One would have to assume all of these things are points of negotiation to get Meta to disable E2E on FB messenger and WhatsApp, along with the public allegations made for years prior that providing encrypted channels directly supported the cause of pedophiles.
(It is also interesting to me that in ~2010, such discussions used to use terrorism, and now it’s CSAM/pedophilia.)
> (It is also interesting to me that in ~2010, such discussions used to use terrorism, and now it’s CSAM/pedophilia.)
Nah, CSAM/pedophilia argument goes way back. It is just that the terrorism argument has largely disappeared because the emotional impact of mostly 9/11 has been dealt with (terrorism was much more rampant in parts of the previous century, can't recall the decade but if I had to say it was 70s or 80s).
The thing is, tools can be used for Good and Bad. A knife, a car, the Internet, social media.
The problem is if we live in a society where your online identity is pseudonymous at best (remember Rotterdam hospital shooting recently, the shooter got found on 4chan), and there is post-moderation instead of pre-moderation you are going to have garbage content.
A lawsuit like this is used to prove negligence in proportion to the amount of users vs content. Ie. it will result in more active moderation by Meta. In that regard, it is The Netherlands hosting providers who were terrible with removing CSAM. And, almost all of them have improved.
Does that mean the content is removed from the Internet? No, impossible. But it sure as hell got more difficult for the perpetrators to distribute the content. Which is a decent compromise.
In 2010 threatening people with terrorism was already almost a decade out of date.
Eventually, if you keep threatening people with an outcome that they can easily detect, they'll notice that it's not happening. It's better to threaten them with something invisible.
The implication isn't that the allegations are false. The implication is that the problem is imaginary. Facebook can easily be the largest site of an imaginary problem.
> If we stick the debate around the truthiness of the allegations, it only takes a few bad examples to lose that argument.
That is true, but the argument here is over why people stopped appealing to terrorism to support their policy preferences.
I'm sorry. I don't see the difference between a problem being imaginary and allegations of a problem being false. If you allege a problem exists, and it's imaginary, then your allegation is false.
So, I'm just saying we can oppose the policy preference regardless of why they stopped appealing to a problem, and regardless of that problem's "realness"
> I'm sorry. I don't see the difference between a problem being imaginary and allegations of a problem being false. If you allege a problem exists, and it's imaginary, then your allegation is false.
The allegation here, as seen in the headline, isn't that there's enough pedophile activity on Facebook to rise to the level of being a problem somewhere.
It's just that there's more on Facebook than there is in most other places.
I suspect the GP was being facetious, but the point that meta is massive is a good one imo. With billions of users your platform can become 'the largest market for x' for many niche use cases without it really saying much about the platform itself.
Why Meta and not the ISPs trafficking the child exploitation bits, or Xiaomi and Apple for selling the silicon that enables it? Or the GNU project for providing disk encryption software that hides it.
The end goal is to morally and legally blackmail every company to act as an active spy for the panopticon.
Because Meta makes more money than all the ISPs together and the ISPs offer a much more useful value to the users. And no, the end goal is to not allow companies to profit from human misery which it seems you aren't against.
And there's the moral blackmail. Tell me, how does Meta "profit from human misery"? Do they take a cut from sex-abuse sales, deliberately turn a blind eye to it, and it represents a significant fraction of their profits? Or do they just imperfectly enforce bans on it, and to them it's nothing but a liability for their ad sales?
> And no, the end goal is to not allow companies to profit from human misery
So says you. But the end result will be a panopticon. Good thing government and corporate oppression are solved issues, so there's no need for impractical things like privacy or freedom anymore.
The HN bubble has moved on for sure, but going by DAU/MAU (which isn’t perfect but is better than “I think”), facebook is still the biggest and is still growing
I just don't see how. I have several neices and nephews. I use facebook to share photos of family and such. I rarely see any activity at all from the younger relatives that I'm following. I just don't think it happens, they should be getting at all social media rather than just facebook. I don't support any of these "think of the children" laws though, because basically the government wants to use it as a backdoor to track everyone and their cat on social media.
Well, other services like CP and fraud don't matter because we're only talking about drugs anyway. I don't think I do underestimate the markets, but we never defined biggest in the first place and neither of us have any data so it seems moot.
The number of times I've tried to get friends to make orders on DNMs over the years with no success. If I'd just passed them a Telegram username and told them to download the app they'd have done it there and then.
How do you order on "DN markets"? Can you give me a three-paragraph howto, starting from the point where I have cash, a card or the kind of paypal/bank/… most people have, but not any particular software installed.
I ask because… if this is something a lot of people do, then it must either be really simple or there are howtos on youtube/quora/… and I can't find any howto.
I feel that there's a lot hidden in that word "just". The shopping sites you have in mind, are they searchable using google? Do they accept visa cards or paypal?
You wrote that GP "heavily underestimate DN markets by service and volume". If those markets can't be found using mass-market search engines and don't accept payment using mass-market payment services, then I think they're either nïche or you need to explain how they reached large volume.
I am not really sure where you are going at. You can very well Google this all (at least in Switzerland you find clear results) the time where onion.to was actually properly indexed in Google is over tho, but that was a thing not to long ago as well.
A crypto wallet, that connects to one of those multi Billion Dollar networks, very well could be viewed as 'mass market payment service'. I at least know more people using crypto than PayPal, most no 'hackers'.
Rhetorically speaking it's simple to make the biggest in some class seem to be worst in some related class. If I'm the biggest taxi operator in town, I'm likely to have the highest CO₂ emissions of all the taxi companies, see? You can omit or deemphasise the connection between the two and make me seem bad.
Buses profit from pedos spying on kids in them.
Google and Apple profit from pedos using their phones to spy on kids.
Public infrastructure provides convenience for pedos to do their dirty work.
I can continue like that for a long time, you know.
