyright violation, but using Elon Musk's likeness without permission for investment scams seems to be a big thing.

But that can't be true! From the article (with a probably irrelevant fact added by me):

  "Sexual exploitation is horrific, and we work aggressively to keep it off our platform" a Meta [which in the past 2 years has laid off and disbanded all teams responsible for this] spokesperson says.

The worst ads are the shady games with all sorts of sexual references. They don't end no matter how many times you report it, block the ads or select the "less gaming ads" option.

Firefox and uBlock Origin will prevent you seeing any ads. I didn't even want to use it until the adds got so repetitive.

Is it surprising? Google and Facebook can barely police the content their human users post.

That seems to be by choice, not because it's inherently difficult at scale. It's not like we see them take things down when you report them, you'll get multiple reviews of "this obvious scam doesn't violate our rules".

You guys see ads on YouTube?

Brave browser is a thing by the way.

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