Meta has had two significant issues brought up this week (hat tip to Futurism):
- Facebook Is Hosting Huge Numbers of Horrifying AI-Generated Videos of Violent Child Abuse, and Meta Is Barely Even Pretending to Care About Taking Them Down
- Mother Horrified When Meta’s AI Scours Instagram and Facebook for Invasive Information About Her Young Daughters
Some quick observations:
re: #1: Meta’s PR team sent this note to the Futurism team: “Not all the links you sent violate our policies,” it read. “Can you please avoid suggesting in your reporting that they do?” My main thought isn’t “why doesn’t this violate your policies?” This is horrifying content. But it is not CSAM. Which is what has the attention of government, the public, etc. I’m not too surprised that Meta was caught off guard about both the existence of this content and its prevalence. I also expect that their “Community Standards” are much more reactive. Therefore, since they didn’t anticipate content featuring physical violence against children, they haven’t created a community standard to be violated. I expect that will be fixed “soon”, when the committee assigned to evaluate this issue finally finishes their review. This game of whack-a-mole with humanity’s darkest impulses is troubling, and I wonder if there’s a way to be proactive and not dive into Minority Report territory.
re: #2: This story is troubling in a different way. AI’s ability to analyze a monumental array of data and ACCURATELY detail someone’s personal details is amazing from a technical perspective, and terrifying from a privacy one. As I was reading this article, I came up with the phrase “stalker-tech” to describe it. Now, before we come swinging at Ms. Robins for sharing ANYTHING about her children, she’s not some influencer sharing her intimate details. Most of the information harvested was shared more privately, amongst friends and family. Meta’s AI triangulated amongst a huge spread of information in order to derive deep details about these children. On an aside: I think her response of asking folks to take down these images is, well, hopeless. The information has been harvested. Removing elements of it from one place on the internet doesn’t delete the graph. Meta’s response? “But we missed the mark because the feature never should have prompted the individual with questions like that and we’ve fixed that issue.” I’m curious about how the “issue” has been fixed. Will the prompts not ask similar questions? Is the ability to analyze huge swaths of data been minimized? My guess is that the prompting has been modified, but that the data is still mapped. Therefore, I expect this sort of misuse is still possible, it will just take more steps and bad intent to execute on it.
Humans are a reactive lot. We’re terrible at thinking technology’s negative possibilities through before we run into problems/crisises. We tend towards letting the potential positives blind us to any negatives. I wonder if we have any hope of changing that part of our nature.
I’m certain that most if not all the worst aspects of AI were predicted simply because of the horrible things that humans (collectively) were always going to train these machines to do. Yet your post still horrifies me.
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In the news this morning, Anthropic has banned use for biological weapons. Will the machine comply? And what about the others?
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We need a PESSIMIST to be in charge!
🤞
Dear David,
Thank you for your comment. I just submitted a very long comment here about 24 minutes ago, and I think that you might find my said comment very relevant and thought-provoking.
Yours sincerely,
SoundEagle🦅ೋღஜஇ 音鷹
Dear Carl,
Thank you for showcasing more consequential issues about Meta and Facebook, whose main goal is still about prioritizing growth and profit, even more so with the power of generative AI and agentic AI.
Your essay offers an incisive, grounded critique of contemporary artificial intelligence deployment, focusing on corporate tech governance failures and systemic privacy disintegration. Two main issues are explored: Meta’s struggle to moderate synthetic violent content and the emergence of predictive “stalker-tech” generated from private social data.
Your arguments are timely, coinciding with high-profile industry warnings such as the widely discussed September 2026 resignations and public statements by researchers at Anthropic and OpenAI regarding the lack of proactive alignment safeguards. You have successfully diagnosed the core issue: the tech industry operates on an outdated, reactive model of community standard enforcement that is structurally incapable of handling the scale and speed of generative AI.
You highlight Meta’s inadequate response to reports of AI-generated violent content involving children, focussing on the public relations defence that the material technically did not breach existing policies. You correctly note that standard definitions of Child Sexual Abuse Material (CSAM) often fail to account for simulated physical violence generated by AI models. Because corporations define compliance legalistically, they end up playing a dangerous game of policy “whack-a-mole”. This aligns with the sociological concept of cultural lag, whereby technology outpaces the legal frameworks and ethical norms needed to govern it. Relying on internal review committees ensures that harms are only addressed after they have caused real-world damage.
Next, you introduce the term “stalker-tech” to describe how AI systems can cross-reference scattered, semi-private information to construct invasive, highly accurate profiles of private individuals. On the one hand, you rightly dismiss the idea that users can protect their data by simply deleting photos after the fact. Once an AI processes data into a relational knowledge graph, removing the original source does not erase the system’s learned inferences. On the other hand, you accurately predict that Meta’s “fix” likely targets surface-level user prompts rather than dismantling the underlying data collection systems.
Although your observations are accurate, your conclusion leans towards technological fatalism, noting that humans are simply “terrible at thinking technology’s negative possibilities through”. To build on your arguments, I would like to suggest that the analysis should consider broader systemic factors as follows:
The Role of Capitalist Incentives: The reactive posture of tech companies is not just a human flaw; it is driven by market pressures. In a competitive tech market, companies prioritize speed-to-market over safety verification to capture users and data before their rivals do.
The Shift Towards Proactive Lawmaking: You ask if there is a way to be proactive without entering “Minority Report territory”. The answer lies in third-party regulatory enforcement. For instance, the recent September 2026 push by US lawmakers for mandatory pre-deployment safety audits shows a shift towards legal accountability rather than relying on corporate community standards.
Indeed, your excellent essay provides a clear view of how corporate self-regulation fails when facing modern generative AI. Your concept of “stalker-tech” captures the modern shift from basic data collection to advanced data deduction. Therefore, I commend you very highly as your current post entitled “Some Thoughts On AI, The News, and Humanity” serves as a strong reminder that without strict external rules, digital privacy cannot be maintained by individual user behaviour alone.
Last but not least, there is still no “hope of changing that part of our nature”, as discussed in very elaborate detail in my post entitled “😱 We have Paleolithic Emotions; Medieval Institutions; and God-like Technology 🏰🚀“, available at
https://wp.me/pkM63-cTi
I look forward to your reading my said post and leaving some thoughts and feedback there, as I am very keen and curious about what you will make of the post.
Wishing you a wonderful weekend and a fantastic mid-September!
Yours sincerely,
SoundEagle🦅ೋღஜஇ
Thanks for alerting me to your comments. You add depth and detail.
Letting my thoughts run on, I note Meta’s willingness to part with a lot of money to side step a legal judgement that it intentionally addicts young people and harms their mental health. I’d rather the industry was prosecuted as accessories to the torts and crimes advanced by the AI and algorithms that they own.