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Comment by steve_adams_86 | Hacker News Reader

> Considering the amount of ads they handle that seems... reasonable?

Why reasonable? Don't these ads pass through pre-publication review, and Meta makes money off of it? Any number above zero is a serious problem. If they can't run an ad business that doesn't publish and profit off of CSAM, they shouldn't run it.

I don't think we should distinguish between 'fake' and real CSAM based on if kids are hurt; this ad machine shouldn't be able to publish it, regardless. The moral question of if it's real or kids were directly harmed seems separate to me.

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I recall YouTube was hijacked to show multi-hour ads during the pandemic. These are imperfect systems that can be abused at any scale.

They identified them after the fact and appear to have disclosed that. This is what they needed to do to be able to be held accountable and to do better detecting them in the future.

I block ads and ad services at the device and network level and don't use any Meta services (outside of facebookresearch models), so while I'm fortunate not to have been able to be served any of these, it's also kind of unfortunate that I'm in a relatively rare category to know to report them and how.

Without more context it’s hard to say whether 332 is reasonable, but I interpreted “reasonable” as in there will always be some amount of harmful content uncaught by automated systems.

I agree, more context would be helpful.

In my mind there are two components of this that are in direct tension though, regardless of numbers:

1. Humans having to review ad content is legitimately traumatizing and awful

2. Automated systems can miss obviously harmful content, which should never be allowed

To me this means we probably shouldn't permit these systems to scale as they do, because the company profits from harms to its own workers and/or ad viewers. I worry that we've normalized a business that shouldn't exist in its current form, but it prints so much cash that no one is willing to stop it.

I'm tired of the argument that since it would be impossible to police at scale then they shouldn't be liable.

Just accept money for CSAM ads without accountability, it's fine. No ethical issue here. Why is everyone so angry? /s

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