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Comment by nebezb | Hacker News Reader

I’ve spent just a teeny bit of time helping international ICE investigators (not that one; internet child exploitation) postpone PTSD with technology. It seems like after two years of their job, they’re going to have a mental break. So postponing is all you can really do.

It’s disheartening how underfunded these agencies are compared to, what feels like at least, the severity of the crimes they’re up against.

These folks are heroes. This is one place AI has a lot of potential (but very little commercial value).

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Moderation feels like the one of the most ethical uses of AI. Being able to prevent a lot of the worst content from being posted and preventing people from being exposed to it.

Sure... so now we end up with people watching abuse 9 to 5 to train AI. https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2026/feb/05/i...

Outsourcing everything. Even PTSD from training AI to India so privileged law enforcement officers and social media moderators don't have to. This system is so hypocritical and broken.

I don't think the issue here is related to AI. Without AI, moderators would still have to look at these same videos. The difference is they would hit the public first before being flagged and sent to moderators. Now with AI they can be prevented from ever going public.

The fact that we still need to traumatize workers to confirm the automated decisions is sad. The only other ways I can see to resolve this would be either to just blindly trust the AI result without any human oversight, or to require all facebook users to link their government ID to accounts and only allow posting by users in countries where the authorities arrest the people posting these things.

I always thought these were the perfect jobs for psychopaths, putting that lack of empathy/stress to some good use e.g. in similar police work.

The agencies already have massive collections of csam from every arrest and site seizure. They already have systems that can identify existing csam by fingerprint or computer vision, so very little needs to be seen by humans, only newly produced material.

Putting that kind of filter in the way of speech seems ripe for abuse.

In the UK once website blocking powers were established, their scope was extended repeatedly by courts for IP protection purposes.

> Putting that kind of filter in the way of speech seems ripe for abuse.

On one hand I agree with you. Any automatic filter implemented can later be expanded to cover more and more things, such as messages from political adversaries for example. It's a slippery slope as we all know.

On the other hand I don't think it applies in this context very much. If we're talking about content published by a corporation or such (say a newspaper for example) they already filter all their gathered news themselves and have no obligation to publish things they don't feel like.

Similarly if we're talking about user uploaded content on social media I don't think they have any obligation to publish everything and anything that their users decide to upload either, and it's not the expectations of the users that anything can be hosted there for them. Users already know that youtube/facebook/tiktok/what-have-you have seemingly arbitrary rules regarding what content they're willing to host and not.

Now if for example DNS providers or ISPs decide to implement these sort of filters on the web at large that's a different matter I think. In which case I agree with you.

The slope isn't slippery, it's vertical. It's always misused. Thus it needs to be completely prohibited, lest the camel get it's nose in.

Another comment mentioned ICE as well, so I've been looking into it, and imagine my surprise to learn that ICE (yes that one) has been working in this space since since the Obama admin. Huh.

https://www.ice.gov/careers/hero

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Justice_for_Victims_of_Traffic...

Coyotes are frequently part of criminal organizations. They take advantage of people in any and every way that they can. Slavery, sexual and otherwise, is not at all an uncommon result of being brought into the country under the radar, so to speak.

HSI was primarily the main investigative body responsible for human traffic and crimes against children prior to this administration. The second largest federal investigative agency behind the FBI (6k agents). Now doing immigration enforcement.

It's unfortunate that they are being repurposed to fix a problem entirely generated purposefully for political gain. Those individuals should never have been allowed to flood the system and take effort away from true egregious victims and crime.

Yeah, I looked into it, and ICE actually has two distinct components: Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) and Enforcement and Removal Operations (ERO). Pretty much everyone things ICE == ERO, so you've got stuff like Canadians agitating to close the HSI collaboration offices in Canada.

Well and unfortunately until recent times ERO was mostly dedicated to criminals first and other folks second but my understand was there was a backlog of criminals to find, capture and remove that person he other parts were less of a concern.

This administration pulled people off catching child predators to go after some Juan at home depot. in light of the epstein coverup, its hardly surprising.

AI for helping mitigate PTSD, or helping with the investigations?

Because the latter basically entails helping create a surveillance state. Which in theory could be an acceptable trade-off, but it seems disingenuous to say "AI companies have no financial incentives here" when the big issue is that AI companies would actually be helping to establish powerful dragnet surveillance capabilities. There would need to be a strong democratic process around this.

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