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https://archive.ph/4LhoU

I didn't realize the original was behind a paywall.

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.
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.

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 other answer is that the people creating these ads have the resources to continuously try and bypass filters/moderation.
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.
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 !

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?"
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.
All their fines are merely a cost of doing business, and they won't change their ways until the fines hurt.
Guys, it's fine.

Relax.

It's only a crime if someone else does it or is not sufficiently wealthy, otherwise it's a mistake.

Metas ads are all over the place. Thomas Kehl, one of the founders of "Finanzfluss" (a german site/content creation company about finance) is currently suing meta because scammers keep using his picture.

There really needs to be some harder punishments for this kind of behavior, after all meta profits by selling scammy ads.

Meta is still running ads that suggest violence against politicians, when reported they say it does not contravene their policies.
What's crazy is how long it takes to report something like this to a big company and actually have them take action on it. I remember 10 years ago I reported a Giphy ad for the same thing, and it took them months to take action.
I'm starting to wonder if any of this is better than local newspapers, where there's an editor with oversight over all content...
Personally I find these kinds of things fascinating. Partially for the practical problem it represents and it's facets but also the one sided backlash of it all. Moderation is an interesting conglomerate of so many factors.

First of all I don't think Meta is a good or honest company, but that doesn't mean they're not trying at all. In reality even if they were good and honest I genuinely believe their task is probably nearly impossible. Humans just suck too much. It certainly doesn't help that Meta has at least some perverse incentive to be permissive with ads, as they get money from them. Though Meta execs aren't stupid. Inflammatory political ads are one thing, kiddie porn is another I suspect they lose more money over CSAM than all the ad revenue from them. I believe them when they say they removed over 36 million pieces of child sexual exploitation content last year.

Which is a number that I should let sink in. Basically more than one piece of CSAM shows up in their ad stream every second of every day all year. If their moderation techniques are 99% effective that results in 360,000 CSAM ads leaking to the public annually.

Another interesting thought is how much would it cost to actually get that rate to 100%? let's assume human moderators aren't paid much but are infallible. That all-in a single moderator employee costs $65K , that's salary, benefits, HR ratio, psychological therapy, equipment, the works, all factored in.

let's say on average you get about 1 ad review ~every 2 minutes, so bout 250 ads per-day per-employee factoring in some time off you actually get about 65,000 reviews a year. So bout $1 per review. So the question begs how many distinct ads enter their system each year? which I haven't found a stat for. But assuming only 1 in 1000 ads are CSAM, which still feels high but is probably a reasonable ratio. we get 36 billion ads needing review annually. At a dollar each 23% of their gross annual ad revenue each year would be just moderation overhead and they would need to hire over 550,000 moderators.

Evil or not I think they organically built a thing that operates at an unimaginable scale, that even moderation with failures in the parts-per-million would result in tens of thousands of unsavory or unscrupulous ads reaching users and they have neither the incentive nor the capacity to reach even that level of accuracy.

So that's why they are lobbying for age verification, i.e ID verification?
Weird how they never thought to require ID verification for advertisers hmmm
Meta will do whatever it can to run any and all ads.

Meta knowingly runs scam ads, they just charge more to run them: https://www.reuters.com/legal/litigation/consumer-watchdog-g...

> Reuters also reported that Meta internally projected in 2024 that it would earn about 10% of its overall annual revenue – or $16 billion – from running ads for scams and banned goods, internal company documents show.

At $employer we're CONSTANTLY fighting fake ads cloning our brand. Their various brand protection features seem deliberately inept and ineffective.

Even if they are caught and it’s illegal, as long as the fine for it is less than the roi of running them the companies will not stop.
Somewhat related: open YouTube in an incognito window.

Search something rather innocuous like "news". Click the first thing then go back to the main page. You have to watch through the ad.

The amount of slop you will get suggested as soon as the algorithm warms up is nuts. The ad you are first served might also be slop. I mean AI generated video advertising overt bogus cures (a memorable one recently - "did you know the Bible has the answer to Alzheimer's?") over AI slop footage.

When I compare to my normal/auth'd Youtube experience, it feels like a totally different app. I have never really experienced such a cheap illustration of the "Youtube rabbit hole" effect. The degree to which AI authored advertising is participating in this is imo pretty concerning if you have, in particular, older parents or relatives.

This is what happens when you let a company be controlled by one person who has no reason to be accountable to anyone.

If Zuckerberg wants total voting control, then he can also deal with the consequences of being caught hosting CSAM.

I'd be interested to know if the same amount of leniency shown here would be applied if we were talking about ads depicting violence against elected politicians.
If stuff like this shows up in GAI I wonder what that means for how common such material is in the wild. Frightening.
> but as Wired notes, it relies on "automated tools" as part of the process, which may have been how the more than 50 ads TTP discovered made it through.

Again, and again, and again, these technologies have proven ineffective to moderate content. User posted and otherwise. Until we have a legal mechanism in place to hold these companies meaningfully liable for this, it will not stop.

Every single one of these has the same damn list of excuses about cost of hiring human moderators, but I promise everyone reading this if you make the executives of a social network legally liable for distributing CSAM on their platforms, they will find all kinds of money to get human moderators really fucking quick.

Classy as usual.
> and ran across Facebook, Threads, Messenger and Instagram.

So it's the SAME AD PLATFORM? Even in MESSENGER? My god. Not only is this whole thing horrible but it's doubly so

We were better off with landlines and local journalism.
Non-specific terms are a pet peeve of mine in accusations.

Is this new term broader than the old term of CP or is it the same? Why did we even switch?

I'm wondering what people expect these companies to do? Human moderators? Sure, but Meta products have approximately half the worlds population using them. At this scale it's pretty mind bogglingly difficult to moderate down everything. The ads/posts served per second is an astronomical number.

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

If any of us did that clearly we’d be in jail for several years and put on the sex offenders register but when Meta appear to be hugely responsible for increases in teen suicide or crimes like these we get nothing. If corporations want the rights of individuals they equally should shoulder our shared societal responsibilities as well. I honestly don’t get how they can just pretend they aren’t responsible somehow because it’s slightly expensive to not commit crimes or something…

If you are downvoting this please explain why, it’s important that we come to a shared understanding how these things are ever okay for corporations and not individuals…

Beyond these obviously deplorable ads, my wife got sniped by an ecommerce lookalike ad on Google the other day: a near-identical match of the vendor she was looking for, with a paid for sponsored ad (that was clearly linked to some chinese firm upon further review). Site had prices that were just a bit too good to be true, and a slightly different TLD that _I_ would've caught, but she missed because the price was a bit too good to be true. Only caught it when Citi asked me if I was spending 9000EGD on some random website.

And my point here is, we're in this great revolution of AI empowered everything and... these companies can't be bothered to scan this volume of AI ad slop to make sure we're not being actively scammed? Or having porn or CSAM spread? I understand it's a "perverse incentive" in the truest sense: they make money by taking the scammers money, but I was scammed once by an insanely clever lookalike Facebook ad, and had trusted their verified checkmark (about a decade ago)... with AI, these things should be a thing of the past.

Good example why not to post your children faces online
Repeal Section 230
Zuckerberg should thrown in prison.
Shut it all down.
I asked my grandpa about the business idea of self-serve magazine advertising. He said if you do that wait till you see the weird shit people will try to publish.

I wonder if we could learn anything from these cranky old timers.

I reported a blatantly sexual adult ad on Facebook the other day, they got back to me and said that their moderators reviewed the ad and that it was appropriate.
Fork found in kitchen.
36 million CSAM media removed in 2025? Why aren't millions of people in jail? Wtf?
As if you didn't need another reason to use an ad blocker.
> AI-generated

How on earth can they know?

Non-paywall alternative:

https://www.engadget.com/2231100/meta-apps-displayed-ads-tha...