Apple is being sued over its decision not to implement a system that would have scanned iCloud photos for child sexual abuse material (CSAM). The lawsuit
Google/Youtube, who take zero action on people posting both horrible videos AND comments on said videos routinely
I used to share an office with YouTube’s content review team at a previous job and have chatted with a bunch of them, so I can give a little insight on this side. For what it’s worth, YT does take action on CSAM and other abusive materials. The problem is that it’s just a numbers game. Those types of reports are human-reviewed. And for obvious reasons, it’s not exactly easy to keep a department like that staffed (turns out you really can’t pay people enough to watch child abuse for 8 hours a day), so the content quickly outnumbers the reviewers. Different types of infractions will have different priority levels, and there’s pretty much always a consistent backlog of content to review.
For Youtube I was very much talking specifically about how long and how little action they took on the kids-doing-gymnastics videos, even when it became abundantly clear that the target market was pedophiles, and the parents who kept posting these videos were, at the very least, complicit if not explicitly pimping their children out.
(If you have not seen and/or read up on this, save yourself the misery and skip it: it’s gross.)
It took them a VERY long time to take any meaningful action, even after the intent of and the audience to which it was being shown was clearly not people interested in gymnastics, and it stayed there for literal years.
Like, I have done anti-CSAM work and have lots and lots of sympathy for it because it’s fucking awful, but if you’ve got videos of children - clothed or not - and the comment section is entirely creeps and perverts and you just kinda do nothing, I have shocking limited sympathy.
Seriously - the comment section should have been used for the FBI to launch raids, because I 100% guarantee you every single person involved has piles and piles of CSAM sitting around and they were just ignored because it wasn’t explicit CSAM.
I used to share an office with YouTube’s content review team at a previous job and have chatted with a bunch of them, so I can give a little insight on this side. For what it’s worth, YT does take action on CSAM and other abusive materials. The problem is that it’s just a numbers game. Those types of reports are human-reviewed. And for obvious reasons, it’s not exactly easy to keep a department like that staffed (turns out you really can’t pay people enough to watch child abuse for 8 hours a day), so the content quickly outnumbers the reviewers. Different types of infractions will have different priority levels, and there’s pretty much always a consistent backlog of content to review.
While this article talks about Facebook, specifically, it’s very similar to what I saw with YouTube’s team, as well: https://www.theverge.com/2019/2/25/18229714/cognizant-facebook-content-moderator-interviews-trauma-working-conditions-arizona
For Youtube I was very much talking specifically about how long and how little action they took on the kids-doing-gymnastics videos, even when it became abundantly clear that the target market was pedophiles, and the parents who kept posting these videos were, at the very least, complicit if not explicitly pimping their children out.
(If you have not seen and/or read up on this, save yourself the misery and skip it: it’s gross.)
It took them a VERY long time to take any meaningful action, even after the intent of and the audience to which it was being shown was clearly not people interested in gymnastics, and it stayed there for literal years.
Like, I have done anti-CSAM work and have lots and lots of sympathy for it because it’s fucking awful, but if you’ve got videos of children - clothed or not - and the comment section is entirely creeps and perverts and you just kinda do nothing, I have shocking limited sympathy.
Seriously - the comment section should have been used for the FBI to launch raids, because I 100% guarantee you every single person involved has piles and piles of CSAM sitting around and they were just ignored because it wasn’t explicit CSAM.
Just… gross, and poorly handled.