14 Sep 2026 Search

In the news: San Francisco Orders Meta to Stop ‘Allowing’ AI Child Abuse Ads. San Francisco’s city attorney, David Chiu, wants Meta to stop serving ads containing AI-generated CSAM, but Meta says they don’t have to care. The ads are “outside the city attorney’s jurisdiction.”

But this is California. So even though Meta can afford to spend more on lawyers than the city can, the city has other ways to get Meta to pay attention.

Much of the data that Meta uses to target people for CSAM, scams, and AI-Generated Quack Cures is data that gets provided to Meta by legitimate businesses.

Those businesses—Meta’s often under-informed enablers—are a better leverage point than going up against the company directly.

A city attorney in California who has a problem with Meta can start by drafting a new addition to the paperwork that goes out to city suppliers. A few simple points.

  1. Wiretapping is illegal in California.

  2. Internet surveillance methods, such as tracking pixels and conversions APIs, are wiretapping under California law.

  3. The city will investigate wiretapping, with particular attention to Internet wiretapping that enables large-scale criminal activity. (Don’t have to call out Meta by name, if you mention big-time crime on the Internet, people will get that it’s about Meta and/or Google.)

They can even make it a little vague on whether number 3 applies to just wiretapping of city employees, or anybody in the city.

Then offer a free pass to a city-organized “how to do business on the web without wiretapping and enabling crime” event. If you provide a venue and enough lead time, web developers and legit advertising and marketing people will speak at this, do Q&A, and so on. (Big Tech’s economic takeover can be beat.)

The draft wiretapping policy wouldn’t even have to become official in order to get some response from Meta. They’ll try to turn it into a “why is the city picking on small business” story, but the city can lean on the “enabling crime” angle, and in my experience, the more that people hear about how Meta tracking works, the madder they are at anyone involved in it. So in order to prevent the story from dragging on too long, Meta would be likely to do something for the city on CSAM, like staffing up on moderators. They gave the UK a special scam reporting tool to settle the Martin Lewis case, and this issue is a lot creepier.