The employees who think this are the ones who have to watch videos of babies and toddlers being raped, so that tends to influence their opinions. My partner was one of those employees and she is, consequently, very much against anything that makes it easier for this to go undetected.
Yeah, if we could guarantee a purely benevolent system that will only ever use the data to catch or prevent pedos without ever widening the scope, it seems like an easy choice. I don't doubt the more awful shit you see, the easier it is to convince yourself such a system exists.
But like the recent abruptness in states like Texas immediately targeting women for receiving healthcare the second they were able to should give anyone pause. Especially given that a large population wants to reelect an insurrectionist publicly planning a dictatorship.
That reveals a major complication of the process that your partner was a part of: if you suspect content to be CSAM, you *legally must not* look at it, open it, etc. It’s a way to prevent bad people from abusing those positions, but at the same time, no one (innocent) who was told to do that wants that law to be changed.
It makes building detection systems harder, though.
Your intuition points to a typical PR pattern around Meta: employees disagree, and they resolve their frustration in the press. So many big tech scandals are an opportunity to remember the “two wolves inside of you” story.
That doesn't make the employees stalinist, does it.
The issue is that CSAM is not some sort of nebulous, vague idea. It is pervasive and endemic in online communities and if you have any tool that can facilitate the sharing of images and communication with children by adults then it will, inevitably, be used by paedophiles. This isn't a vague conjecture, it is the truth of the matter.
FB Messenger is specifically a problem because of the ready access it provides adults to children.
This sort of imagery is often created for profit - either for the kudos of being the creator of first-generation material or for actual profit in the case of a number of asian abuse rings.
So yes, demand reduction will reduce actual instances of rape and sexual abuse - while there is an argument that nonces will nonce regardless, the encouragement and egging on by others is a significant driver of offending.
There is also the matter that mere possession of these images is also a criminal offence.