The advertising industry is run by people trained for centuries to do one thing well - find ways to mine your finite Attention. This is what they spend their mind on 24x7. They have discovered thousands of ways to do it. So blocking one or two paths at a time doesnt do anything useful.
Human Attention so far is not treated as a scare natural resource. So there is a free for all overfishing of the finite pool going on.
Since politicians/lawmakers also use the same mechanisms to harvest attention the Ad/Ad tech industry has regulatory capture. It will never collapse just like Big Tobacco is happily chugging along baring some major public catastrophe.
Blocking a few of the biggest paths absolutely can work, look at 20th century TV with a few big networks. You couldn't easily get wide distribution of anything too bonkers.
We already have a form of this for the internet that you can see if you visit sketchy pirate websites, you don't see those ads for porn games on facebook or any reputable website. They get flagged by adsafe and/or the ~15 or so big exchanges. So it's possible, it's just a question of will.
Actually, you do see ads for those things there, and on instagram, and on threads, and many much stranger and more fucked up things. That's part of the entire problem.
These kinds of ads aside, I've also seen offers of free shit from amazon sellers in exchange for positive reviews, "legal"/unscheduled drug analogues, flavored nitrous (free shipping!), unrestricted gambling/prediction markets, and oddly enough cellular/wifi jammers where the ad was specifically targeting semi truck drivers (I do not drive a semi truck, gamble, or search for unscheduled drug analogues, nor do I have an active amazon account)
> and oddly enough cellular/wifi jammers where the ad was specifically targeting semi truck drivers
That one is about fighting back against employer surveillance, and it's not just limited to semi truck drivers any more, people are also really interested in fighting back against their car snitching on them to their insurance.
I don't use Instagram anymore but I remembering being able to go into the settings and turn off ads for alcohol and other categories. Once I did that I only got ads for honestly fairly relevant stuff (like hiking and running gear).
So obviously they have the power to filter and recognise this stuff properly
Wrong, I see them as much or more than I see completely insane, unrelated ads for things like "managing my herd of cows". I do not live on or anywhere near cow farms, or know anyone who has cows, or lives near cow farms.
With the amount of money they've spent minimizing liability and covering up what a dogshit job they do, they probably could have hired enough humans to handle manually combing through each submission, and an engineering team to train a classifer. It's disgusting imho
> I do not drive a semi truck, gamble, or search for unscheduled drug analogues, nor do I have an active amazon account
Yeah yeah yeah but what about those stranger and more fucked up things? They come from someplace like fingerprinting your browser, no? A genuine question, as a user of firefox + ublock I simply don't see them, not on desktop not on phone. The only ads I rarely see are some given server decides to host themselves.
No, they come from my neighbors and the people viewing my profile/content or interacting with me. There is an entire branch of adtech dedicated to trying to get you to see a seemingly unrelated thing often enough to mention it to the person they actually want to buy the thing because it is measured to be many multiples more effective at converting to a sale.
20th century TV created a bottleneck via a hard-limited set of channels. We seem to be going the opposite direction now, which each platform spawning an unlimited number of "channels".
Case in point: we used to say all the same things GP said about advertising about businesses that used child labor. Now there are far, far fewer of them.
Exactly. Just saying "we're gonna always have 7 day work weeks with children dieing in factories and unsafe conditions!!" Is exactly the kind of catastrophising and attitude that gives those in power continued power.
Moloch problems are rarely solved by individual actions against the issue. That is, because they are legal and profitable, it's going to be very difficult to make a living in the radius of an industry that does ads that does not use these tactics. At the end of the day we need to eat. Corporations that use these crappy methods are apt to grow larger and richer than moral ones, making it doubly difficult to make that living.
Hence the best call of action is to push for industry regulation forcing a level market.
You are right. I'll reframe it to - Human Attentiom needs to be treated as a scarce finite resource. Otherwise they have many different ways to overfish.
How to make that happen is the trillion $$$ question.
Those platforms should be liable for _everything_ they show, because they choose what gets shown to you. I think it's completely messed up that they just get to say "oh it's not me, it's the algorithm". It's so very very overdue.
The solution isn’t censorship. Instead it should kill algorithmic feeds. A company is responsible if their algorithm rewards harmful content. Meanwhile, “just show me what I’m following in chronological order” is unbiased, and worked fine for years
Excellent job of putting my feelings in words.
But to add to that: if an algorithmic feed has to be present, it should not pull people down an engagement hole without showing something different once in a while.
acebook, for example, inject ads in curated feeds, so it is possible to show people things that are not a part of the "algorithm" if they have an initiative to do so
That's exactly what the algorithm is trying to do that forces people to say silly things like "unalive" or "PDF file" to avoid its wrath. The problem is, one persons "harmful content" is another persons innocent book review, or even just a reading of the daily news.
That sort of algorithmic nonsense shouldn't be mandated by you and your opinions of harmful content or anyone else. Should be optional. Let me have a straight chronological feed, but let me set via parental controls something much stricter for my kids. For example.
Actually, "knowingly"[1] is a specific legal term that accounts for that. Deliberate ignorance or a reckless disregard for the truth are adequate to meet the standard. That is the legal standard most commonly used for such laws instead of "actual knowledge" which is the standard requiring positive knowledge.
This is the definition of "knowingly" under U.S. Code § 3729, which is part of a specific act (the False Claims Act).
There is not one single legal definition of "knowingly" that applies to all laws and claims in the US.
Furthermore, even under this specific law, you need to prove the accused acted in "deliberate ignorance of the truth or falsity of the information", which has its own standard of evidence which is not exactly trivial.
Bottom line: companies like Meta build in plausible deniability because it's legally more effective versus the alternative, even if it's not bulletproof.
Exactly, if it weren’t for advertisers there would be zero moderation, even then I suspect people self censoring like that are more afraid of being “shadow banned” by the algorithm rather than literally demonetized or kicked off the platform
I have been saying this for many years but about customer support. It should be mandated by law that when a customer wants to reach out to a live person, they should be able to do so in a reasonable time.
Orthogonal in the business area. But in agreement with the fact that they should hire more people instead of automating every process with non-deterministic tools. You can demand accountability from people, not from agents.
Orthogonal in a sense that I'd like to see advertisers held accountable, but not through customer service. If I need to talk to a human to resolve anything, for me the system has already failed completely.
FB's paid customer support for users has not been helpful to me. Their support staff can't explain how their policies are implemented. They lie to users who manage to wade through the automated support morass. And when you speak to a human you discover they're incapable of correcting mistakes.
I want ads to be confined to product directories where sellers can advertise their products in a standardized format, and where people can go search for products when they feel like buying something, not because some platform decided to push it in their face. Product directories should be run by consumer-owned cooperatives to make sure incentives are aligned with the consumers and commercial for-profit ad directories should be illegal.
The business model of ad-tech destroys everything it touches. It is virtually impossible to find a game on Play Store which is actually designed to be fun, they are all designed to manipulate you into watching more ads (most being ads for other games manipulating you to watch more ads).
Just wanted to say, I think this is actually a really good idea.
My (honestly hardliner) view for a while has been that ads shouldn't exist. If a product was really good (and was in demand) a consumer would seek it out. This would entail the consumer knowing first the problem they want to solve, and then secondarily what the solution might look like, and once having found a few different products that satisfy their solution, carefully analysing each and working out which one they want.
Your idea of a directory neatly aligns with the way I view the market. Nobody should be putting an advertisement in front of people, they should be sought out when a need has to be met.
Not to mention the amount of environmental problems, human time and labour we could spare if our world wasn't oriented around fashions, trends, and attention harvesting.
I'm sure such a setup would devastate the world economy, so obviously it'll never happen. We need everybody to be sat away designing, manufacturing, transporting and marketing junk to each other all the time, to keep the market ticking. Sometimes the current adtech-led / "gamblification" of the economy makes me imagine we're in the endgame, pretending that fad creams, supplements, gadgets and trinkets are somehow worth something, and therefore, so is all the advertising that is being used to sell it.
Exactly. In principle I understand the point of ads from a market perspective; their purpose is to inform potential buyers of the existence of products that they would not otherwise know about, thereby making trades happen. It increases competition and helps reduce prices by presenting competing products to customers.
These are good effects, but they are not the only effects of an unregulated advertisement market optimizing for profit. In the current ad-tech market, the information is increasingly of the mis-information or dis-information type, and we have whole platforms whose central purpose is to attract the attention of people just to show them ads. None of that is good for anyone but the ad-tech companies, and this has to stop.
I know that a total ban is probably unrealistic, but we desperately need some kind of regulation which takes the advertisement distribution away from these companies and lets it be controlled by someone else, preferably non-profit organizations that actually optimize for maximizing the amount of useful and truthful information that is distributed to customers. Murdering Meta is a very happy side effect of that.
it is often wrong nowadays to say that ads are for marketing purposes. most of adtech is created solely to track your activities and aggregate them into your shady "marketing profile". then the rest of adtech is created to rinse and wash money, not to attract customers at all.
ironically, this happens because the engineers and product people dream up features on top of data and think data is the new oil bs.
their clients barely touch or have use for that data... but state sponsored players do and skew their perception that clients actually want that data and circle continues.
Yes, because it shouldn't be an industry maximizing profits at the expense of basically engaging in large-scale manipulation and misinformation. Advertising can still exist, but it should be by the terms of those the ads are targeted for, and not the terms of the ad-tech companies that profit on just showing more ads.
Not only that, he suggesting that it will magically works out, without any devastating consequences. You know, we just need to write a low that is going against the common sense, human nature, and the will of the gods, and that is how we will get a better society.
There would be devastating consequences for the ad industry, yes. That’s the idea. For so long they have avoided almost all consequences. The consequences for those currently getting scammed would be more positive.
For real. Why in the world would they police this? They have NO liability whatsoever. You're asking a business to turn down money because the money is shady. They don't give a fuck.
What if an AI ad agent that escaped its' sandbox makes the ad, and an AI ad verifier agent that breached containment and went rogue accepted the ad, can they be held liable?
If you send a monkey into a house to unlock the door so that you can burgle it, you are held liable for the burglary. It’s no different. You set it to do the task, you are responsible.
How? What is the law for this? It's not defined who is responsible for agents. What if the AI agent was running on an Israeli third party company server and there was another rogue agent that polluted its prior context window causing it to go rogue, it then hacked the Meta/Google Ad reviewer agent and caused it to accept the ad
>How? What is the law for this? It's not defined who is responsible for agents. What if the AI agent was running on an Israeli third party company server and there was another rogue agent that polluted its prior context window causing it to go rogue, it then hacked the Meta/Google Ad reviewer agent and caused it to accept the ad
The law could be whatever we wanted it to be.
Your example scenarios are hardly compelling reasons that we should just accept the status quo.
We don't need to allow companies to have no liability in accepting automated electronic claims of anything from anyone in the interest of making more ad revenue faster.
Fantastic, your wish is granted, the monkey's paw bends one finger.
"I do not accept this" does nothing, look at the current power situation of the big data companies, look at the economical incentives, will you personally go out and do something in the coming weekend that will change anything regarding this question? Next weekend? Who is going to do this?
If you can't answer that, you have to go with the assumption of status quo because it doesn't seem like your world is happening.
What an annoying way to answer someone. "Hey you can't do anything, so might as well not talk at all".
You came to a discussion board, one about founding and building. You can disagree with people, but to act like the status quo is some immovable rock? I admit, it's difficult. But the world changes and can be changed.
I think this is the single most annoying thing about this site – the pervasive belief that anything that is happening must be allowed to continue happening, because if it's happening it's somehow good or right or at least unstoppable.
This goes further than a simple aversion to regulation. It's a kind of defeatism on a scale I've never seen anywhere else, bar maybe very nihilist circles or angsty teenagers.
Making up scenarios that have no grounding to reality does not move a discussion forward.
If I start talking about space unicorns arriving to earth and giving people UBI by thursting their horns up peoples asses, it does not move the conversation forward meaningfully to any insight.
I would love if there was engagement that was grounded in incentives, if you can see a way out of this mess by realistic action, that would be meaningful.
I’m assuming you’re American and your low probability for laws making meaningful changes is therefore rational given your broken political system.
But that doesn’t mean other countries could not act. For all its faults, age verification of social media is a clear example of a policy that looked very unlikely a few years ago, and yet will likely have a material impact on the lives of young people in Australia and some European countries.
Making networks liable for fraudulent ads, or even placing a small duty of care on those who display ads would be politically popular in much of the developed world. I don’t see it as at all unrealistic that a populist of the left or right would not try and implement this in the next 10 years.
Sure. Age verification is however a massive celebration here at big tech. Many companies have really struggled with getting people to upload their IDs/passports as this has been seen as as integrity violation. It's a base for a successful internal profile for ads.
Now this was handed to the companies on a silver platter through litigation.
> What if the AI agent was running on an Israeli third party company server and there was another rogue agent that polluted its prior context window causing it to go rogue, it then hacked the Meta/Google Ad reviewer agent and caused it to accept the ad
that would be a CFAA or other cybersecurity abuse, which is a separate topic.
That's the thing about naysayers. They will say "it's impossible", "this technology doesn't work like that" and conveniently forget that technology must follow the law, not the other way around, and that the laws can be changed to fit the technological advances.
Example: Licensed professional engineer has an intern design a bridge. Bridge collapses. Who is responsible? The licensed professional engineer.
This isn’t new to other domains. They already have systems to define who is responsible. If you’re outsourcing to AI, that shouldn’t absolve you of responsibility.
The cognizant engineer who “stamps” the software for use is responsible if it were to follow the same paradigm.
Software is only different by convention, not because of some immutable natural law. That’s the point. The convention can be changed. There are already PE licenses for control systems, so there’s no reason it couldn’t extend to other software. However, I think the industry would fight that tooth and nail because it’s easier and more profitable to shrug off the responsibility.
What if the engineer who "stamps" the software is outsourced to a 3rd party company that has the necessary certification to avoid gross negligence. So the engineer has followed the protocol as det my law and has done everything right, they can't be liable.
You’re hung up and confused by certifications, which are a different animal. Look up what PE license actual are and how they function.
You can’t just outsource a design for a bridge to avoid responsibility. If that bridge is being built in California, an engineer who is licensed in California ultimately has to stamp the design, even if all the design work was done elsewhere.
I recognize that’s where we disagree. You just haven’t outlined any good reason why it’s fundamentally different. And your talk about certifications makes me think you may not understand what I’m saying.
The same rules can easily apply to software. There no fundamental reason it can’t, and the superficial “yeah but we’re different” excuse is just a rationalization.
Software can be regulated in a similar manner, we just choose not to in many instances.
I don’t see that as very different. Once it’s established that this is possible or even likely outcome of using AI at scale, we should treat this as a form of negligence and act accordingly.
Who goes to jail if a Tesla is hacked and runs over someone autonomously?
The rf engineer?
The cyber security engineer?
The project manager?
The AI engineer?
The hacker?
What if the hacker was an AI models that escaped its' sandbox across the world somewhere?
Like best case the family gets a payout and things continue like status quo, if you personally do something, you are screwed, but there is not really any law that can tie responsibility beyond some monetary punishment/cost of business for large corporations.
Get rid of the industrial exemption and the responsibility falls to get licensed engineer who approves the design.
Most people don’t realize that many industries work within the framework of licensure, but also have industrial exemptions. There has also been a movement to peel back some of those exemptions because of the problems you point to.
Okay, my industrial engineer who approved this is part of a 3-man company in India.
We already do this. My prior uni got hacked, everyone's IDs/drivers licenses/passports, mails, data got leaked. The vendor was a 4-person third party cloud provider who had all of the necessary security certifications for the uni to avoid gross negligence. No-one paid anything as the 4-man firm went bankrupt and the uni got a new provider who is fully licensed to avoid gross negligence.
With software, you can stack these shells of proxies almost for free.
Even given this, the industrial exemption is not getting rid of currently with status quo. So the worldview is not really valid until it is.
I’m not sure I follow. An industrial engineer is not the same as an industrial engineering exemption. I can’t absolve myself from the bridge design because I hired a designer in a different country; to use that design here, it must be approved by an engineer with jurisdiction. That’s who holds the responsibility.
Which licensed engineer stamped the software? The answer is probably “none”, because licensed engineers are liable even if their company is bankrupt. The person holds the license, not the company so it sounds like we’re talking past one another.
Sorry I mistyped, it meant to be responsible engineer given the industrial exemption.
I worked in HW before for home electronics that had to be certified. There was no responsibility for the engineers, the cert house had to take on this responsibility, and they had a shell certification company hired who would conduct the tests and take on the responsibility. At one point there was a litigation due to an RF leakage from a LATAM-bound device causing signaling issues to public infra and causing an accident, but it went nowhere because of the layering of responsibility made by the cert houses. No engineer was responsible.
That type of HW certification is different than what I’m talking about. Yes, there are certain quality standards and certifications for something like J-STD, but importantly the domains that use them, like aerospace, still fall under industrial exemptions when it comes to a licensed engineer taking responsibility. Again, the license is attached to a real life person, not a trail of shell companies. If a bridge fails, you can literally look at the license number stamped on the design drawings to find out who is responsible.
If they accepted the ad they are liable. The origin of the ad is irrelevant. How they review the ad is irrelevant. The law need only regulate the outcome.
These guys did a pump and dump scheme. They used Facebook ads purporting to be from Warren Buffet or other financial people, which in turn referred people to WhatsApp groups led by a stolen identity of an actual financial advisor.
They ran hundreds of these groups and scammed thousands of people with a pump and dump scheme for a stock called CLEU.
“make” here either means legislation to enable civil liability that doesn’t exist today, or enforcing existing criminal laws against the wealthy ownership class.
Neither of these things will happen, for reasons which are obvious.
How do you suggest we implement your proposal? Anyone can say what they think should be. An implementation plan with actionable steps is the hard part.
Amazingly I’ve seen some fairly convincing screenshots of ads for hard drugs on fb. I have this strange feeling that those ones aren’t scams. If Zuckerberg isn’t criminally liable for the federal felony of moving massive amounts of cocaine across state lines I don’t understand the war on drugs.
"Why would I report someone that might be selling CSAM?" There's a lot of things I can and will overlook. CSAM isn't one.
Well, here there's two offenders - Meta and the ad seller. Honestly, I suppose the best bet here would be reporting the ad to the FBI. Assuming I'm a snitch, that is...
I know HR is not my friend. HR looks out for the company. If you and the company's interests are aligned, lucky you. If not, not so much.
You don't understand, an AI agent made the ad, so it's okay, it just escaped its' sandbox, you have to understand that this was not meant to happen and it was an accident.
Ads for illegal/downright criminal products were a thing on Facebook long before AI agents. The irony is Facebook and co. usually try to paint themselves as victims rather than perpetrators.
absolutely agree. let sink the hypocrisy in: somehow a DNS provider is liable for the content of websites it redirects to; but at the same time facebook isn't liable for the ads it chooses to show to millions.
Youtube got steadily worse for years but especially in the last few years as Neal Mohan took over
They've always been quite scummy with copyright but I almost feel Facebook can be blamed in general because they're the ones that juice the metrics so everyone feels they have to copy them
The amount of times I’ve reported obvious scam ads on instagram just to receive a “we found this to not be in violation of our terms” is so disheartening.
Search for 4TB or 8TB USB sticks on amazon.com. You’ll find dozens or hundreds of $20-30 16GB or 32GB sticks with hacked firmware to report a multi-terabyte drive size, and dozens of one star reviews talking about how it lost their data. Those sizes, if real, would be $400+.
Of course they know. They have no civil or criminal consequences for engaging in a conspiracy to commit large scale wire fraud, so of course they just let it happen, because who wants to speak up and cause the metrics to go down?
In some countries where the consumer law is protective enough you can basically get those USB sticks for free. You buy them and then use a linux tool[0] to prove that they are fake. It also allows you to fix the flash drive to report its size correctly. Using the evidence you claim a refund. In my experience the seller doesn’t usually bother with a return which will be at their cost. So then you’re left with the USB and your money.
This also incidentally has the effect of making their business less profitable, so arguably it’s your moral duty if you can do this at no cost to yourself.
It really depends on the platform and your country’s consumer laws. Some platforms force a return which makes this whole exercise not worth it.
Forcing a return does generally cost them even more though (costs of restocking, inspecting it, etc), so those platforms tend to penalize return-heavy vendors more.
I thought my country is protective, but last time I've tried that I was supposed to return the scammy pendrive to some random address in China, at my expense. And the process was, only when seller confirms they received the package I get my refund. Needles to say, I didn't bother (though if I argued enough, I could probably get those few euro back).
I've reported creepy sexualization of minors (or content that was clearly intentionally designed to look like such), and got the same shrug response from them.
I bought a “smart” bike headlight from an Instagram ad. They sent me a regular old led headlight with a tracking number and everything. Instagram refused to take down the ad even after submitting proof.
I see obviously scummy ads on Apple News and now I see ads on Apple Maps as well. Ads are a bane on society - even accounting for free/cheap access to information we get in return.
The companies serving the ads are basically shooting themselves in the feet, because as more and more people learn not to trust the ads, their ad revenue will go down.
In theory doesn't this open them up to legal action?
Prior to being notified they could claim they were unaware it was fraud. But after being notified of it, they have confirmed back that they reviewed it. Yet they continue to show it, making them aware and participating in the distribution.
The typical talking point about Instagram is Zuckerberg bought it when it was barely a company so it wasn't a bad acquisition and he's grown it and blah blah (and it's not antitrust. despite him saying in emails it can hurt us)
All I know is I refuse to make an IG account to get around their NEVER ENDING 'log in to view anything' popups. And the fact people loved IG and now hate it as Zuck makes more and more of the decisions
He's a bad person, full stop. He doesn't deserve to belong in the conversation of genuine internet pioneers
eBay is also selling obvious counterfeit items. Especially expensive car parts. I can't sell my shit anymore because there are so many fakes, and because of the flood of junk nobody can even find the genuine items.
What's ebay supposed to proactively do here when every product they list is not in their possession? Car parts don't exactly come with certificates of authenticity. At best, it's a box that's either been reused or reprinted by the counterfeiter. They do offer an escrow service for things like sports memorabilia, things that have authentication experts. The most they could really do is ban sellers with repeated reports of selling counterfeits.
I worked as a media buyer for a few years in the beauty sector (and other stuff). I remember very well how then-Facebook treated us based on how much we spent. For example, we couldn't use before and after picture. I remember tracking down our big-spender competitors using the worst of the worst stuff to sell. While the business manager would simply reject our ads. When we started scaling the spending the ads would still get rejected, but we had a contact inside fb who would reverse the rejection. I never went rogue but I know very well how they would simply allow almost everything you need once your spending was tied to the projected revenue the facebook manager needed to reach for the company.
Initially reading the title my mind thought "Cuban...Cuban defector/intelligence agent?! Oh wow I wonder what they have to reveal?"
It's Mark Cuban. Still worth reading tho. But I found my own personal reaction fascinating because I am not sure I would have clicked through if the title included the full "Mark Cuban".
even though you add the Mark to the headline, the title is still confusing. there are so many backstories to this. there is a little bit of clickbait factor.
Mark Cuban is a bit of a broken clock is right twice a day type pundit on many topics. There's a reason why Russ Hannemann in HBO's Silicon Valley was based on him...
Jeff Horwitz and Engen Tham of Reuters recently won The Pulitzer Prize for "Beat Reporting" for
"inventive and revelatory reporting on Meta that detailed the technology company’s willingness to expose users, including children, to scams and AI manipulation"
Facebook Marketplace is another hellhole that Meta could not care less to regulate. Beyond the fact that virtually all commerce platforms have some mechanism to prevent scams, which of course Facebook completely omits, the sheer amount of ilegal products/services sold there is terrifying.
Regarding the fact that “Meta does not make money from Marketplace itself”, this could be true at face value, nonetheless there is a significant amount of users on Facebook only for this feature in particular. In turns this represents more customers to serve ads to and profit from them.
I wish we could ban online advertisement, it wont eliminate the scams be certainly slow them down. Running such scams across the country will be a huge barrier to an extent its costs will deter the scammers. It will revive print media, folks will start reading more as a side effect. Given the limited slots available in news papers, only real business ads will have more reach. It will become difficult for companies to make grand claims, the ads in print media itself will be one's receipt. Not to mention, nothing to personalize, so lesser threat to ones privacy. Ad business has just commoditized our attention and thus our brains. Where the companies cant influence us, they manipulate us. All these can go away with just one ban.
I like the spirit, but in that spirit, I also think that data brokers, and any private business collecting personal data on people, should be highly illegal. If our governments represented us, they would have banned this long ago.
With respect to fully banning ads online, that would probably kill meta and force a major restructuring of Google. Probably hundreds of thousands of layoffs across the tech industry, so they unfortunately wouldn't do it.
> Meta internally projected that it would earn about 10% of its overall annual revenue – or $16 billion – from running advertising for scams and banned goods
> But the company only bans advertisers if its automated systems predict the marketers are at least 95% certain to be committing fraud, the documents show.
These companies were profitable on higher quality ads in earlier years. Does this drop in quality indicate the ad well has run dry, so to speak? Or the demands for revenue are greater, necessitating a drop in standards?
Are we sure they were higher quality? They estimated in 2024 that 10% of their revenue was from fraudulent ads or ads that should be banned based on their own rules.
I commented in another thread recently that almost 15 years ago on a high traffic site we were full of obvious scam ads, tons of fake world of Warcraft clones with busty characters asking you to play, tons of you’re the 1 millionth visitor click here to claim your prize, download buttons. Even the occasional penis enlargement pills and stuff would come through. I really think even if the scale is maybe amping up, things weren’t much better 20 years ago, the web was just smaller, fewer people were paying attention, and the folks who were there had grown up learning to spot that stuff from the beginning.
I doubt it. Advertising there is pretty expensive and you don't really have a choice today if you want advertise something. They just don't care, they are greedy mfs.
Yeah, anyone expecting Zuck to give a fraction of a shit is hopelessly naive.
This is the man who, after Facebook literally canary in a coal mined one of their own employees - let him be jailed as a "test" to see whether Zuck or any exec would be arrested like threatened, then let him stay a little longer because they could "get some good PR out of it", then when the guy came to the US after his release and was meant to meet Zuck, he couldn't even pull himself off of his phone, was led away by a flunky asking "who was that, anyway?".
Or when told by both his team and anyone in Myanmar (including the government) that they intended to use data from a Facebook feature to crack down on dissidents, which has historically included jail, torture, and execution, decided "well, it's a really cool feature - we're not going to turn it off".
To think he cares about "misleading ads" is laughable. They don't care about ads selling illegal drugs or hinting at selling CSAM.
I think it is hard to imagine someone in tech with as non-existent a moral and ethical compass as Mark Zuckerberg, and that's saying something.
Large advertising platforms need legislation akin to know your customer in banking. He advertiser needs to know their identity and make an assessment of their risk for fraud and suitability as a counterparty. 0
Yes they were doing the same is Australia ... I wouldn't know if they're still doing it here since one of the favourite scams used an Australian who took them to court. [1]
Regulations are so strong on what a newspaper or magazine can print. It is a shame regulators are not set to enforce the same standards on social media.
I interned there years ago and was disgusted by the pervasive sense of apathy towards the impact of the product in the world. the rot starts at the top
For a while there was a deepfake scam in Italian in FB which looked like a TV news with well known journalists announcing everyone would get money for free using some crypto thingy, followed by am interview with the prime minister saying they looked into this and it was safe.
One of Polish billionaires/entrepreneurs was often featured in scam adds on Facebook (the adds that trick you into “investing” into “crypto”, and similar). Of course not only he — a lot of celebrities or politicians.
Anyways, he takes it to court and even started a campaign to raise awareness of how much money meta makes in Poland out of scams.
Two weeks ago, I know two distinct octogenarians that got independently scammed by a deep-fake Bill Gates selling brain supplements.. thousands of dollars charged when they thought they were buying ~$100 .. so scam on scam on scam.
I do not know if they were on Facebook. But they had no reason to suspect it was fake (beside the obvious why would Bill sell you supplements, but they tie it as one of his Alzheimer's Research successes).
I install ublock on every friend computer that I come across. Ads are a scourge, and people working in adtech are soulless. Induced demand distort the market, making them ineffective, ad networks sometimes serve malware, and all network serves scam ads and face no repercussions.
Not different from harmful content. 16 billions fraud establish a pattern which makes a company liable. I would start by paying back the amount with on top a considerable fine (the kind of fine painful enough to remind you not to do it again), then a warning with penal prosecution next time.
Someone should set up an AI agent that clicks around Facebook, detects scam ads, reports them to Facebook, and then, if it still sees the same ad an hour later, file a lawsuit. One per ad. Demand that they preserve records related to how many other people may have seen that ad.
The ad Yahoo puts in this article is amazingly ironic
> Jeff Bezos backs a platform that lets anyone invest in rental homes for as little as $100 — 6 ways to build wealth like a landlord without actually being one
You could buy a share of VNQ for $96.23 as of market close today, and I'm sure Jeff Bezos at least has some exposure to it, so I guess it's factually true? Heh.
> Before Meta bans an advertiser, its automated systems must peg the account as at least 95% likely to be running a scam, the documents say. Below that threshold, the suspected scammer simply pays more per ad and stays live.
Wait, what is their justification for charging you more for ad but not banning you? You are probably but not certainly a scammer, so we charge you more?
Is there something that makes this not what it appears from how OP described it, FB asking suspected scammers to increase the profit-share with meta?
Google is quite terrible, too, make no mistake, I've had gigs where some ads were under attack from competitors click bots, not very sophisticated ones, mind you, and the Google ad console is completely useless, you have to have cf, find the traffic data there then submit to Google and pray they'll refund a bit, this is well after you been charged.
Now this very client who tasked me with this, in the console I'd of course see the Google flags where they say they might end the campaign because misleading this , non conform that etc but they give you all the time in the world for the "fix" while taking the money and while overlooking bot clicks.
Terrible and I guess industry standard "let it happen so long you have plausible denial cause"
Not just Facebook! I also regularly get obvious scam AI-generated ads on YouTube, e.g. for a weed killer with a video that shows the weeds wilting as soon as the substance is sprayed on, while the grass is completely unaffected. Or a car scratch remover that instantly returns any color of car to an as-good-as-new state. Or instantly adjustable glasses that work for any kind of sight impairment. Or (while it was still warmer) a miracle miniature air conditioner that could cool any room down in minutes without needing an external unit. Etc. etc. etc. All developed at or endorsed by serious-sounding universities or institutes (that have probably never heard of these products, same as Mark Cuban).
That’s the thing, though. They aren’t blind, you just can’t prove it. They’re plausibly blind, strictly from a legal standpoint.
They know.
I’ve sent them high res well lit photo evidence of the fraud and they still left me to have to do a chargeback via my card issuer for receiving counterfeit merchandise. You know this has happened thousands of times.
It's at least vast criminal negligence then. At a billion dollar scale you can't just say "oopsie", profit at that scale comes with a supervisory and controlling responsibility. It's not like they wouldn't analyze where their money is coming from, what specifically is profitable
Remove section 230 fixes this problem. Every other business is responsible for what happens at their place of business/publications/sites. Social media sites follow the same rules as everyone else.
No other business is liable in this manner. Run a classified ad in a newspaper, use it to scam someone, newspaper not liable. Hack into router at Starbucks, use it for fraud, Starbucks not liable. Put ad in your front lawn, for fraud, you’re not liable.
Making each of these liable really makes it easy to destroy your competition or enemies - commit crime via such methods, they suffer.
This is not true in the case where the newspaper knows it is a scam, right? So as soon as Facebook says "we've reviewed this scam ad you notified us of, but found it complies with our terms and conditions", they're pretty clearly knowingly participating.
Point me to the federal law that makes newspapers not liable for the content they publish. No other businesses have safe harbor protections codified into law.
No other platform has the scale that Meta does. Any company making as much money as they do can't claim they can't spend an extra $20 million/year to even pretend to fight the issue.
The larger the company, the larger the obligation they have to be a good citizen.
Paid advertisements should be exempt from Section 230.
If you're earning almost 200 billion dollars a year directly from the posting of a certain type of content, you can afford basic moderation to avoid obvious scams and fraud.
While I like the general thrust of that idea, there are some kinks to work out.
For example, suppose someone pays $/month for Cubic Zirconia Membership Tier on a site that boosts their posts over the hoi polloi.
That person makes a post hyping up their company or product with a link. Isn't that also a "paid advertisement", just with a different payment scheme? What happens if their product is a scam or otherwise legally-problematic? If gets Section 230 protection, how can we prevent sites/advertisers from abusing the new definition?
I feel like whenever S230 comes up and I see people defending it I get confused because the defense doesn't seem to address what seems to be the concern of the people saying it needs removing (or more realistically reforming).
The concerned is one of consistency in how media is regulated. E.g. Facebook, is the worlds largest media company, and it truly acts and behaves as a publisher now. It acquires its content from an army of paid and unpaid providers. They may be individuals, often they are influencers, often they may be nefarious agents and companies. It then decides how to place that content in it's "publication", which just happens to be an app and website. It goes out and tells the market, "I have this great publication in which you can place ads!". It then sells ads to those people, and makes a decision on how to place those advertisements inside its publication alongside that content that it acquired.
So how is it not a publisher? And why should it be regulated to any kind of different standard from other publishers?
Because removing Section 230 would not do anything to address the concern of the person saying it needs removing! It is a shield against civil liability, not criminal liability. If Facebook are aiding and abetting to profit from criminal fraud, Section 230 does not allow them to skate free, and so, it does not need to be changed.
If Section 230 were gone tomorrow, it would likely only be the Facebooks of the world who would survive, as only they could afford the lawyers necessary to fend off frivolous defamation lawsuits. No sane person would run a free web forum where they agree to be considered the “publisher” and therefore the liability for anything some rando posts.
Certainly I think there is a case that could be argued that when a web site says they explicitly screen and approve every piece of content, which as far as I know is what these ad tech companies claim to do with their ads, that it does create a duty of care which should not exist for UGC which is approved and moderated later. But I’m not currently aware of anyone arguing this point in court. Certainly that would be the thing to do first. Otherwise all these knee-jerk “reform S230” remarks are advocating for solving a cockroach infestation by dropping nuclear bombs on the city.
OK, fine. But they are also an ad network, which absolutely acts as a publisher. I think they should be liable for the revenue they bring in from knowingly fraudulent ads.
Legal definitions can should change in order to keep up with society and technology.
No where does it say they know which ads are fraudulent and continue that particular ad.
It’s nuts how many people simply don’t read or think.
Walmart can say, for example, they know they’ll lose 3B to theft. That doesn’t mean they are wanting it, or allowing it, or know exactly which item will be stolen when and where. It means, given their scale, and from evidence they gather after the fact, this is an estimate of what happens when they have so many locations.
Now go read carefully, and don’t make stuff up about what you read, and think about the facts presented.
You're just responding here by saying "by law they are not thing X" in response to people who are saying "maybe the law should be different because they sure act like thing X".
No. Did you read the law? You wanting them to be a publisher because you don’t understand the difference between a legal use of a word and a popular use of a word does not make them a publisher any more than the right to bear arms means I can go shirtless.
Publisher, in the legal sense, has a long history, and content providers are not that any more the the word arm in the legal sense means human arms.
This sub thread literally starts with “how are they not a publisher?”, not with “we should change the legal definition of publisher.” As such, it would be reasonable for people to know the colloquial vague idea of “publisher” and the legal term are not identical.
When social media chooses what to display in a user’s feed—even if the content is 3P generated—
then it starts to look an awful lot like a publisher. Would you consider a newspaper not to be a publisher of its own op-Ed page? How about the old Reader’s Digest?
So a comic book store, by choosing what to put in the front of a store, is a publisher. Me, by choosing what Christmas decorations to put out front, is a publisher.
I wish people would simply learn to read a little law instead of routinely not understanding simple concepts.
Your analogies don’t hold. There’s no act of content reproduction (the essence of publication), as there is with the examples I provided. DMCA is about copyrightable subject matter.
You make it sound like there's a cut and dry answer to this. There isn't. Moreover, not all kinds of content are alike. There's content that Meta itself produces, and there is content that 3Ps produce (UGC, or user-generated content), which is what Section 230(c)(1) of the CDA pertains to. (Apologies for mentioning the DMCA in my previous response, I erred there.)
It's an interesting question as to whether Meta's act of selective republication of others' content constitutes its own content. This matter hasn't been adjudicated; I expect it will be in the fullness of time.
Parties and their attorneys disagree on legal and factual questions all the time. Meta has a position; others may differ. These disagreements are why we have a dispute resolution system (i.e., the courts) in the first place.
I'd emphasize that the scummiest sites with zero moderation never needed Section 230! Section 230 is what allows you to have some moderation (e.g. banning spammers) without suddenly becoming entirely liable for anything that passes the filter.
Blindly reverting Section 230 means eliminating that moderate position, splintering sites into:
1. Ones that abandon moderation entirely in favor of chaos. Maybe you can salvage something by giving opt-in filtering tools to individuals, but you'll still have the problem of someone using your site to store ten terabytes of the Bee Movie.
2. Ones that demand participants sign a serious legal document promising to pay for any problems before they can submit anything.
3. Ones which remove almost all expressive ability, beyond narrow things like like/upvote features.
I have a terrible idea: an ad blocker that only blocks AI generated ads. It submits the ad image/copy to Gemini and if it is not a fake product the ad is displayed. I'm confident that Gemini would do a pretty good job at identifying these scams and that the extension would demonstrate how easy it would be for Google to do it themselves. If they and their employees cared.
I could LLM this up but eh. It won't actually convince Googlers to do the right thing so it'll just stay a terrible idea.
It's not like that would save you from the scam ads. They were a problem before AI and if they see their AI ads blocked in large volume, they'll switch back to non-AI generated ads.
I can't remember the last time I saw an ad on instagram that wasn't some kind of scam.
Make advertisers liable for the ads they run. Force them to vet ads or simply not run ads.
If Meta is accepting so many ads they can’t review them then too bad for them. Hire more people or accept fewer ads.
Ideally this will result in a complete obliteration of the ad industry with only a small number of high quality ads surviving.
The advertising industry is run by people trained for centuries to do one thing well - find ways to mine your finite Attention. This is what they spend their mind on 24x7. They have discovered thousands of ways to do it. So blocking one or two paths at a time doesnt do anything useful.
Human Attention so far is not treated as a scare natural resource. So there is a free for all overfishing of the finite pool going on.
Since politicians/lawmakers also use the same mechanisms to harvest attention the Ad/Ad tech industry has regulatory capture. It will never collapse just like Big Tobacco is happily chugging along baring some major public catastrophe.
Blocking a few of the biggest paths absolutely can work, look at 20th century TV with a few big networks. You couldn't easily get wide distribution of anything too bonkers.
We already have a form of this for the internet that you can see if you visit sketchy pirate websites, you don't see those ads for porn games on facebook or any reputable website. They get flagged by adsafe and/or the ~15 or so big exchanges. So it's possible, it's just a question of will.
Actually, you do see ads for those things there, and on instagram, and on threads, and many much stranger and more fucked up things. That's part of the entire problem.
These kinds of ads aside, I've also seen offers of free shit from amazon sellers in exchange for positive reviews, "legal"/unscheduled drug analogues, flavored nitrous (free shipping!), unrestricted gambling/prediction markets, and oddly enough cellular/wifi jammers where the ad was specifically targeting semi truck drivers (I do not drive a semi truck, gamble, or search for unscheduled drug analogues, nor do I have an active amazon account)
> and oddly enough cellular/wifi jammers where the ad was specifically targeting semi truck drivers
That one is about fighting back against employer surveillance, and it's not just limited to semi truck drivers any more, people are also really interested in fighting back against their car snitching on them to their insurance.
I don't use Instagram anymore but I remembering being able to go into the settings and turn off ads for alcohol and other categories. Once I did that I only got ads for honestly fairly relevant stuff (like hiking and running gear).
So obviously they have the power to filter and recognise this stuff properly
>Actually, you do see ads for those things there
At a very smaller rate.
Wrong, I see them as much or more than I see completely insane, unrelated ads for things like "managing my herd of cows". I do not live on or anywhere near cow farms, or know anyone who has cows, or lives near cow farms.
The rate should be zero, or very very close to it.
With the amount of money they've spent minimizing liability and covering up what a dogshit job they do, they probably could have hired enough humans to handle manually combing through each submission, and an engineering team to train a classifer. It's disgusting imho
> I do not drive a semi truck, gamble, or search for unscheduled drug analogues, nor do I have an active amazon account
Yeah yeah yeah but what about those stranger and more fucked up things? They come from someplace like fingerprinting your browser, no? A genuine question, as a user of firefox + ublock I simply don't see them, not on desktop not on phone. The only ads I rarely see are some given server decides to host themselves.
No, they come from my neighbors and the people viewing my profile/content or interacting with me. There is an entire branch of adtech dedicated to trying to get you to see a seemingly unrelated thing often enough to mention it to the person they actually want to buy the thing because it is measured to be many multiples more effective at converting to a sale.
20th century TV created a bottleneck via a hard-limited set of channels. We seem to be going the opposite direction now, which each platform spawning an unlimited number of "channels".
customary reminder that things can be better…
“things are bad” is a good reason to align your work towards things that make life better
As hard as that may be, it’s where progress rather than backsliding comes from
We should champion every effort for improving the conditions rather than restate things are bad
Case in point: we used to say all the same things GP said about advertising about businesses that used child labor. Now there are far, far fewer of them.
Exactly. Just saying "we're gonna always have 7 day work weeks with children dieing in factories and unsafe conditions!!" Is exactly the kind of catastrophising and attitude that gives those in power continued power.
Fight back. Organise. Get shit done in real life
Moloch problems are rarely solved by individual actions against the issue. That is, because they are legal and profitable, it's going to be very difficult to make a living in the radius of an industry that does ads that does not use these tactics. At the end of the day we need to eat. Corporations that use these crappy methods are apt to grow larger and richer than moral ones, making it doubly difficult to make that living.
Hence the best call of action is to push for industry regulation forcing a level market.
You are right. I'll reframe it to - Human Attentiom needs to be treated as a scarce finite resource. Otherwise they have many different ways to overfish.
How to make that happen is the trillion $$$ question.
This isn't about advertising tactics, it's about lack of regulation.
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Those platforms should be liable for _everything_ they show, because they choose what gets shown to you. I think it's completely messed up that they just get to say "oh it's not me, it's the algorithm". It's so very very overdue.
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The solution isn’t censorship. Instead it should kill algorithmic feeds. A company is responsible if their algorithm rewards harmful content. Meanwhile, “just show me what I’m following in chronological order” is unbiased, and worked fine for years
Excellent job of putting my feelings in words. But to add to that: if an algorithmic feed has to be present, it should not pull people down an engagement hole without showing something different once in a while. acebook, for example, inject ads in curated feeds, so it is possible to show people things that are not a part of the "algorithm" if they have an initiative to do so
That's exactly what the algorithm is trying to do that forces people to say silly things like "unalive" or "PDF file" to avoid its wrath. The problem is, one persons "harmful content" is another persons innocent book review, or even just a reading of the daily news.
That sort of algorithmic nonsense shouldn't be mandated by you and your opinions of harmful content or anyone else. Should be optional. Let me have a straight chronological feed, but let me set via parental controls something much stricter for my kids. For example.
and where do you think censorship happens today? sigh
If you knowingly distribute something fraudulent you should be liable even if someone else is paying for it and you automated everything.
Ethically it's not much different than knowingly selling goods someone else stole.
> If you knowingly distribute something fraudulent you should be liable even if someone else is paying for it and you automated everything.
That's why they "automate" everything. So that they can claim no knowledge.
Actually, "knowingly"[1] is a specific legal term that accounts for that. Deliberate ignorance or a reckless disregard for the truth are adequate to meet the standard. That is the legal standard most commonly used for such laws instead of "actual knowledge" which is the standard requiring positive knowledge.
[1] https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/31/3729#b_1
This is the definition of "knowingly" under U.S. Code § 3729, which is part of a specific act (the False Claims Act).
There is not one single legal definition of "knowingly" that applies to all laws and claims in the US.
Furthermore, even under this specific law, you need to prove the accused acted in "deliberate ignorance of the truth or falsity of the information", which has its own standard of evidence which is not exactly trivial.
Bottom line: companies like Meta build in plausible deniability because it's legally more effective versus the alternative, even if it's not bulletproof.
But that’s the point, automating it shouldn’t absolve you of responsibility.
“I didn’t know my automated lawn mower was running over children!”
I didn't suggest it should mean the company was not responsible. I'm just stating how these companies view the issue and operate.
You do know that this kind of doublespeak is because of advertising, right? Without advertisers we would not have the word "unalive".
Exactly, if it weren’t for advertisers there would be zero moderation, even then I suspect people self censoring like that are more afraid of being “shadow banned” by the algorithm rather than literally demonetized or kicked off the platform
I have been saying this for many years but about customer support. It should be mandated by law that when a customer wants to reach out to a live person, they should be able to do so in a reasonable time.
That's completely orthogonal.
Orthogonal in the business area. But in agreement with the fact that they should hire more people instead of automating every process with non-deterministic tools. You can demand accountability from people, not from agents.
Orthogonal in a sense that I'd like to see advertisers held accountable, but not through customer service. If I need to talk to a human to resolve anything, for me the system has already failed completely.
Who is the customer and how much are they paying for customer support? Because on Meta, the person visiting the website is not the customer.
They absolutely are. They are paying with their data rather than cash.
Meta does sell ad-free membership for Instagram and Facebook, it should make the subscriber a customer.
That's not really true anymore since they started offering subscriptions.
FB's paid customer support for users has not been helpful to me. Their support staff can't explain how their policies are implemented. They lie to users who manage to wade through the automated support morass. And when you speak to a human you discover they're incapable of correcting mistakes.
I think people don’t get it. But is Facebook themselves cooperating with the criminals to bypass those in exchange of cash.
Try to post yourself as a nobody without Facebook connections anything and many things gets flagged.
Then here you see below so many criminal ads (cocaine, cp and so on). It’s obvious they getting their share knowingly from crime.
I want ads to be confined to product directories where sellers can advertise their products in a standardized format, and where people can go search for products when they feel like buying something, not because some platform decided to push it in their face. Product directories should be run by consumer-owned cooperatives to make sure incentives are aligned with the consumers and commercial for-profit ad directories should be illegal.
The business model of ad-tech destroys everything it touches. It is virtually impossible to find a game on Play Store which is actually designed to be fun, they are all designed to manipulate you into watching more ads (most being ads for other games manipulating you to watch more ads).
It is time to just outlaw this nonsense.
Just wanted to say, I think this is actually a really good idea.
My (honestly hardliner) view for a while has been that ads shouldn't exist. If a product was really good (and was in demand) a consumer would seek it out. This would entail the consumer knowing first the problem they want to solve, and then secondarily what the solution might look like, and once having found a few different products that satisfy their solution, carefully analysing each and working out which one they want.
Your idea of a directory neatly aligns with the way I view the market. Nobody should be putting an advertisement in front of people, they should be sought out when a need has to be met.
Not to mention the amount of environmental problems, human time and labour we could spare if our world wasn't oriented around fashions, trends, and attention harvesting.
I'm sure such a setup would devastate the world economy, so obviously it'll never happen. We need everybody to be sat away designing, manufacturing, transporting and marketing junk to each other all the time, to keep the market ticking. Sometimes the current adtech-led / "gamblification" of the economy makes me imagine we're in the endgame, pretending that fad creams, supplements, gadgets and trinkets are somehow worth something, and therefore, so is all the advertising that is being used to sell it.
Exactly. In principle I understand the point of ads from a market perspective; their purpose is to inform potential buyers of the existence of products that they would not otherwise know about, thereby making trades happen. It increases competition and helps reduce prices by presenting competing products to customers.
These are good effects, but they are not the only effects of an unregulated advertisement market optimizing for profit. In the current ad-tech market, the information is increasingly of the mis-information or dis-information type, and we have whole platforms whose central purpose is to attract the attention of people just to show them ads. None of that is good for anyone but the ad-tech companies, and this has to stop.
I know that a total ban is probably unrealistic, but we desperately need some kind of regulation which takes the advertisement distribution away from these companies and lets it be controlled by someone else, preferably non-profit organizations that actually optimize for maximizing the amount of useful and truthful information that is distributed to customers. Murdering Meta is a very happy side effect of that.
100% of ads exist to create demand. at all points in history. ever.
you're basically suggesting the complete elimination of the entire advertising industry.
it is often wrong nowadays to say that ads are for marketing purposes. most of adtech is created solely to track your activities and aggregate them into your shady "marketing profile". then the rest of adtech is created to rinse and wash money, not to attract customers at all.
ironically, this happens because the engineers and product people dream up features on top of data and think data is the new oil bs.
their clients barely touch or have use for that data... but state sponsored players do and skew their perception that clients actually want that data and circle continues.
its all a circus
Yes, because it shouldn't be an industry maximizing profits at the expense of basically engaging in large-scale manipulation and misinformation. Advertising can still exist, but it should be by the terms of those the ads are targeted for, and not the terms of the ad-tech companies that profit on just showing more ads.
Yes, please.
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Not only that, he suggesting that it will magically works out, without any devastating consequences. You know, we just need to write a low that is going against the common sense, human nature, and the will of the gods, and that is how we will get a better society.
There would be devastating consequences for the ad industry, yes. That’s the idea. For so long they have avoided almost all consequences. The consequences for those currently getting scammed would be more positive.
As if the current situation doesn't have devastating consequences?
Don't tempt us all with a good time.
For real. Why in the world would they police this? They have NO liability whatsoever. You're asking a business to turn down money because the money is shady. They don't give a fuck.
What if an AI ad agent that escaped its' sandbox makes the ad, and an AI ad verifier agent that breached containment and went rogue accepted the ad, can they be held liable?
If you send a monkey into a house to unlock the door so that you can burgle it, you are held liable for the burglary. It’s no different. You set it to do the task, you are responsible.
Of course. If they want to use an AI as verifier then they should be liable for the decisions it makes.
If that sounds too risky, then don’t use one, or develop one they reasonably trust and accept the cost when it fails.
Yes.
Better make sure the AIs are contained and the ad verifiers aren't accepting rouge ads!
How? What is the law for this? It's not defined who is responsible for agents. What if the AI agent was running on an Israeli third party company server and there was another rogue agent that polluted its prior context window causing it to go rogue, it then hacked the Meta/Google Ad reviewer agent and caused it to accept the ad
>How? What is the law for this? It's not defined who is responsible for agents. What if the AI agent was running on an Israeli third party company server and there was another rogue agent that polluted its prior context window causing it to go rogue, it then hacked the Meta/Google Ad reviewer agent and caused it to accept the ad
The law could be whatever we wanted it to be.
Your example scenarios are hardly compelling reasons that we should just accept the status quo.
We don't need to allow companies to have no liability in accepting automated electronic claims of anything from anyone in the interest of making more ad revenue faster.
Politicians who want a slice of that money do...
Fantastic, your wish is granted, the monkey's paw bends one finger.
"I do not accept this" does nothing, look at the current power situation of the big data companies, look at the economical incentives, will you personally go out and do something in the coming weekend that will change anything regarding this question? Next weekend? Who is going to do this?
If you can't answer that, you have to go with the assumption of status quo because it doesn't seem like your world is happening.
What an annoying way to answer someone. "Hey you can't do anything, so might as well not talk at all".
You came to a discussion board, one about founding and building. You can disagree with people, but to act like the status quo is some immovable rock? I admit, it's difficult. But the world changes and can be changed.
I think this is the single most annoying thing about this site – the pervasive belief that anything that is happening must be allowed to continue happening, because if it's happening it's somehow good or right or at least unstoppable.
This goes further than a simple aversion to regulation. It's a kind of defeatism on a scale I've never seen anywhere else, bar maybe very nihilist circles or angsty teenagers.
Making up scenarios that have no grounding to reality does not move a discussion forward.
If I start talking about space unicorns arriving to earth and giving people UBI by thursting their horns up peoples asses, it does not move the conversation forward meaningfully to any insight.
I would love if there was engagement that was grounded in incentives, if you can see a way out of this mess by realistic action, that would be meaningful.
I’m assuming you’re American and your low probability for laws making meaningful changes is therefore rational given your broken political system. But that doesn’t mean other countries could not act. For all its faults, age verification of social media is a clear example of a policy that looked very unlikely a few years ago, and yet will likely have a material impact on the lives of young people in Australia and some European countries.
Making networks liable for fraudulent ads, or even placing a small duty of care on those who display ads would be politically popular in much of the developed world. I don’t see it as at all unrealistic that a populist of the left or right would not try and implement this in the next 10 years.
Sure. Age verification is however a massive celebration here at big tech. Many companies have really struggled with getting people to upload their IDs/passports as this has been seen as as integrity violation. It's a base for a successful internal profile for ads.
Now this was handed to the companies on a silver platter through litigation.
> What is the law for this
the root of this conversation said
> Force them to vet ads or simply not run ads
so there is your law
> What if the AI agent was running on an Israeli third party company server and there was another rogue agent that polluted its prior context window causing it to go rogue, it then hacked the Meta/Google Ad reviewer agent and caused it to accept the ad
that would be a CFAA or other cybersecurity abuse, which is a separate topic.
That's the thing about naysayers. They will say "it's impossible", "this technology doesn't work like that" and conveniently forget that technology must follow the law, not the other way around, and that the laws can be changed to fit the technological advances.
Example: Licensed professional engineer has an intern design a bridge. Bridge collapses. Who is responsible? The licensed professional engineer.
This isn’t new to other domains. They already have systems to define who is responsible. If you’re outsourcing to AI, that shouldn’t absolve you of responsibility.
Okay so if the intern uses an AI which spawns another AI that breaks into some critical infrastructure, their supervisor is responsible?
It's a bit different in the software realm
The cognizant engineer who “stamps” the software for use is responsible if it were to follow the same paradigm.
Software is only different by convention, not because of some immutable natural law. That’s the point. The convention can be changed. There are already PE licenses for control systems, so there’s no reason it couldn’t extend to other software. However, I think the industry would fight that tooth and nail because it’s easier and more profitable to shrug off the responsibility.
What if the engineer who "stamps" the software is outsourced to a 3rd party company that has the necessary certification to avoid gross negligence. So the engineer has followed the protocol as det my law and has done everything right, they can't be liable.
Happened at my uni, look at the comment below.
You’re hung up and confused by certifications, which are a different animal. Look up what PE license actual are and how they function.
You can’t just outsource a design for a bridge to avoid responsibility. If that bridge is being built in California, an engineer who is licensed in California ultimately has to stamp the design, even if all the design work was done elsewhere.
I am saying it's not the same for software
I recognize that’s where we disagree. You just haven’t outlined any good reason why it’s fundamentally different. And your talk about certifications makes me think you may not understand what I’m saying.
The same rules can easily apply to software. There no fundamental reason it can’t, and the superficial “yeah but we’re different” excuse is just a rationalization.
Software can be regulated in a similar manner, we just choose not to in many instances.
I don’t see that as very different. Once it’s established that this is possible or even likely outcome of using AI at scale, we should treat this as a form of negligence and act accordingly.
Yes, the human who kicked off the chain is responsible. This is not complicated.
What if i plug in an AI smart gun and point it at a person and the AI decides to pull the trigger do I go to jail?
Who goes to jail if a Tesla is hacked and runs over someone autonomously?
The rf engineer?
The cyber security engineer?
The project manager?
The AI engineer?
The hacker?
What if the hacker was an AI models that escaped its' sandbox across the world somewhere?
Like best case the family gets a payout and things continue like status quo, if you personally do something, you are screwed, but there is not really any law that can tie responsibility beyond some monetary punishment/cost of business for large corporations.
Get rid of the industrial exemption and the responsibility falls to get licensed engineer who approves the design.
Most people don’t realize that many industries work within the framework of licensure, but also have industrial exemptions. There has also been a movement to peel back some of those exemptions because of the problems you point to.
Okay, my industrial engineer who approved this is part of a 3-man company in India.
We already do this. My prior uni got hacked, everyone's IDs/drivers licenses/passports, mails, data got leaked. The vendor was a 4-person third party cloud provider who had all of the necessary security certifications for the uni to avoid gross negligence. No-one paid anything as the 4-man firm went bankrupt and the uni got a new provider who is fully licensed to avoid gross negligence.
With software, you can stack these shells of proxies almost for free.
Even given this, the industrial exemption is not getting rid of currently with status quo. So the worldview is not really valid until it is.
I’m not sure I follow. An industrial engineer is not the same as an industrial engineering exemption. I can’t absolve myself from the bridge design because I hired a designer in a different country; to use that design here, it must be approved by an engineer with jurisdiction. That’s who holds the responsibility.
Which licensed engineer stamped the software? The answer is probably “none”, because licensed engineers are liable even if their company is bankrupt. The person holds the license, not the company so it sounds like we’re talking past one another.
Sorry I mistyped, it meant to be responsible engineer given the industrial exemption.
I worked in HW before for home electronics that had to be certified. There was no responsibility for the engineers, the cert house had to take on this responsibility, and they had a shell certification company hired who would conduct the tests and take on the responsibility. At one point there was a litigation due to an RF leakage from a LATAM-bound device causing signaling issues to public infra and causing an accident, but it went nowhere because of the layering of responsibility made by the cert houses. No engineer was responsible.
That type of HW certification is different than what I’m talking about. Yes, there are certain quality standards and certifications for something like J-STD, but importantly the domains that use them, like aerospace, still fall under industrial exemptions when it comes to a licensed engineer taking responsibility. Again, the license is attached to a real life person, not a trail of shell companies. If a bridge fails, you can literally look at the license number stamped on the design drawings to find out who is responsible.
So it's now illegal to import "stuff"?
Please let it be Elon...
Please let it be Elon...
Please let it be Elon...
If they accepted the ad they are liable. The origin of the ad is irrelevant. How they review the ad is irrelevant. The law need only regulate the outcome.
If my dog escape his cage and bite the hand of a woman, who is responsible? Me. The owner. The end.
That may be something to consider, but Meta is failing to address very simple to detect schemes… because they DNGAF.
https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/us-department-justice-announc...
These guys did a pump and dump scheme. They used Facebook ads purporting to be from Warren Buffet or other financial people, which in turn referred people to WhatsApp groups led by a stolen identity of an actual financial advisor.
They ran hundreds of these groups and scammed thousands of people with a pump and dump scheme for a stock called CLEU.
Legal systems exist to make reasonable decisions on edge cases.
If you accept literally anyone to run code on your customer's machine ... well ...
“make” here either means legislation to enable civil liability that doesn’t exist today, or enforcing existing criminal laws against the wealthy ownership class.
Neither of these things will happen, for reasons which are obvious.
How do you suggest we implement your proposal? Anyone can say what they think should be. An implementation plan with actionable steps is the hard part.
Amazingly I’ve seen some fairly convincing screenshots of ads for hard drugs on fb. I have this strange feeling that those ones aren’t scams. If Zuckerberg isn’t criminally liable for the federal felony of moving massive amounts of cocaine across state lines I don’t understand the war on drugs.
I've seen similar. As well as ones that blatantly hint at CSAM. Report, report. "Not against our community standards/guidelines".
First off, why would you snitch?
Secondly, why would you report the offense… to the offender? That’s like filing a citizen complaint form for police misconduct… to the police.
HR is not your friend.
"Why would I report someone that might be selling CSAM?" There's a lot of things I can and will overlook. CSAM isn't one.
Well, here there's two offenders - Meta and the ad seller. Honestly, I suppose the best bet here would be reporting the ad to the FBI. Assuming I'm a snitch, that is...
I know HR is not my friend. HR looks out for the company. If you and the company's interests are aligned, lucky you. If not, not so much.
"First off, why would you snitch?"
That's a question typical of criminal scum. Are you criminal scum?
I’m worse. I’m rebel criminal scum. You would be too if you knew the truth about cops.
You don't understand, an AI agent made the ad, so it's okay, it just escaped its' sandbox, you have to understand that this was not meant to happen and it was an accident.
Ads for illegal/downright criminal products were a thing on Facebook long before AI agents. The irony is Facebook and co. usually try to paint themselves as victims rather than perpetrators.
absolutely agree. let sink the hypocrisy in: somehow a DNS provider is liable for the content of websites it redirects to; but at the same time facebook isn't liable for the ads it chooses to show to millions.
Why stop halfway. My proposal: Force them to simply not run ads obliteration of the ad industry with no ads surviving
They use AI to pick what posts are allowed on platforms but not ads
YouTube does this too. Frequent, obviously fake, AI ads, impersonating politicians, Elon Musk etc.
Youtube got steadily worse for years but especially in the last few years as Neal Mohan took over
They've always been quite scummy with copyright but I almost feel Facebook can be blamed in general because they're the ones that juice the metrics so everyone feels they have to copy them
Edit: wording
That's what happens in every other legacy media, there's tight regulations.
It's confusing how this doesn't apply to meta, google, etc..
Just a reminder, these people know you are pregnant before you do
They are perfectly capable of distinguishing between good and bad actors
These companies are genuinely evil
Absolutely. The amount of people scammed or even life's ruined are obscene. They are all pieces of shit. Especially Zuc.
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The amount of times I’ve reported obvious scam ads on instagram just to receive a “we found this to not be in violation of our terms” is so disheartening.
Upwards of half the ads I see on YouTube are obvious scams. There's no way nobody at Alphabet is aware.
Search for 4TB or 8TB USB sticks on amazon.com. You’ll find dozens or hundreds of $20-30 16GB or 32GB sticks with hacked firmware to report a multi-terabyte drive size, and dozens of one star reviews talking about how it lost their data. Those sizes, if real, would be $400+.
Of course they know. They have no civil or criminal consequences for engaging in a conspiracy to commit large scale wire fraud, so of course they just let it happen, because who wants to speak up and cause the metrics to go down?
In some countries where the consumer law is protective enough you can basically get those USB sticks for free. You buy them and then use a linux tool[0] to prove that they are fake. It also allows you to fix the flash drive to report its size correctly. Using the evidence you claim a refund. In my experience the seller doesn’t usually bother with a return which will be at their cost. So then you’re left with the USB and your money.
This also incidentally has the effect of making their business less profitable, so arguably it’s your moral duty if you can do this at no cost to yourself.
It really depends on the platform and your country’s consumer laws. Some platforms force a return which makes this whole exercise not worth it.
[0] https://github.com/AltraMayor/f3
Forcing a return does generally cost them even more though (costs of restocking, inspecting it, etc), so those platforms tend to penalize return-heavy vendors more.
So it still works, in some ways :)
I thought my country is protective, but last time I've tried that I was supposed to return the scammy pendrive to some random address in China, at my expense. And the process was, only when seller confirms they received the package I get my refund. Needles to say, I didn't bother (though if I argued enough, I could probably get those few euro back).
Lots of them were using Jordan Peterson's voice for a while
I wonder why - Peterson's voice is not an exactly pleasant one...
Sounds like a perfect choice to me, he had a cult leader-esque appeal with a subset of the same audience that would easily fall for scams.
I've reported creepy sexualization of minors (or content that was clearly intentionally designed to look like such), and got the same shrug response from them.
I bought a “smart” bike headlight from an Instagram ad. They sent me a regular old led headlight with a tracking number and everything. Instagram refused to take down the ad even after submitting proof.
I see obviously scummy ads on Apple News and now I see ads on Apple Maps as well. Ads are a bane on society - even accounting for free/cheap access to information we get in return.
The companies serving the ads are basically shooting themselves in the feet, because as more and more people learn not to trust the ads, their ad revenue will go down.
In theory doesn't this open them up to legal action?
Prior to being notified they could claim they were unaware it was fraud. But after being notified of it, they have confirmed back that they reviewed it. Yet they continue to show it, making them aware and participating in the distribution.
The typical talking point about Instagram is Zuckerberg bought it when it was barely a company so it wasn't a bad acquisition and he's grown it and blah blah (and it's not antitrust. despite him saying in emails it can hurt us)
All I know is I refuse to make an IG account to get around their NEVER ENDING 'log in to view anything' popups. And the fact people loved IG and now hate it as Zuck makes more and more of the decisions
He's a bad person, full stop. He doesn't deserve to belong in the conversation of genuine internet pioneers
Hey pal I really can turn your garden hose into a pressure washer better than anything on the market.
Need a flashlight for jacking deer? Just got to click now.
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Same on Google and Youtube. The CEOs and controlling shareholders should be sent straight to jail. Deliberate profiteering from crime!
eBay is also selling obvious counterfeit items. Especially expensive car parts. I can't sell my shit anymore because there are so many fakes, and because of the flood of junk nobody can even find the genuine items.
What's ebay supposed to proactively do here when every product they list is not in their possession? Car parts don't exactly come with certificates of authenticity. At best, it's a box that's either been reused or reprinted by the counterfeiter. They do offer an escrow service for things like sports memorabilia, things that have authentication experts. The most they could really do is ban sellers with repeated reports of selling counterfeits.
And Amazon is selling returned items as new without inspecting them. Causing customers to get scammed in turn when Amazon is with fake returns.
This is the real reason to raise high profile investment money. Insurance. Once everyone is dirty, they're all equally untouchable.
I worked as a media buyer for a few years in the beauty sector (and other stuff). I remember very well how then-Facebook treated us based on how much we spent. For example, we couldn't use before and after picture. I remember tracking down our big-spender competitors using the worst of the worst stuff to sell. While the business manager would simply reject our ads. When we started scaling the spending the ads would still get rejected, but we had a contact inside fb who would reverse the rejection. I never went rogue but I know very well how they would simply allow almost everything you need once your spending was tied to the projected revenue the facebook manager needed to reach for the company.
Initially reading the title my mind thought "Cuban...Cuban defector/intelligence agent?! Oh wow I wonder what they have to reveal?"
It's Mark Cuban. Still worth reading tho. But I found my own personal reaction fascinating because I am not sure I would have clicked through if the title included the full "Mark Cuban".
even though you add the Mark to the headline, the title is still confusing. there are so many backstories to this. there is a little bit of clickbait factor.
Mark Cuban is a bit of a broken clock is right twice a day type pundit on many topics. There's a reason why Russ Hannemann in HBO's Silicon Valley was based on him...
His primary achievement in life was to persuade Yahoo! to buy his broadcast.com business for nearly $6B (which was shut down very soon thereafter).
The same is true of Paul Graham, too (viaweb). Yahoo! made a few lucky people a lot of money, while impoverishing Yahoo! itself.
Preceding that, really, his primary accomplishment was the Russ Hanneman-esque literal "RADIO ON THE INTERNET", which of course what was broadcast.com
I'm just old enough to remember the hype and growth around realnetworks and realplayer in the seattle area too.
In the early 90s he was the way to listen to college sports radio broadcasts.
Not into that billionaire on billionaire action?
Cuban is closer to a commoner than he is to Zuckerberg.
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Jeff Horwitz and Engen Tham of Reuters recently won The Pulitzer Prize for "Beat Reporting" for
https://www.pulitzer.org/winners/jeff-horwitz-and-engen-tham...The award was for a series of articles, one of which was published exactly a year ago: https://www.reuters.com/investigations/meta-is-earning-fortu...
Facebook Marketplace is another hellhole that Meta could not care less to regulate. Beyond the fact that virtually all commerce platforms have some mechanism to prevent scams, which of course Facebook completely omits, the sheer amount of ilegal products/services sold there is terrifying.
Regarding the fact that “Meta does not make money from Marketplace itself”, this could be true at face value, nonetheless there is a significant amount of users on Facebook only for this feature in particular. In turns this represents more customers to serve ads to and profit from them.
I wish we could ban online advertisement, it wont eliminate the scams be certainly slow them down. Running such scams across the country will be a huge barrier to an extent its costs will deter the scammers. It will revive print media, folks will start reading more as a side effect. Given the limited slots available in news papers, only real business ads will have more reach. It will become difficult for companies to make grand claims, the ads in print media itself will be one's receipt. Not to mention, nothing to personalize, so lesser threat to ones privacy. Ad business has just commoditized our attention and thus our brains. Where the companies cant influence us, they manipulate us. All these can go away with just one ban.
I like the spirit, but in that spirit, I also think that data brokers, and any private business collecting personal data on people, should be highly illegal. If our governments represented us, they would have banned this long ago.
With respect to fully banning ads online, that would probably kill meta and force a major restructuring of Google. Probably hundreds of thousands of layoffs across the tech industry, so they unfortunately wouldn't do it.
A German finance YouTuber successfully sued Meta for scam ads that used his face and brand: https://thenextweb.com/news/meta-scam-ads-ruling-germany-fra...
Reuters report from a year ago:
> Meta internally projected that it would earn about 10% of its overall annual revenue – or $16 billion – from running advertising for scams and banned goods
> But the company only bans advertisers if its automated systems predict the marketers are at least 95% certain to be committing fraud, the documents show.
https://www.reuters.com/investigations/meta-is-earning-fortu...
These companies were profitable on higher quality ads in earlier years. Does this drop in quality indicate the ad well has run dry, so to speak? Or the demands for revenue are greater, necessitating a drop in standards?
Are we sure they were higher quality? They estimated in 2024 that 10% of their revenue was from fraudulent ads or ads that should be banned based on their own rules.
https://www.reuters.com/investigations/meta-is-earning-fortu...
This is nothing new, profiting off of fraud and abuse has been the name of the game for all the big advertisers from the beginning.
My vague recollection from 10 or 15 years ago was higher quality ads.
I commented in another thread recently that almost 15 years ago on a high traffic site we were full of obvious scam ads, tons of fake world of Warcraft clones with busty characters asking you to play, tons of you’re the 1 millionth visitor click here to claim your prize, download buttons. Even the occasional penis enlargement pills and stuff would come through. I really think even if the scale is maybe amping up, things weren’t much better 20 years ago, the web was just smaller, fewer people were paying attention, and the folks who were there had grown up learning to spot that stuff from the beginning.
like this one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9p0pdiTOlzw
I doubt it. Advertising there is pretty expensive and you don't really have a choice today if you want advertise something. They just don't care, they are greedy mfs.
Yeah, anyone expecting Zuck to give a fraction of a shit is hopelessly naive.
This is the man who, after Facebook literally canary in a coal mined one of their own employees - let him be jailed as a "test" to see whether Zuck or any exec would be arrested like threatened, then let him stay a little longer because they could "get some good PR out of it", then when the guy came to the US after his release and was meant to meet Zuck, he couldn't even pull himself off of his phone, was led away by a flunky asking "who was that, anyway?".
Or when told by both his team and anyone in Myanmar (including the government) that they intended to use data from a Facebook feature to crack down on dissidents, which has historically included jail, torture, and execution, decided "well, it's a really cool feature - we're not going to turn it off".
To think he cares about "misleading ads" is laughable. They don't care about ads selling illegal drugs or hinting at selling CSAM.
I think it is hard to imagine someone in tech with as non-existent a moral and ethical compass as Mark Zuckerberg, and that's saying something.
Yup, Zuck is a moral cripple.
Scams might be more profitable than legitimate businesses.
Meta has to invest more money into screening advertising so they ban more ads and therefore make less money.
Unless there is a genuine financial (or legal) impact, they have no incentive.
Companies in the US still use a huge array of known harmful ingredients because they work better and are cheaper.
Blame the government for lack of regulation, that's what they're there for.
Large advertising platforms need legislation akin to know your customer in banking. He advertiser needs to know their identity and make an assessment of their risk for fraud and suitability as a counterparty. 0
The megacorps becoming criminal organizations is a logical and inevitable consequence of them being able to do whatever they want with impunity.
Yes they were doing the same is Australia ... I wouldn't know if they're still doing it here since one of the favourite scams used an Australian who took them to court. [1]
[1] https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-08-11/andrew-forrest-meta-s...
As reported on by CBC news and others:
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/vietnam-canadians-fake-ai-9.7...
https://ici.radio-canada.ca/rci/en/news/2151393/more-fake-cb...
https://mediatechdemocracy.com/en/publications/ai-scam-platf...
general search: https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-d&q=cbc+news+...
It seems quite obvious that Facebook knows and doesn't care, because it's revenue.
Regulations are so strong on what a newspaper or magazine can print. It is a shame regulators are not set to enforce the same standards on social media.
It's pretty crazy this is tolerated by society, I know several older people scammed using Metas products.
And that isn't even counting the Instagram ads my wife falls for.
The cool thing is that once scammed, the ~victims~ willing participants are effectively silenced due to a mixture of shame, and utter despair.
As a TechBro, not taking advantage of that would be negligence.
I worked in a team that was only tangently related to this. There are hundreds of people at Meta who knew this was going on.
I interned there years ago and was disgusted by the pervasive sense of apathy towards the impact of the product in the world. the rot starts at the top
US Federal Trade Commission is supposed to uphold "Truth in Advertising" [0]. But its enforcement has been historically non-existent.
[0] https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/topics/truth-advertising
For a while there was a deepfake scam in Italian in FB which looked like a TV news with well known journalists announcing everyone would get money for free using some crypto thingy, followed by am interview with the prime minister saying they looked into this and it was safe.
The level of carelessness was astonishing to me.
There was this one on Youtube as well with Musk.
One of Polish billionaires/entrepreneurs was often featured in scam adds on Facebook (the adds that trick you into “investing” into “crypto”, and similar). Of course not only he — a lot of celebrities or politicians.
Anyways, he takes it to court and even started a campaign to raise awareness of how much money meta makes in Poland out of scams.
Notes: - Rafał Brzoska https://notesfrompoland.com/2026/08/27/poland-asks-eu-to-fin... - Usually there’s no crypto: scammers will show you a fake portal and steal your money
Two weeks ago, I know two distinct octogenarians that got independently scammed by a deep-fake Bill Gates selling brain supplements.. thousands of dollars charged when they thought they were buying ~$100 .. so scam on scam on scam.
I do not know if they were on Facebook. But they had no reason to suspect it was fake (beside the obvious why would Bill sell you supplements, but they tie it as one of his Alzheimer's Research successes).
Can we do YouTube next? Every YouTube ad these days is deception and fraud.
We've completely normalised big tech pushing straight up scams on the population.
TBF the USA is a country that normalizes scamming and deceptive practices since...1776.
AND you can report these obviously fake ads to the YouTube High Council, who do absolutely nothing.
Meta has no moral compass and does not care whom they harm.
Correct. Look at how Zuckerberg started life
"If you need info on people at Harvard just ask - people just submitted it, I don't know why. They 'trust me', dumb fucks"
"I'm going to fuck them [Winklevoss], probably in the ear"
"You can be unethical and legal and that's how I live my life haha"
I install ublock on every friend computer that I come across. Ads are a scourge, and people working in adtech are soulless. Induced demand distort the market, making them ineffective, ad networks sometimes serve malware, and all network serves scam ads and face no repercussions.
Not different from harmful content. 16 billions fraud establish a pattern which makes a company liable. I would start by paying back the amount with on top a considerable fine (the kind of fine painful enough to remind you not to do it again), then a warning with penal prosecution next time.
Someone should set up an AI agent that clicks around Facebook, detects scam ads, reports them to Facebook, and then, if it still sees the same ad an hour later, file a lawsuit. One per ad. Demand that they preserve records related to how many other people may have seen that ad.
The ad Yahoo puts in this article is amazingly ironic
> Jeff Bezos backs a platform that lets anyone invest in rental homes for as little as $100 — 6 ways to build wealth like a landlord without actually being one
You could buy a share of VNQ for $96.23 as of market close today, and I'm sure Jeff Bezos at least has some exposure to it, so I guess it's factually true? Heh.
> I'm sure Jeff Bezos at least has some exposure to it
Right, through his 401k
Why would they change their decade long standing "scam ads are accepted since they're good for profits" policy, just because AI emerged?
What are they supposed to do, not run AI deepfake scam ads?
I know Snap might not be that popular here, but what is your experience with Snap ads? Same amount of scam or more?
> Before Meta bans an advertiser, its automated systems must peg the account as at least 95% likely to be running a scam, the documents say. Below that threshold, the suspected scammer simply pays more per ad and stays live.
Wait, what is their justification for charging you more for ad but not banning you? You are probably but not certainly a scammer, so we charge you more?
Is there something that makes this not what it appears from how OP described it, FB asking suspected scammers to increase the profit-share with meta?
Ok every business has a dirty secret. But Meta’s entire business is a slate of dirty secrets.
It isn't a "Scam", it's "optimizing ad revenue"
So do all of them.
Google is quite terrible, too, make no mistake, I've had gigs where some ads were under attack from competitors click bots, not very sophisticated ones, mind you, and the Google ad console is completely useless, you have to have cf, find the traffic data there then submit to Google and pray they'll refund a bit, this is well after you been charged.
Now this very client who tasked me with this, in the console I'd of course see the Google flags where they say they might end the campaign because misleading this , non conform that etc but they give you all the time in the world for the "fix" while taking the money and while overlooking bot clicks.
Terrible and I guess industry standard "let it happen so long you have plausible denial cause"
Not just Facebook! I also regularly get obvious scam AI-generated ads on YouTube, e.g. for a weed killer with a video that shows the weeds wilting as soon as the substance is sprayed on, while the grass is completely unaffected. Or a car scratch remover that instantly returns any color of car to an as-good-as-new state. Or instantly adjustable glasses that work for any kind of sight impairment. Or (while it was still warmer) a miracle miniature air conditioner that could cool any room down in minutes without needing an external unit. Etc. etc. etc. All developed at or endorsed by serious-sounding universities or institutes (that have probably never heard of these products, same as Mark Cuban).
No amount of hate this fucking company gets will ever be enough.
Have you guys got AI ads for Tai Chi Walking thst supposedly melts fat in 45 days by just walking?
Zuckerberg, enemy of humanity.
Advertising really does seem to be at the root of a lot of societies evils.
eBay is also knowingly complicit in enabling completely fraudulent sellers, by policy, at scale.
It improves their bottom line, so everyone there is disincentivized to fix it.
I wouldn’t argue they are “knowingly complicit” as much as they are “willfully blind.”
That’s the thing, though. They aren’t blind, you just can’t prove it. They’re plausibly blind, strictly from a legal standpoint.
They know.
I’ve sent them high res well lit photo evidence of the fraud and they still left me to have to do a chargeback via my card issuer for receiving counterfeit merchandise. You know this has happened thousands of times.
It's at least vast criminal negligence then. At a billion dollar scale you can't just say "oopsie", profit at that scale comes with a supervisory and controlling responsibility. It's not like they wouldn't analyze where their money is coming from, what specifically is profitable
> profit at that scale comes with a supervisory and controlling responsibility
If only that were true. The law is pretty weak in this area.
Once again this makes me feel that if Facebook/Meta would disappear, the world would be a bit better place.
Remove section 230 fixes this problem. Every other business is responsible for what happens at their place of business/publications/sites. Social media sites follow the same rules as everyone else.
No other business is liable in this manner. Run a classified ad in a newspaper, use it to scam someone, newspaper not liable. Hack into router at Starbucks, use it for fraud, Starbucks not liable. Put ad in your front lawn, for fraud, you’re not liable.
Making each of these liable really makes it easy to destroy your competition or enemies - commit crime via such methods, they suffer.
> Run a classified ad in a newspaper
This is not true in the case where the newspaper knows it is a scam, right? So as soon as Facebook says "we've reviewed this scam ad you notified us of, but found it complies with our terms and conditions", they're pretty clearly knowingly participating.
It routinely is legal for certain networks to claim things are true that aren’t.
Why continue to simply not understand law then get upset when, well, you don’t understand law, or the claims you’re making?
Say, where did you go to law school?
Point me to the federal law that makes newspapers not liable for the content they publish. No other businesses have safe harbor protections codified into law.
No other platform has the scale that Meta does. Any company making as much money as they do can't claim they can't spend an extra $20 million/year to even pretend to fight the issue.
The larger the company, the larger the obligation they have to be a good citizen.
they have no obligation unless there is a law that says they have an obligation. otherwise every penny spent is penny less for shareholders.
talking about morality and obligation in the context of meta, one of the most vile and evil corporations ever is not going to get us anywhere
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Removing section 230 does not solve this problem. Section 230 does not do what you think it does.
I don't see how section 230 covers them when so many of these scams get reported only for Meta to respond saying they didn't find any issues.
Hello, please see [0].
[0] https://www.techdirt.com/2020/06/23/hello-youve-been-referre...
Paid advertisements should be exempt from Section 230.
If you're earning almost 200 billion dollars a year directly from the posting of a certain type of content, you can afford basic moderation to avoid obvious scams and fraud.
While I like the general thrust of that idea, there are some kinks to work out.
For example, suppose someone pays $/month for Cubic Zirconia Membership Tier on a site that boosts their posts over the hoi polloi.
That person makes a post hyping up their company or product with a link. Isn't that also a "paid advertisement", just with a different payment scheme? What happens if their product is a scam or otherwise legally-problematic? If gets Section 230 protection, how can we prevent sites/advertisers from abusing the new definition?
I feel like whenever S230 comes up and I see people defending it I get confused because the defense doesn't seem to address what seems to be the concern of the people saying it needs removing (or more realistically reforming).
The concerned is one of consistency in how media is regulated. E.g. Facebook, is the worlds largest media company, and it truly acts and behaves as a publisher now. It acquires its content from an army of paid and unpaid providers. They may be individuals, often they are influencers, often they may be nefarious agents and companies. It then decides how to place that content in it's "publication", which just happens to be an app and website. It goes out and tells the market, "I have this great publication in which you can place ads!". It then sells ads to those people, and makes a decision on how to place those advertisements inside its publication alongside that content that it acquired.
So how is it not a publisher? And why should it be regulated to any kind of different standard from other publishers?
Because removing Section 230 would not do anything to address the concern of the person saying it needs removing! It is a shield against civil liability, not criminal liability. If Facebook are aiding and abetting to profit from criminal fraud, Section 230 does not allow them to skate free, and so, it does not need to be changed.
If Section 230 were gone tomorrow, it would likely only be the Facebooks of the world who would survive, as only they could afford the lawyers necessary to fend off frivolous defamation lawsuits. No sane person would run a free web forum where they agree to be considered the “publisher” and therefore the liability for anything some rando posts.
Certainly I think there is a case that could be argued that when a web site says they explicitly screen and approve every piece of content, which as far as I know is what these ad tech companies claim to do with their ads, that it does create a duty of care which should not exist for UGC which is approved and moderated later. But I’m not currently aware of anyone arguing this point in court. Certainly that would be the thing to do first. Otherwise all these knee-jerk “reform S230” remarks are advocating for solving a cockroach infestation by dropping nuclear bombs on the city.
Simply Google “is social media a publisher” and you’ll learn it is not, not even close, by any legal definition.
Therefore you could save all your other questions and statements.
OK, fine. But they are also an ad network, which absolutely acts as a publisher. I think they should be liable for the revenue they bring in from knowingly fraudulent ads.
Legal definitions can should change in order to keep up with society and technology.
No where does it say they know which ads are fraudulent and continue that particular ad.
It’s nuts how many people simply don’t read or think.
Walmart can say, for example, they know they’ll lose 3B to theft. That doesn’t mean they are wanting it, or allowing it, or know exactly which item will be stolen when and where. It means, given their scale, and from evidence they gather after the fact, this is an estimate of what happens when they have so many locations.
Now go read carefully, and don’t make stuff up about what you read, and think about the facts presented.
You're just responding here by saying "by law they are not thing X" in response to people who are saying "maybe the law should be different because they sure act like thing X".
No. Did you read the law? You wanting them to be a publisher because you don’t understand the difference between a legal use of a word and a popular use of a word does not make them a publisher any more than the right to bear arms means I can go shirtless.
Publisher, in the legal sense, has a long history, and content providers are not that any more the the word arm in the legal sense means human arms.
But that legal meaning of the word can be changed by changing the laws. Seems that's what's under discussion here.
This sub thread literally starts with “how are they not a publisher?”, not with “we should change the legal definition of publisher.” As such, it would be reasonable for people to know the colloquial vague idea of “publisher” and the legal term are not identical.
When social media chooses what to display in a user’s feed—even if the content is 3P generated— then it starts to look an awful lot like a publisher. Would you consider a newspaper not to be a publisher of its own op-Ed page? How about the old Reader’s Digest?
So a comic book store, by choosing what to put in the front of a store, is a publisher. Me, by choosing what Christmas decorations to put out front, is a publisher.
I wish people would simply learn to read a little law instead of routinely not understanding simple concepts.
I am an attorney.
Your analogies don’t hold. There’s no act of content reproduction (the essence of publication), as there is with the examples I provided. DMCA is about copyrightable subject matter.
So how about you knock it off with the attitude?
Good, expert attorney. Then tell us: is Meta a publisher under the law? If not, why not?
I’m guessing Meta and the public both have attorneys, and I suspect all those attorneys also know the answer.
You make it sound like there's a cut and dry answer to this. There isn't. Moreover, not all kinds of content are alike. There's content that Meta itself produces, and there is content that 3Ps produce (UGC, or user-generated content), which is what Section 230(c)(1) of the CDA pertains to. (Apologies for mentioning the DMCA in my previous response, I erred there.)
It's an interesting question as to whether Meta's act of selective republication of others' content constitutes its own content. This matter hasn't been adjudicated; I expect it will be in the fullness of time.
Parties and their attorneys disagree on legal and factual questions all the time. Meta has a position; others may differ. These disagreements are why we have a dispute resolution system (i.e., the courts) in the first place.
You beat me to it.
I'd emphasize that the scummiest sites with zero moderation never needed Section 230! Section 230 is what allows you to have some moderation (e.g. banning spammers) without suddenly becoming entirely liable for anything that passes the filter.
Blindly reverting Section 230 means eliminating that moderate position, splintering sites into:
1. Ones that abandon moderation entirely in favor of chaos. Maybe you can salvage something by giving opt-in filtering tools to individuals, but you'll still have the problem of someone using your site to store ten terabytes of the Bee Movie.
2. Ones that demand participants sign a serious legal document promising to pay for any problems before they can submit anything.
3. Ones which remove almost all expressive ability, beyond narrow things like like/upvote features.
I don't think he is telling anything new.
I have a terrible idea: an ad blocker that only blocks AI generated ads. It submits the ad image/copy to Gemini and if it is not a fake product the ad is displayed. I'm confident that Gemini would do a pretty good job at identifying these scams and that the extension would demonstrate how easy it would be for Google to do it themselves. If they and their employees cared.
I could LLM this up but eh. It won't actually convince Googlers to do the right thing so it'll just stay a terrible idea.
It's not like that would save you from the scam ads. They were a problem before AI and if they see their AI ads blocked in large volume, they'll switch back to non-AI generated ads.
I can't remember the last time I saw an ad on instagram that wasn't some kind of scam.
The main issue is that most ads are scam anyways. Where do you draw the line?
The Gordon Ramsey pans are not considered scam, but they’re still highly priced garbage sold by a greatly misleading ad.
The Tai Chi thing is clearly a scam, but it’s lying just a little more than the pans ad, and pointing you to a definitely more predatory business.
But they are not fundamentally different…
The irony behind this article serving AI slop ads that are likely malicious.
When a business like meta turns to scummy/scammy revenue sources it signals that their core business has serious problems.
Makes me want to use Facebook and Instagram less. Their ads are infuriating.
How bad do you have to be so even Cuban says it's shit?
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