Ah, they made it private on Facebook, but not on Threads. Which they didn't know it was also being posted to, but that's by-the-by.

Teshnikully, you waive a LOT of rights on anything you post on their service. I'm not sure the "private post" thing would hold against sending your pictures to a third party in the first place.

Of course, it's shitty. But they put that provision in their TOS a long time ago.

I'm not trying to defend Meta, but where in the article does it say that private posts were shared publicly? I'm only seeing that public posts made by adults were used this way. The main rub is Facebook being accused of intentionally serving these publicly posted photos of children in school uniforms (by parents) as bait to join another one of their platforms. Like, a grown man was sent multiple advertisements where this was the exact content, no back to school pictures of young men, or any other type of photo. That they sexualized children algorithmically to bait men into using Threads, and are justifying it's ok because the parents shared the photo publicly and didn't opt out of the advertising settings (which seem to be a way to gain followers?).

One of the men was like, I've no idea why they keep sending me these pictures, I don't engage with them. That might be an even more interesting story, because either Facebook is trying to offer sexualized children to uninterested men, or they know exactly which men are interested in sexualized children and instead of using it to push intervention ads, ban them from seeing the content their AI can definitely classify as enticing, or anything else, they use it to try to make more money.