Disagree with essentially all of this.

To get a Facebook account they require all sorts of PII.

Why not have people give their PII to set up an advertising account and if they distribute CSAM then they are banned. Removing access to WhatsApp will stop a large portion of the world from participating.

And the parts that can't? Well, they can't advertise on Facebook/Instagram anymore.

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ticulatedspline 2 days ago | parent [-]

Probably a case of "hate the game not the player"

CSAM is highly illegal, no doubt these accounts are getting banned but likely not charged (who knows what jurisdiction the advertiser is even in) clearly they're able to pass the current bar.

This is conjecture but I'd bet that in all likelihood someone at some meeting at Meta has floated the idea of moving impedance to the signup to try to limit this phenomena. Maybe more verification, or more hoops. And likely Meta crunched the numbers and was looking at billions of dollars lost in legit ad traffic and that just doesn't fly for a publicly traded company.

I'd guess that the folks at Meta would absolutely love CSAM to stop showing up, It's simply too dangerous, likely costs more than it earns, makes them look bad when it shows up, and alienates users who don't want to see it.

But those negative effects are probably all quantifiable to some dollar value that's less than the alternatives.

Executives don't get bonuses for altruism or ethical behavior. They get bonuses for making more money than they did last quarter. real fix is changing the game but that's a lot harder than it seems and can have many unintended consequences of it's own.

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happymellon 2 days ago | parent | next [-]

> 'd guess that the folks at Meta would absolutely love CSAM to stop showing up, It's simply too dangerous

Presumably not dangerous enough.

	▲	ticulatedspline 2 days ago \| parent [-]
		Which could be a "change to the game" but that might be worse. Protections like Section 230 are absolutely abused by large companies. But protections like that are also what has made the internet even possible Overly strict rules can also be weaponized. Imagine running a site that supports user content, but any appearance of CSAM on your site was jail-worthy, and you get an email demanding bitcoin or you're about to get hit with some posts that will shut you down. You have good moderation but you know you can't withstand a literal attack, someone who can automate that attack and has a financial motive to get illegal content onto your site. what do you do?

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FireBeyond a day ago | parent | prev [-]

You are talking about a company that willingly allowed one of its employees to be arrested when the government of that country was threatening to do so (apropos of the rightness or wrongness of that country in doing so), as a canary in a coal mine of sorts to decide whether they were willing to allow their executive team to travel there...

And then were okay with letting that person sit in jail longer because they thought it'd be better for Facebook PR if they did...

And then when they finally got that person out of jail, and later had him show up at a meet-n-greet with said executive team, Zuck didn't look up from his phone, looked confused, and said to his PA as he was leaving "who was that guy anyway, and why did he need to meet us?"

Or when Burmese dissidents, even the Burmese government itself, said that a FB feature would be used to track down and imprison, torture people the government didn't like, Zuck and FB leadership said "the feature is doing a lot to improve platform engagement, it needs to stay".

So the answer is worse. It's a combination of "the money" and pure psychopathy and sociopathy at the head of the dragon.