Meta documents show 100k children sexually harassed daily on its platforms

Hey nobody wants even a single child being harassed. There is lots of harassment in real life too and it can happen on any street corner. But most people would agree that recording everything on every street corner 24&#x2F;7 is not acceptable in a free society. As more and more of our lives have an online component, online services also can not prevent 100% of crime and lesser unpleasantness and still remain powerful enough to fulfill user needs and enable running of free society.<p>There are both unique challenges and unique opportunities online. Child accounts can be more locked down. But children can lie and use parent&#x27;s id&#x2F;phone&#x2F;etc to create adult accounts. Plus government regulation can either discourage a service from offering child accounts in the first place or make these too restrictive to be useful, forcing everyone to lie.<p>Ultimately parents and perhaps schools have to educate children on realistic dangers they can face both online and on street corners and supervise them until they are ready to responsibly use these spaces alone.

What&#x27;s the base rate to compare this against? For other social networks, for other websites, for society as a whole. My general attitude about meta is that it&#x27;s cool to point out any flaw that might get people mad at them, but I just want to know if there is any reason to think this is a special problem they have. And, even though it&#x27;s a double standard, I do get my hackles up when they start testing the waters to see how effective it is to imply that end-to-end encryption causes child abuse.

Why are children even allowed on social media? From a society standpoint, social network use is correlated to mental health problems(1). Then factor in sexual harassment and bullying.<p>(1) <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.hhs.gov&#x2F;surgeongeneral&#x2F;priorities&#x2F;youth-mental-health&#x2F;social-media&#x2F;index.html#:~:text=Children%20and%20adolescents%20who%20spend,symptoms%20of%20depression%20and%20anxiety.&amp;text=This%20is%20concerning%20as%20a,a%20day%20on%20social%20media" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.hhs.gov&#x2F;surgeongeneral&#x2F;priorities&#x2F;youth-mental-h...</a>.

It&#x27;s bizarre to end this by denouncing encryption. &quot;There&#x27;s been this long lasting problem on Facebook, but a large part of it is something introduced last month.&quot;

&gt; an internal 2017 email describes executive opposition to scanning Facebook Messenger for “harmful content” because it would place the service “at a competitive disadvantage vs other apps who might offer more privacy”, the lawsuit states.

I don&#x27;t understand why they claim that scanning messages erodes privacy: it can be done in the recipient side totally on client side. It could be as easy as a image classifier: &quot;hey, this photo may contain unwanted content (we may be wrong), do you want to see it? Yes, No, Report, Report &amp; Block&quot;.<p>Unfortunately Facebook do an awful job blocking harmful content: I have reported posts where there is obvious phishing, hate speech or even murder threats and... They do nothing. But if you write &quot;tinta negra HP&quot; (HP black ink) they ban you immediately.

How can anyone believe law enforcement would catch more criminals by having more data if they’re understaffed already?

Which platforms do meta allow children to create accounts? To my understanding, they stopped allowing children on their platforms since social networks can cause major harm to children from things like bullying, and that children can&#x27;t give consent to the model of data collections that meta do.

It is mind boggling how a high level Apple employee would not use Apple&#x27;s own parental control abilities to safe guard their child&#x27;s online activity. They aren&#x27;t even supposed to be using the IG platform at twelve years old. I hope Meta would throw that back in Apple&#x27;s face if they kicked up a stink.<p>Obviously this kind of harassment should not exist in the first place but parents who work in tech should be held more accountable for not protecting their kids imo.

Perhaps this might be the first great use-case of AI - stopping people from doing inappropriate harassment..

A unique 100k each day or is there overlap? Also are these genuine messages or just wide-cast spam messages? Technically we <i>all</i> get sexually harassed daily if we include our GMail spam folders.

There should be a big banner at the top of every page &quot;Surgeon General&#x27;s Warning: This app contains a gratuitous amount of dicks.&quot; From that point forward it would be caveat emptor.

So what percentage of the sexual harassment involves adults, and what percentage is grooming?<p>Tossing everything into a single number isn&#x27;t very helpful.

Very true.<p>I was teaching a 9th grade class a few years ago and realized that men from a certain demographic showing pics of their reproductive organs had traumatized the young females in my to the point most of them showed signs if PTSD. They gasped, closed their eyes, and&#x2F;or recoiled at any image suddenly popping up on their computer screens or on the projector.<p>I pointed out that this was felony child sexual abuse, and that the perpetrators were easy to find. Law enforcement did not care.

Now do Discord.

I&#x27;m perhaps alone in this, but that&#x27;s fewer than I would have expected.

The real conspiracies are always in plain sight

&quot;The sexual harassment of one child is a tragedy; the sexual harassment of one hundred thousand children is a statistic.&quot;<p>[Paraphrasing a quote usually attributed to Joseph Stalin]