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Meta has set up an internal task force after reporters and researchers discovered its systems helped “connect and promote a vast network of accounts” devoted to underage-sex content, The Wall Street Journal has reported. Unlike forums and file transfer services, Instagram not only hosts such activities but promotes them via its algorithms. The company acknowledged enforcement problems and has taken actions including restricting its systems from recommending searches associated with sex abuse. 

“Child exploitation is a horrific crime,” Meta told the WSJ in a statement. “We’re continuously investigating ways to actively defend against this behavior.”

Along with the task force, Meta told reporters that it is working on blocking child sexual abuse material (CSAM) networks and taking steps to change its systems. In the last two years, it has taken down 27 pedophile networks and is working on removing more. It has blocked thousands of related hashtags (with millions of posts for some) and took action to prevent its systems from recommending CSAM-related terms. It’s also trying to stop its systems from connecting potential abusers with each other.

However, the report should be a wakeup call for Meta, the company’s former security chief Alex Stamos told the WSJ. “That a team of three academics with limited access could find such a huge network should set off alarms at Meta,” he said, noting that the company far better tools than outside investigators to map CSAM networks. “I hope the company reinvests in human investigators.” 

Academics from Stanford’s Internet Observatory and UMass’s Rescue Lab were able to quickly find “large-scale communities promoting criminal sex abuse,” according to the report. After creating test users and viewing a single account, they were immediately hit with “suggested for you” recommendations of possible CSAM sellers and buyers, along with accounts linking to off-platform content sites. Following just several recommendations caused the test accounts to be inundated with sex-abuse content. 

“Instagram is an onramp to places on the internet where there’s more explicit child sexual abuse,” said UMass Rescue Lab director Brian Levine. The Stanford group also found that CSAM content is “particularly severe” on the site. “The most important platform for these networks of buyers and sellers seems to be Instagram.”

Meta said the company actively seeks to remove such users, having taken down 490,000 accounts violating child safety policies in January alone. Its internal statistics show that child exploitation appears in less than one in 10 thousand posts, it added. 

However, until queried by reporters, Instagram was allowing users to search terms that its own systems know may be associated with CSAM material. A pop-up screen warned users that “These results may contain images of child sexual abuse” that can cause “extreme harm” to children. However, it then allowed users to either “Get resources” or “See results anyway.” The latter option has now been disabled, but Meta didn’t respond when the WSJ asked why it was allowed in the first place. 

Furthermore, attempts by users to report child-sex content were often ignored by Instagram’s algorithms. And Facebook’s own efforts to exclude hashtags and terms were sometimes overridden by the systems, suggesting users try variations on the name. In testing, researchers found that viewing even one underage seller account caused the algorithm to recommend new ones. “Instagram’s suggestions were helping to rebuild the network that the platform’s own safety staff was in the middle of trying to dismantle.”

A Meta spokesperson said it’s currently building system to prevent such recommendations, but Levine said the time to act is now. “Pull the emergency brake. Are the economic benefits worth the harms to these children?” Engadget has reached out to Meta for comment. 

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/meta-vows-to-take-action-after-report-found-instagrams-algorithm-promoted-pedophilia-content-133343896.html?src=rss 

WordPress is getting an AI writing assistant of its own called Jetpack AI, and it’s built into the content management system’s editor. For WordPress blogs hosted elsewhere, owners will still be able to access the tool through the Jetpack plugin. Like any other generative AI tool, Jetpack can spit out content based on the prompt users type in, whether it’s a traditional article, a list or a table. The assistant can also switch the tone of the post, depending on what the user is going for: It could sound informative, optimistic, humorous or even sarcastic. 

If the user wants to write their own post, they could still ask Jetpack for help. They could either make the tool generate a headline based on what they’d written or use it to automatically check their grammar or correct any spelling mistakes. And if they want to include a translation of their article, they can use Jetpack AI to quickly translate it into any of its 12 available languages, including Spanish, French and Korean. According to TechCrunch, Jetpack is free to use for all WordPress.com customers for the first 20 requests as sort of a free trial period. After that, users will have to pay $10 per month to be able to access the tool. 

While Jetpack AI can be especially useful for people already using WordPress, it’s just one of the AI-powered writing tools that have recently popped up. The Microsoft 365 Copilot, for instance, can create a proposal on Word based on spreadsheet data or change a written report’s tone. Google also recently imbued its Workspace apps with AI capabilities and gave Docs the power to generate text based on the topic written on the page.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/wordpress-jetpack-ai-will-write-your-blog-posts-for-you-121009297.html?src=rss 

Reddit is going through a restructuring, and according to an email by company chief Steve Huffman as seen by The Wall Street Journal, one of the moves it’s going to make is laying off 90 employees. That’s around 5 percent of the company’s current workforce with 2,000 employees. 

In addition, Reddit is slowing down hiring this year and reducing the intake of new workers to 100 from the 300 personnel it had originally planned. Apparently, the social network wants to focus on achieving its biggest goals, such as breaking even next year. Huffman reportedly wrote in the email that Reddit has “had a solid first half of the year,” and that this restructuring will position it “to carry that momentum into the second half and beyond.”

This is but one of the moves Reddit is taking in an effort to earn money: Back in April, it also announced that it will start charging developers for access to its API. The company made the decision just as the biggest players in tech got into generative AI, which is typically trained using data from the internet accessed via API. “[A]s a platform with one of the largest corpus of human-to-human conversations online, spanning the past 18 years, we have an obligation to our communities to be stewards of this content,” the company said. 

While Reddit may have been looking to earn from large companies, even independent developers are affected by its decision. Christian Selig, the sole developer of Apollo for Reddit, said it would cost him $20 million a year to keep his app running as is. Other third-party apps, such as Narwhal and Reddit is Fun, have already warned users that they can’t afford paying for Reddit’s API and will likely shut down. Dozens of subreddit communities across various topics are now planning to go dark starting on June 12th as an act of protest. Some of them plan to remain inactive for 48 hours, while others intend to stay dark permanently until Reddit addresses the issue. 

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/reddit-is-reportedly-cutting-5-percent-of-its-workforce-100556991.html?src=rss