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Facebook is removing stories about pornographic ads
- nojvek 2y agoNetwork effects - the more people use Facebook, the valuable it becomes. If you want Facebook to die, stop using it. Meta makes 98% of its revenue from advertising, and that segment grew 25% last quarter YoY. Meta has 3.19 billion DAUs and 3.9 billion MAUs (Almost everyone connected to internet not in China). Their engineers and scientists have invented digital cocaine and they've got very little push back. They keep on printing more billions every quarter.
- bttrpll 2y agoDone. I also deleted Instagram. Meta is awful.
- alper 2y ago> Their engineers and scientists have invented digital cocaine They bought Instagram and WhatsApp because they couldn't figure anything out.
- samtheprogram 2y agoNot true, they bought the growing competition -- in the case of Instagram, digital crack cocaine.
- WheatMillington 2y agoRight because Facebook was such a miserable failure before those acquisitions.
- dboreham 2y agoIt was a failure at acquiring young users.
- wavemode 2y agoAre you familiar with the origins of Facebook?
- _DeadFred_ 2y agoYes. And they were petrified of becoming not cool/population aging out/etc from day one.
- bigfatkitten 2y agoWhich some extent, it has. My 14 year old describes Facebook as "the app for boomers."
- _DeadFred_ 2y agoIf you knew Facebook people, they were super super scared. They literally bought those apps out of pure fear.
- laweijfmvo 2y agoInstagram today is effectively a totally different app than what they bought.
- razster 2y agoOur company on Friday will be discussing the deletion of all META accounts. We're at the point where we no longer need them and it is a waste of resources, not to mention how horrible they've become.
- echelon 2y ago> If you want Facebook to die, stop using it. None of us have any power. Most people will continue using it.
- autoexec 2y ago> If you want Facebook to die, stop using it. I don't use facebook and somehow facebook hasn't died yet. In fact, facebook is happy to create an account/profile for me since I refuse to and they populate it with data about me collected from anyone who mentions me on their platforms, as well as by scraping data posted to the web elsewhere and by buying up my information from data brokers. I said "No" to facebook, and facebook said "You don't get a choice". There's no reason to think that if people stopped using facebook it would go away. Facebook has already demonstrated that they're willing to populate their site with shadow profiles and fake AI accounts to keep up the appearance of being filled with active users even as their real user count continues to decline. The AI they're using to make bots was (at least in part) trained on things I wrote, or were written about me, on sites other than facebook. When young people started leaving facebook for instagram facebook just bought instagram to keep them. There is simply no way to for users to vote with their feet/wallet here. The best we can hope for is that advertisers will notice that AI bots viewing ads won't increase sales, finally get tired of all the other ad/click fraud going on and stop using the platform. Maybe then facebook will die, but even in that case I wouldn't hold my breath. Facebook will just keep trying to expand into other areas like healthcare, education, and shopping
- ipython 2y agoI stopped using it about 12 years ago. So you can thank me for their number being 3,190,000 DAUs and not 3,190,001 DAUs. (point being, while individual action sounds like a nice solution, it certainly doesn't operate on "webscale")
- jtbayly 2y agoYou left off 3 zeros those numbers!
- weyland108 2y ago[flagged]
- andrepd 2y agoUsual technofeudalist "free speech", nothing to see here.
- JumpCrisscross 2y agoHave Meta or Zuckerberg waived that flag recently?
- echelon 2y agoZuck was in a video stating exactly this: https://about.fb.com/news/2025/01/meta-more-speech-fewer-mistakes/ https://about.fb.com/news/2025/01/meta-more-speech-fewer-mis...
- mmooss 2y agoQuite a bit, associated with the moderation change. Zuckerberg criticized the EU, someone at Facebook said how great Trump is for free speech, a justification for the moderation changes is 'free speech', ...
- snakeyjake 2y agoThere is no freedom freer than a techbro spitting out a venomous "freedom you're not gonna take my freedom just do what I fucking say and don't criticize me" between gritted teeth. edit: said while writing a massive check to a politician, of course.
- nixpulvis 2y agoAll I'll say is that moderation is a nightmare. I wish we all gathered offline more.
- simple10 2y agoSide note... Sometimes the sketchy ads are from account hacks. I've seen this happen a couple of times with business accounts. Hackers get access to a personal Meta account that has access to Ad Manager. They run a bunch of scam ads that go live because of the previous reputation of the ad account let's it slip by the AI moderation. The scam ads will run for a few days or more before Meta gets around to human moderation triggered by users flagging the ads. This usually leads to the ad account getting banned. There's a pretty huge ecosystem out there for hacking ad accounts. I would imagine it adds to the overall load on the human moderation process.
- alex1138 2y agoCould be! Apropos of absolutely nothing, Facebook accounts have proven very easy to hack so that's yet another argument for probably breaking the company up into little pieces
- jimt1234 2y agoThis ^^^ I often thought of creating my own Twitter clone, but the biggest problem/obstacle I keep envisioning in content moderation. At the very least it's required for legal reasons - no CSAM! However, if you want to have a platform that isn't a cesspool, but still respects diverse content - well, that's just not easy, even in offline gatherings.
- thethirdadmin 2y agoIts literally impossible to create an online social media platform that wont degenerate into a cesspool. Neil Postman essentially said as much in his book Amusing Ourselves to Death. The very nature of the medium makes it impossible.
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- msm_ 2y agoUnrelated but similar story: my company (a Polish national CERT) published a technical blog post about how ad fraud proliferates on large online platforms, featuring Meta and Google [1]. Then a magic thing happened: facebook posts that linked to our publication started disappearing within a minute of publication. Including journalists and newspapers. Then posts about how the posts were removed started disappearing. Then facebook accounts - including journalists - writing about this were banned. Sounds like a fairy tale, but it actually happened [2]. I suspect a human overreaction and then automated systems taking over. Anyway, eventually it was escalated really high up and resolved. I can't share any more details unfortunately, even though I'd like to write more about this. [1] English translation: https://cert.pl/en/posts/2024/12/Ad-fraud-on-large-online-platforms/ https://cert.pl/en/posts/2024/12/Ad-fraud-on-large-online-pl... [2] Our reaction post about this, in Polish: https://cert.pl/posts/2024/11/blokada-na-meta-stanowisko/ https://cert.pl/posts/2024/11/blokada-na-meta-stanowisko/.
- Hilift 2y agoFacebook is a cash machine. $62 billion net profit, from ads. Anything with that much revenue will attract fraud. Facebook will likely present themselves as victims, taken advantage of by organized criminals.
- consumer451 2y agoSure, but prior to FB style ads, newspaper humans reviewed the ads prior to publishing them in the newspaper. They did things that didn't scale. FB, Google, YouTube, and other ad markets don't give a crap about any of that, and print money by not giving a crap. Most of the those newspapers are out of business now, and/or were bought by special interests. This appears to me to be a clear net loss for humanity.
- ipython 2y agothis is super frustrating, as platforms such as Facebook and Twitter claim to be the digital equivalent of the "public town square" yet take on none of the responsibilities and transparency that come along with it, just all the profits. I would suspect something a bit more sinister: the very organizations you are targeting probably started a mass campaign to "report" your content, which triggered automated systems that caused your posts to disappear. A more cynical me would add in the fact that any manual review by Facebook staff would trigger even more aggressive moves to silence you, given that you're directly accusing them of inadequate moderation of their platform, which at best doesn't make them look good, and at worst, means they lose advertising $$ that those groups may be spending with Facebook to target those very victims.
- darth_avocado 2y agoNot sure about ads, but things are definitely getting worse in terms of health first at FB and now at Instagram. It seems like sex workers (onlyfans models) seemed to have realized the way to skirt the FB community guidelines. There’s no straight porn, but when cooking videos and reels about cute animals suddenly starts morphing into cooking videos but with someone wearing suggestive clothes and animal videos centered around an attractive person doing suggestive things, things go downhill real fast. Recommendation takes higher precedence over your network. And then nefarious actors take over the recommendations. That’s how these products die. The recommendation engine is unfortunately not able to distinguish between regular content and suggestive content, and no amount of reporting/blocking seems to change that. Plus almost all the reports are reviewed and are determined to have not broken any community rules.
- reducesuffering 2y ago> The recommendation engine is unfortunately not able to distinguish between regular content and suggestive content, and no amount of reporting/blocking seems to change that. Maybe currently... But you can definitely crowdsource / user generate some thumbs-up or thumbs-down mechanism whether something is "suggestive" content
- mjevans 2y agoBad for Parents: It won't catch people failing to be sensitive enough or favoring their own network with less stringent oversight. Bad for Content Creators: It won't be consistent, so largely it will be harsh to established players in predicable and game-able ways, while new market entrants will experience either statistical randomness (influenced by time and geographic demographics) or a bias against them in favor of established content. Still, SOME of that would help a little, if only as a second sort of data channel to compare to other effects. AI moderation will continue to be game-able garbage until true AI, at which point, please just plug me into the matrix and give me the pill.
- laweijfmvo 2y agoNo, there is outright porn. They do this "trick" where they flash a nude photo for like 100ms on a 10s video and caption it with something like "pause it for the good part". The sad thing is that I've reported these posts and they always say it doesn't violate their terms.
- pessimizer 2y agoI've said this too many times, but Facebook only did political censorship because they were extorted into doing political censorship, so "it's not censorship because they're a private company," whatever you believe about the principle, is factually wrong. Facebook only wants to censor stories about Facebook, just like Musk is only interested in censoring stories about Musk. This is the natural state of these companies. They were never actually interested in being moral arbiters for the government, they were just used as proxies because of their self-interest, through the leverage that the people who regulate them and pay them have over them.
- llamaimperative 2y ago> they were extorted into doing political censorship Please cite your sources. From Zuck’s recent letter he says literally the opposite: “Ultimately, it was our decision whether or not to take content down, and we own our decisions”
- cute_boi 2y agowhy complain when we can just stop using facebook?
- drumhead 2y agoSeems like the most productive option.
- tokioyoyo 2y agoTo my understanding, all the efforts to get people of Facebook/IG and others have failed, so people stopped preaching that. So we either have to get people addicted to something else (like TikTok but with even more dopamine hits) or keep complaining about it. Anyone who wanted to get out has already done so. Others are stuck or have to use it for various reasons.
- mmooss 2y agoThe problem is quitting and saying it's hopeless, the standard response from a certain political grouping to lots of problems.
- tokioyoyo 2y agoIt’s been more than a decade since people started trying to get others off Facebook. It clearly hasn’t worked.
- mmooss 2y ago> It’s been more than a decade since people started trying to get others off Facebook. It clearly hasn’t worked. That's called "quitting". It hasn't worked yet, and people widely began the quitting years ago, so it's not going to work until they actually work hard with commitment, passion, creativity, confidence. If they don't do that, if they don't believe in it, certainly nobody else will. And look how you've derailed the actual work. Instead of talking about how to solve the problem, we're talking about whether we should quit like you have - a conversation that accomplishes absolutely nothing for anyone. Who invited you to this meeting?
- darepublic 2y agoWhen I sometimes check into facebook.com, it feels like 80% of the reels are beautiful women taking off their panties, posted by people I've never interacted with
- bamboozled 2y agoMy Instagram feed just became smut for some reason, other things yes, but mostly just women doing yoga in a seemingly innocent yet suggestive way. Basically an onlyfans preview catalogue. Yes, men look at this, yes I clicked on some of it because I like seeing attractive women doing yoga, yes it "drives engagement", but I just deleted the app instead. Life's to short to spend on that crap. I just don't see the use of any of it now. What's worse is, a lot of the content is now AI now too, so you're not even looking at "real content" anymore, what is the use of it? I login once every few weeks to check my messages for people who can't workout how to use other apps or iMessage. Our family uses the Apple Photos sharing exclusively and everyone absolutely loves it. It's what Facebook used to be.
- bigfatkitten 2y agoAt least they're adults. On my throwaway accounts feed, they're often not.
- alex1138 2y agoI really don't like Zuckerberg a lot of the time and "if you need info on people at Harvard just ask" ought to have been the biggest red flag of all time People struggle so much using Facebook with its feed randomness and now Instagram too (and them arguably engaging in antitrust with Whatsapp, they promised not to share data and immediately broke that promise)
- 1vuio0pswjnm7 2y agoWhere archive.is is blocked: https://web.archive.org/web/20250108140722if_/https://www.404media.co/facebook-is-censoring-404-media-stories-about-facebooks-censorship/ https://web.archive.org/web/20250108140722if_/https://www.40...
- Tostino 2y ago[flagged]
- paulddraper 2y agoFree speech does not include obscenity. In any common usage I’m aware of.
- sharkjacobs 2y agoThe news stories, which are being removed from Facebook, are not pornographic or obscene. The stories are about pornographic ads on Facebook, which are obscene, and which are not being removed.
- mvdtnz 2y agoAll of the ads mentioned in this article have been removed, though?
- samtheprogram 2y agoRegardless if they all have, that's irrelevant to the point being argued. The articles themselves are not obscene.
- sharkjacobs 2y agoWhat is that germane to?
- mvdtnz 2y agoThe second sentence of the 2-sentence post I replied to.
- sharkjacobs 2y agoDo you mean that you disagree with the article itself or with my summary of it?
- 23B1 2y agohttps://archive.is/kdPJB https://archive.is/kdPJB
- kristopolous 2y agoAlso, consider paying 404media the $100 for a year. It's just 4 people and I don't think they have many people actually paying. They're doing really good work. I paid. They also have a podcast - basically the top stories they publish in a conversational format: https://www.404media.co/the-404-media-podcast/ https://www.404media.co/the-404-media-podcast/
- warkdarrior 2y ago$100/year is too much for an article on their complaints about Facebook.
- jeffgreco 2y agoBelieve it or not, $100 provides a wealth of journalism for the year, not just the single article!
- kristopolous 2y agoWhat about: * Government to Name ‘Key Witness’ Who Provided FBI With Backdoored Encrypted Chat App Anom * Secret Service Admits It Didn’t Check if People Really Consented to Being Tracked * Telegram Hands U.S. Authorities Data on Thousands of Users * DHS Says China, Russia, Iran, and Israel Are Spying on People in US with SS7 * Congress Pushes Apple to Remove Deepfake Apps After 404 Media Investigation * Hackers Claim Massive Breach of Location Data Giant, Threaten to Leak Data the reason I paid is they kept coming up over and over again and I want to support their model: https://www.cjr.org/business_of_news/404-media-and-the-hopes-of-worker-owned-journalism.php https://www.cjr.org/business_of_news/404-media-and-the-hopes... also traditional media are using them as a source, such as forbes: https://www.forbes.com/sites/davidphelan/2024/11/12/no-your-iphone-is-not-mysteriously-rebooting-heres-whats-happening-secret-revealed/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/davidphelan/2024/11/12/no-your-...
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- djyaz1200 2y ago[flagged]
- thinkingkong 2y agoNow immediately flagged off the front page.
- jorts 2y agoIt’s on the front page for me.
- freitasm 2y agoThat's why following HN from a RSS feed is invaluable. You get to see everything, even the things groupthink filters out.
- freedomben 2y agoIndeed. Some of the most interesting stories on HN never make it past the initial filter. I've seen great posts slip by in obscurity only to get hundreds of votes and hit the front page weeks or months later. There's a lot indeterminism in what makes it to the front page(s) and what doesn't.
- PeterHolzwarth 2y agoKeep in mind this wonderful alternate HN front-send site - it's pretty much taken over for me vs hitting HN's main page: https://hckrnews.com/ https://hckrnews.com/ This site displays the posted links in chronological order which means stuff that suddenly got booted off the front page still shows up.
- oidar 2y agoThat's what I use as well. I wish I could find a good iOS client that supports that style of chronological, but front page posts.
- kergonath 2y agoThere’s quite a lot of trash flagged for very good reasons, though. I cannot keep up with the full feed.
- yoyohello13 2y ago[flagged]
- 23B1 2y agoTheir shareholders don't care ¯\_(ツ)_/¯"
- nine_zeros 2y agoBut society and voters do. Do you want to live in a Putin-esuque society?
- netsharc 2y agoIt seems like it's harder to be a billionaire if you're not an immoral opportunist...
- zimpenfish 2y ago> if you're not an immoral opportunist... "amoral" might be a better fit there given how they'll happily swing in whichever direction they think the power/money wind is blowing.
- tumsfestival 2y agoAnd yet there were loads of chumps here on HN praising Zuck for "upholding the western democratic values of freedom of speech" and other such nonsense. Truly rules for thee but not for me.
- freitasm 2y agoSo true. I mentioned this to a group of friends. The number of people saying this move is good news for speech just shows how people see free speech as being good only when it fills their pockets or aligns with their interests.
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- cynicalsecurity 2y agoI do agree that Facebook are assholes, but then I'm not sure I want to support journalists who are bashing sex, pornography and prostitution. There is nothing wrong with those things. We are not living in the Medieval times any more, maybe it's finally time to stop being puritans and stop believing that sex is somehow fundamentally sinful or wrong. Those beliefs don't make any sense and they look absolutely ridiculous. I would totally support journalism targetted at exposing hypocrisy and authoritarian practices of big tech. It's finally time to liberate society and to stop demonise sex and sex-related topics. Healthy views on sex would make the society a better place, and sex ads on Facebook would stop containing only scam.
- theWreckluse 2y agoI'm not sure if your comment is targeted towards the article. In any case, the article itself specifically says that it's not against the sex, but against Meta's hypocrisy most likely driven by ad revenue.
- daseiner1 2y agoCommoditization of sex is not equivalent to its liberation, and in fact sex has been cheapened and corrupted, resulting in a more poisonous vice than it’s ever been. Pornography is about as good for society as alcohol.
- beepbopboopp 2y agoThat sure reads like a personal opinion and not a fact. I think the passion of your response is the problem pointed out in the article as well as the general problem of freedom of speech. Everyone thinks they know where the "obvious" line is.
- daseiner1 2y agoI do not believe that statements which are obviously opinions need or ought be prefaced with “in my opinion”. I feel that that is poor style. The irony that I’ve done that in this comment (I do not believe…; I feel…) is not lost on me.