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Facebook fired an employee who was paid bribes to reactivate banned ad accounts
- annoyingnoob 7y agoI think you misspelled Facecancer.
- dang 7y agoPlease don't post unsubstantive comments here.
- brenden2 7y agoTo be fair, Facebook itself accepts bribes from spammers all the time in order to put ads in front of people who probably don't want to see them.
- davidw 7y agoI keep reporting a scammy outdoor gear site, and it keeps appearing in my FB ads. FB is a dumpster fire.
- koheripbal 7y agoIt's common for these tech companies to set different ethical standards for paying customers. ... as another example, Indeed does not action/review companies that have been flagged as having inappropriate postings (i. e. MLM scams) as long as they have actively billed job postings. This is evidenced by the fact that when such a company removes their automated payment and/or pauses all job listings, all the flags then get reviewed and actioned (speaking from personal experience - not MLM, but commission based job listings).
- cwkoss 7y agoI get ads for financial services on Facebook. All of them looks somewhere between low-quality and outright scams. Kind of depressing to think that a non-zero number of people are making decisions about financial management based on facebook ads.
- a0zU 7y agobuzzfeed news...
- ceejayoz 7y ago... is a legitimate journalistic organization that's been finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BuzzFeed_News https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BuzzFeed_News
- AmericanChopper 7y agoI hate this line of reasoning so much. It completely ignores how trust works. As an organisation, you cannot simultaneously build a reputation for worthless anti-journalistic click bait, and serious real journalism at the same time. It would be as if Facebook launched some pro-privacy NGO and then people like you went around saying everybody should absolutely take it seriously.
- FisDugthop 7y agoAnd yet this reasoning works for every newspaper with an editorial/opinion section: The opinion and editorial columns are not held to the same standard as the rest of the paper.
- ProAm 7y agoTo be far this is every news agency since the 1970's. It's just been scaled and personalized.
- briandear 7y agoLegitimate news organizations are neutral. Buzzfeed News wrote 65 positive stories about Obama, 35 neutral, and just 1 critical. How a “legitimate” news organization only had a single critical article on Obama out of 100 articles written can’t be considered “legitimate.” All legitimate news articles should be neutral and objective.
- toby- 7y ago
- unnouinceput 7y ago<Quote>: "“Holy shit lol,” said the partner. “Ya,” Burke replied, punctuating his message with the sack of money emoji.</Quote> Heh, amateurs. Let me tell you guys a story from my country, from 90's. So in those years cell phones started to become the norm. You know, those Nokia brick types (which had like 1 week of battery in them before requiring charging) but the service was like this. You would call your contact then around 4 or 5 rings will give you plenty of time to close the call, and after that a voice mail message would inform you the contact was not answering and inviting you to leave a message. Problem was that if you went that far, then you'd pay for those seconds when the automated voice mail be initiated just like if your contact would've answered. So far so good. But one CEO of a cell company decided he wanted money. So randomly, he would enable the automated voice mail message to enter just after one ring. Now, individually that was not expensive, around few cents for each subscriber, but on the whole network this would mean for every hour this trick was pulled the company would win one million dollars (yes, you read that correctly).
- sekh60 7y agoVery unethical, but pretty brilliant.
- Chinjut 7y agoThis trick would hit tens of millions of subscribers every hour? The number of subscribers and frequency of their calls required to achieve this in the 90s seems difficult.
- unnouinceput 7y agoEastern Europe country, so when we finally broke off Russia we went to implement very fast Western technologies. This also coupled with the fact that during Communism era fixed phone were something to wait years to be approved off made cell phone penetration extremely fast. People were starving for communication so it didn't matter that we barely had food, we still wanted cell phones. And not ten of millions, just ten is enough. Call your family and few friends under this trick and oops, you're good to pay an extra dollar at the end of the month.
- lwb 7y ago> Sen. Mark Warner of Virginia told BuzzFeed News that the revelation of a Facebook employee being bribed to reactivate scammy ads was further evidence of the unaccountability of platforms and the corruption endemic to digital advertising markets. I'm confused. If anything, this seems to me like evidence that Facebook is holding people accountable for violating regulations on the platform.
- sg47 7y agoIn this case accountability would have involved periodically reviewing and catching banned accounts that have been reviewed and making sure they had a valid reason to be revived.
- AngeloAnolin 7y agoI think this pertains to the fact of how easy it was for people / organizations to directly contact people inside Facebook to do things at their bidding. FB does hold their staff accountable but the Senator wants more safeguard so that it is very difficult for such an event to be carried out successfully.
- throwaway_tech 7y agoWhen it comes to corruption and being unaccountable...you must defer to the Senator, it is after all their very area of expertise. If there is one thing politicians know and understand it is the corruption endemic to big money accounts, back-door access and bribes...just look at all the Senators donors and public meetings with "constituents" in the capital building. Senator's Campaign Finance: https://www.opensecrets.org/members-of-congress/summary?cid=N00002097 https://www.opensecrets.org/members-of-congress/summary?cid=... Number 3 donor...Amazon.com. Yet, the Senator doesn't seem to concerned with Amazon's practices that include selling counterfeit products or prevalent paid and outright fake reviews.
- kevinh 7y agoThe article continues: > “For over four years, I have raised concerns to the [Federal Trade Commission] that behavioral advertising markets are rife with fraud – not just in the form of clickfraud but, exploiting the scale of large platforms, in scams and criminal schemes that directly exploit American consumers,” he said in a statement. “Because of Section 230, neither the victims of these schemes nor state [attorneys general] can seek to hold the platforms accountable for their continued facilitation of these frauds.” Which suggests that he does not want to rely solely on Facebook policing itself for accountability.
- y-c-o-m-b 7y agoI don't use Facebook, but I would think a good transparent way to deal with this is open a page to the public that lists the ads a company is running along with statistics like how many times the company has violated policies, how many ad runs they've accumulated and how many dollars have been spent to run those ads.
- wayoutthere 7y agoSo just for scale, a single ad campaign could have thousands of individual ads. Times a few dozen campaigns at a company. Times millions of buyers, many of whom buy through an ad agency or network reseller. The scale of this problem is too big for transparency. Hypertargeting of advertisements should just be illegal.
- jsonne 7y agoThey actually do have the first bit. Look up the "ads library" and you can see every ad a page is running presently.
- aberforth123 7y agoPff, what can we do to break the ad industry? It sucks on so many levels.
- wayoutthere 7y agoYou literally can't; advertising is a core requirement of capitalism. If you can't tell people about your product, you can't charge more for it.
- gilrain 7y agoSo, you can... you just have to break capitalism too.
- wayoutthere 7y agoNot a bad idea
- drdeca 7y agoBy "break the ad industry" I don't think they meant "make it so you can't inform others that you have a product that you are selling". Now, the following hypothetical is a rather stupid hypothetical, but imagine if the government made it so that, as part of jury duty, you had to select a couple categories of product, and be presented with a random selection of around 5 descriptions of products in each of those categories (companies could bid to have their product listed I guess) ( the descriptions would have to be straightforward descriptions of the product and optionally some of the ways in which it is demonstrably different from competition), and also, at the same time, banned banner ads on websites. This would be stupid and tyrannical, yes, but it seems to me like it would "break the ad industry" while also not really "doing away with capitalism". To be very very clear : I do not advocate implementing the policy that I just described; I think it would be a very bad policy.
- wayoutthere 7y agoThis doesn't break the ad industry at all, it just obfuscates the process. Like, how do you narrow the list of 300 watchmakers down to 5? How does one watchmaker establish a reputation to allow him to be successful that doesn't lead to recreating the ad industry? The only way to get rid of advertising is to just commoditize everything, which is what communism aims to do.
- tempsy 7y agoWill never not be surprised by how little people will accept to ruin their lives. $5k? Really?
- catalogia 7y agoThis morning I saw somebody riding their bicycle without a helmet. They could die like that, and for what? A moderate sensation of comfort? Obviously they perceived the risk as low.
- katbyte 7y agofwiw not all cultures look at bicycle helmets the same: https://www.treehugger.com/bikes/why-dutch-dont-wear-helmets.html https://www.treehugger.com/bikes/why-dutch-dont-wear-helmets...
- catalogia 7y agoFair enough. My point however is that risk taking is common in all walks of life. A facebook worker who accepts a $5k bribe doesn't think he's going to get caught and the cyclist thinks he won't hit his head.
- matkoniecz 7y agoNote that bicycle helmets are not very useful at improving outcomes. Especially for cycling within cities, MTB or something completely different is likely to have a different risks and helmets may be a clearly good idea there.
- catalogia 7y agoI hope that pedantry about cycling safety aside, my point is clear. Feel free to swap out "cycling without a helmet" for any other risky activity you might observe day to day if you pay attention to the world around you. Why do people break the speed limit on wet roads just to get home a minute sooner, when they could slide off the road into a ditch and never make it home at all? Obviously, because they think that won't happen.
- danso 7y agoOK it's not surprising that rogue insiders – whether it's a regular ads employee, manager, or a site-reliability engineer – can attempt this kind of tampering. It is surprising that FB – who, if anything, is excellent at data and tracking – seems to lack seemingly basic access controls and detection mechanism to prevent this. According to BuzzFeed, FB only launched an internal investigation after BF asked questions about this employee: > A company spokesperson confirmed that an unnamed employee was fired after inquiries from BuzzFeed News sparked an internal investigation. The employee in question was based in the company’s Austin office, according to information obtained by BuzzFeed News. The article doesn't say exactly [0], but potentially a BF reporter might have noticed that scammy ad accounts that BuzzFeed previously reported on [1] – which FB then banned in response – were inexplicably active again. But why doesn't FB have an internal flag/bit for these egregiously scammy ad accounts (and their unique identifiers) in their systems? A flag that would trigger an automated notice/audit when that account was reactivated for any reason, by any employee? [0] It's possible the article under discussion was completely sparked by insider leaks to the BF reporter, e.g. "chat messages obtained by BuzzFeed News". I'm just saying that it's possible that the rogue activity potentially seems to have been observable by any outsider, i.e. completely observable and preventable if Facebook had proper access control. [1] https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/craigsilverman/facebook-subscription-trap-free-trial-scam-ads-inc https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/craigsilverman/facebook...
- AJ007 7y agoRemember when Google got in trouble for helping advertisers sell illegal drugs and even Larry Page knew a what was going on? I doubt Facebook cares. https://www.wired.com/2013/05/google-pharma-whitaker-sting/ https://www.wired.com/2013/05/google-pharma-whitaker-sting/
- danso 7y agoActually this story did make me think about an even older article about Google [0]: in 2010, when a site reliability engineer was fired after allegedly spying on teens' Google accounts. At the time, it really underscored to me how much power – and potential to abuse it – that insider employees have. Particularly site reliability and security engineers, who inherently need to have this kind of power and access do do their jobs: > "If you're an SRE, for instance, on Gmail, you will have access to mailboxes because you may have to look into the databases," the former Google SRE—who did not work with Barksdale—explained to us by phone. "You'll need access to the storage mechanisms," he explained, pointing out that in order to determine the cause of a technical issue with Gmail, an SRE might have to access emails stored on Google's servers to see if data is corrupted. I'm assuming in the years since, Google's SRE have mechanisms in place to audit and log the use of sudo-level access and powers. Twitter, on the other hand, seems to not have implemented this, at least as of 2015 [0] I can imagine FB having decent auditing and logging when it comes to internal access of private data of user accounts. But not when it comes to ad accounts, considering the level of scammy activity these ad accounts had when BuzzFeed News reported on them [2] [0] https://gawker.com/5637234/gcreep-google-engineer-stalked-teens-spied-on-chats https://gawker.com/5637234/gcreep-google-engineer-stalked-te... [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21467921 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21467921 [2] https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/craigsilverman/facebook-subscription-trap-free-trial-scam-ads-inc https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/craigsilverman/facebook...
- HugoDaniel 7y agowas it zuckerberg ?
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- kls 7y agoIf they where making millions, then this guy sold himself cheap at 5K. He was literally the decision maker between them and millions of dollars. That is why they jumped at the retainer price. He could have hit them for 50k and they would not have blinked.
- inetknght 7y agoI don't think you understand how the court system in America works
- kls 7y agoI was not commenting on the morality of what the individual did. Rather that he was shitty at sales. I personally would not have done what he did and find it reprehensibly, I am fully aware of how the court systems work. The point of my post is how these people always seem to undersell their illicit services when said services are a rare commodity and are valuable to the purchaser. My comment was specifically about the seller of services not knowing how to price his market. The morality and legality issues have been covered in several other comments so I figured no need to beat that horse.
- rankingreborn 7y agoYou can get a new account for that price. There are businesses going bust all time, willing to sell their ad account. Also, he talks about spending millions, not making millions. On campaigns there is an ROI, he could be making 100K on 1mil spend, how can he afford to pay you half of it? In this case, you won't close a deal. He closed the deal, made money, lived fast and enjoyed.
- sp0dr 7y agoKnowing Facebook it seems like they would rather corner that market themselves.
- rntksi 7y agoWe run ads for small beauty clinics & spas that cannot afford their own staff to do that kind of work. This includes facebook ads which have high return value for the businesses. I cannot tell you the amount of frustrating time we had to spend to chase Facebook to stop banning us because of an algorithm that thinks the belly buttons and the ladies in our ads resemble adult ads (it's not in any way nsfw, it just shows more skin than usual because that gets interested clicks) Sometimes I wish there was someone to talk to at facebook to make the automated process less painful, but we are in an Asian country with no facebook representative.
- seibelj 7y agoThis is super common, I knew a guy who knew a guy who could get similar stuff done at another famous social network. A company I know got its short url because the employee snagged it from some nobody and gave it to the company. I don’t feel that this is illegal as it is private company that can do what it want, but a low employee doing this unilaterally is sketchy.
- henvic 7y agoIronically, since I interviewed for a Facebook position a year ago, I can't post my website link anymore (hosted on GitHub page - programming/photos, basically) there or on Instagram. It probably happened because I sent my link to too many friends too fast to ask for opinions, and Facebook marked it as spam. I tried to ask for help multiple times by using their 'review' feature, with no answer.
- randyrand 7y agoIf they paid facebook directly would it have still been considered a bribe?