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diz @awful.systems

5mo ago

Meta was “allegedly” seeding porn to speed up their book downloads.

arstechnica.com Meta pirated and seeded porn for years to train AI, lawsuit says

Lawsuit: Meta may have seeded porn to minors while hiding piracy for AI training.

Meta pirated and seeded porn for years to train AI, lawsuit says

Sounds like meta’s judge will have to invent a grand unified theory of fair use to excuse this.

I kept saying about various lawsuits that the important thing is discovery. Nobody knew all the idiotic shit these folks were doing, so nobody could sue them properly.

Technology @beehaw.org

Meta pirated and seeded porn for years to train AI, lawsuit says

arstechnica.com /tech-policy/2025/07/meta-pirated-and-seeded-porn-for-years-to-train-ai-lawsuit-says/

Meta pirated and seeded porn for years to train AI, lawsuit says

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19 comments

The "to minors" is a bit inflammatory. "Without any sense of discretion or propriety" is more accurate. It's not like you seed torrents for specific people. P2P just doesn't care if anyone is a minor or not, and downloading anything makes it available tl everyone anonymously. If you ever downloaded an R rated movie, you probably shared it with minors. The way it's written makes it sound intentional and predatory.
- Yea, it's not good of Ars to report the shameless "think of the kids" spin uncritically.
  
  Exactly, plus there’s no shortage of bad shit Meta has done to the youth, this is a stupid reach.
  
  I’m just going to come out and say it: I don’t give a Kentucky fried fuck about the kids.
- If you ever downloaded an R rated movie, you probably shared it with minors.
  If a minor knows how to use bittorrent in 2025, I'm more than happy to upload R-rated movies to them. It's not like it's the biggest hurdle to overcome, but it's big enough that I trust the judgment of that young person.
  
  I don't think it's even illegal to watch R-rated movies as a minor, it's more of a guideline for your caretakers.
- @themeatbridge
  P2P may not care but a mega-corporation ought to care about who they might be making the files available to. Using a P2P tool doesn't make it any better than putting it on an open FTP server at Facebook.com.
  P2P isn't the target here so your knee-jerk defensive posture is misplaced.
  
  P2P vs FTP or whatever is not the point. Subtitling the article "Lawsuit: Meta may have seeded porn to minors while hiding piracy for AI training." (emphasis mine) is misleading as it implies they were seeding the files with the intention or purpose to make them available to children.
  Also, I find it disingenuous to pretend like seeding a torrent originally published by someone else is the same thing as publishing the file on an FTP site yourself, even if there's legal precedent for treating it that way. Even if the bytes of the file are flowing out from your computer, that doesn't mean you're the one who made the file available, "to minors" or otherwise.
  
  I agree with you, and fuck Facebook for a variety of reasons. I'm not defending Meta in the slightest. Nor is the allegation even false. Meta employees seeded porn to improve their torrent ratios and increase the speed with which they downloaded unlicensed copyrighted content to train their AI models. That porn was available to anyone with access to the seed, including likely minors.
  My point is that the pearl-clutching Helen Lovejoy act is a bit much. The last time I downloaded p2p porn was probably on Bearshare and it included a bonzi buddy, and I was a minor at the time, but I'm not going to pretend that it's some line in the sand. I'm not going to apply a different moral standard to Facebook than I apply to myself or anyone else.
  Focus on what they did, which is bad enough, and don't frame it in a way that provides the "but everybody does it" defense.
  
  I mean, arguably an open FTP server would have been better because how many kids these days could actually use an FTP client?

I demand that Visa and Mastercard stop processing their payments immediately!

So there are some positive downstream effects of this entire bubble, huh. Didn't have this in my predictions.

For what it's worth, a grand unified theory of Meta must include Bittorrent. The reason we have Llama is because its weights were leaked by Meta employees on 4chan and distributed via Bittorrent; going open-source was the most market-efficient way to save face. (See also previously, on Awful.) It is well-known inside lore that Facebook datacenters use Bittorrent to initialize and update machines. In the 2000s, folks used to say that Googlers look at Bayesian conditioning like classical programmers look at if-statements; similarly, you must understand that Meta/Facebook culture looks at Bittorrent the same way that we look at scp and rsync.
- Isn’t it part of the lawsuit that one of the developers literally said that downloading torrents on a corporate machine feels wrong?
  That they routinely use bittorrent protocol for data only makes it more willful, since they know how it works while your average Joe may not understand that he is distributing anything.

We’re anti porn now?
- We're anti Meta getting away with crimes that decent people of the society get fucked for.
- Yes. In particular the porn that you yourself consume. You should be ashamed!

19 comments