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Meta has run hundreds of ads for cocaine, opioids and other drugs

171 points by cwwc 2y ago

adidas123 2y ago
[dead]
agata4151 2y ago
[flagged]
arilotter 2y ago
Anecdotally, I get Instagram ads for "buy mdma online" all day, every day.
- animal_spirits 2y ago
  I’ve continually gotten magic mushroom gummy advertisements
  - axoltl 2y ago
    These are likely for muscimol gummies as opposed to psylocybin gummies. Despite having psychoactive components muscimol containing mushrooms (Amanita Muscaria, etc.) are legal, as is muscimol itself.
    - jrflowers 2y ago
      A recent brand of gummies was found to have 4-ACO-DMT in them, which is a prodrug of psilocin. https://arstechnica.com/science/2024/07/diamond-shruumz-candies-suspected-of-causing-second-death-fda-reports/ https://arstechnica.com/science/2024/07/diamond-shruumz-cand...
      - lagniappe 2y ago
        >found to have 4-ACO-DMT in them that's a legal and unscheduled substance. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/O-Acetylpsilocin https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/O-Acetylpsilocin
        jrflowers 2y ago
        From that link, regarding legality in the US: > it would be considered akin to a Schedule I Controlled Substance under the Federal Analogue Act if sold for human consumption. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_Analogue_Act https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_Analogue_Act
        lagniappe 2y ago
        You won't find any of them are conspicuously sold for human consumption, it's easier to stamp "not for human consumption" on the packaging.
        jrflowers 2y ago
        The link I initially posted was about 4-aco-dmt being found in gummies and chocolate — types of candy. It came in packaging with recommended dosing on it. https://arstechnica.com/science/2024/07/diamond-shruumz-candies-suspected-of-causing-second-death-fda-reports/ https://arstechnica.com/science/2024/07/diamond-shruumz-cand... The brand’s website has dosing suggestions as well https://diamondshruumz.com/ https://diamondshruumz.com/
        Suppafly 2y ago
        >You won't find any of them are conspicuously sold for human consumption, it's easier to stamp "not for human consumption" on the packaging. That's not the get out jail free defense that idiots think that it is. Gummies aren't made and packaged and distributed for any other purpose than human consumption, judges aren't stupid.
      - Scoundreller 2y ago
        > Perhaps the most plausible possible cause identified so far is yet another compound identified by Diamond Shruumz itself. > In its recall notice, the company reported that third-party lab testing of some of its candies identified higher than normal amounts of muscimol, a psychoactive compound found in hallucinogenic Amanita mushrooms, including the iconic toadstool A. muscaria. > These mushrooms contain a combination of muscimol and the related ibotenic acid, both of which resemble neurotransmitters. > Together, they could cause the symptoms seen in the cases so far, including seizures, central nervous system depression (loss of consciousness, confusion, sleepiness), agitation, abnormal heart rates, hyper/hypotension, nausea, and vomiting. And in pharmaceutical manufacturing, diluting things is definitely a science. Gotta worry about demixing, adsorption, absorption, granulations, cracking or creaming of emulsions (if present), caking... lots of fun when you need to make something consistent at low concentrations.
- mewpmewp2 2y ago
  Just to make sure I won't get hit by any, what activities does one have to avoid doing in order to not get any of those?
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
kosolam 2y ago
Facebook is full with this shit. I deem them legally complicit in drug dealing/trafficking/whatnot
onemoresoop 2y ago
I reported some of those and got a response in return that I could block the item question but that it's basically green light by them, doesn't break their community standards or some wording like that. At this point I'm surprised there aren't more lawsuits coming up, this is egregious behavior that needs to be penalized fast.
- jldugger 2y ago
  This seems like the kind of thing that can be resolved by emailing a screenshot of that to zuck@fb.com with the head of the DEA on the CC list. I'm sure one of them will be happy to act.
  - onemoresoop 2y ago
    I don't care about a particular advertisement to do that, I'd rather Zuck gets slammed with a bigger lawsuit for allowing this to fester.
    - jldugger 2y ago
      I mean, the DEA's on the CC list for a reason.
freejazz 2y ago
Not a huge surprise considering their position on CP and the abusive conduct that occurs on their platforms.
lovethevoid 2y ago
Advertising networks get away with so much, it's quite ridiculous. The same company that will ban your account for posting about such content, will regularly run ads about such content. Worse, there's nothing you can do about it except run ad blockers (which they in turn will use various measures as punishment for you doing so). Guess we didn't learn anything from Cambridge Analytica.
- 01HNNWZ0MV43FF 2y ago
  I'm trying to get more into self hosting and things like federation that can allow technical people to be admins of low-maintenance services for their friends and family. It's a slow push but it's gonna happen. Microtransactions are stuck in deployment hell, advertisements are a deal with the devil, and this is the only third option I know of
  - immibis 2y ago
    I don't think widespread self-hosting will ever be easy enough, since anything that makes it easy enough for anyone to do necessarily has as much control over your account as Elon Musk does. Plus it costs a few bucks a month. But what might be possible is widespread co-op-hosting - run one for your whole family or friend group.
  - pseudocomposer 2y ago
    You might be interested in my AGPL federated social network, Jonline, which I've built specifically for this purpose. Source is at https://github.com/JonLatane/jonline https://github.com/JonLatane/jonline, and I have a few instances up at https://jonline.io https://jonline.io ("flagship"/demo server), https://bullcity.social https://bullcity.social (Durham, NC community), and https://oakcity.social https://oakcity.social (Raleigh, NC community). It's a pure Rust server so it's extremely lightweight to self-host compared to things like Mastodon, plus it supports events (with iCal/Google Calendar export). I'm also happy to host an instance on my DigitalOcean Kubernetes cluster for anyone interested and integrate it into my CI/CD pipeline, which is an option on my GitHub sponsors page (and I'm working on a load balancer which should eventually bring the cost of this down as well).
vondur 2y ago
As many others have stated, I've reported all kinds of sketchy drug sales to FaceBook and been told they won't do anything about it. I'd love to see them raked over the coals for this.
annexrichmond 2y ago
There are many ads on Instagram that makes me wonder how this is legal; for example, I saw a fake site that pretended to be Marine Layer where the clothes were suspiciously cheap. I reported the ad, but they dismissed it. And don't get me started on all the "mushroom alternative", "caffeine alternative", drugs. And it's like everyone and their grandmother has their own Viagra or Hair Loss drug company now Infomercials for millennials, I suppose.
- 01HNNWZ0MV43FF 2y ago
  I routinely see ads for scams on YouTube and report them and never hear back. Stuff like "a 19 year old invented this that saves you a hundred bucks on your power bill but Big electricity is suppressing it" Just the most bullshit claims over stock footage, things I saw debunked on Snopes 20 years ago as a literal child. It's disappointing
  - kjkjadksj 2y ago
    Its not just youtube. I unsubscribed from LA times after their email newsletter had one too many "Doctors don't want you to know about this!!!!" esque ads. Pure poison marketing. I can't believe people greenlight this crap to run on their platform. Maybe they already fired who greenlights ads.
    - bediger4000 2y ago
      For me Washington Post and Daily Beast newsletters were filled with ads for "Grunt Style" brand qanon clothing, sometimes all 5 or 6 of the ads in a given newsletter email. I ended up DNS blackholing some FQDNs, but I suspect that Grunt Style was targeting ads to "own libs".
  - nradov 2y ago
    There's a sucker born every minute. I suppose that when Googlers look at their huge paychecks it's easy to rationalize building tools that help scammers steal from suckers. From a legal standpoint they have plausible deniability but most YouTube advertising is just so slimy, like even more unethical than TV infomercials.
mfkp 2y ago
https://archive.md/D4EnE https://archive.md/D4EnE edit: hm, maybe this isn't working for the full articles on WSJ anymore...
- mgh2 2y ago
  Yeah, they don't anymore Previous: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41115602 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41115602
- BillSaysThis 2y ago
  Your archive.md link works for me.
  - mfkp 2y ago
    Interesting, it updated now with the whole article. Earlier it was just the first 2 paragraph preview.
atonse 2y ago
There's just no excuse for this anymore – why don't they apply their own state-of-the-art LLMs to analyze these and flag the adds as pushing potentially illegal substances? Because as it's painfully obvious now, Meta doesn't care, they're happy to take the money.
- dragontamer 2y ago
  LLMs create text. They don't understand them in the traditional sense. LLMs are backwards. Much like how Stable Diffusion is text-to-image, not image-to-text. You need to rework the neural network entirely to do what you're asking. ------- Its a neat trick that you can train LLMs to perhaps, ingest "text" followed by a question (ex: "Is the previous paragraph spam?"), and then the text-generator generates a yes-or-no response that is somewhat pleasing. But its not quite the same as what you're asking for.
  - reaperman 2y ago
    If I understand correctly, every LLM has an embedding function which can reduce a block of text to a coordinate in high-dimensional space. That coordinate can be used to determine how likely something is to be talking about selling illegal drugs and automatically flag posts for manual review. But given that the problem seems to be in the "manual review" because users constantly report these and get brushed off, that "neat trick" you wrote about seems like it could really help explain to manual reviewers exactly why a particular ad violate's Meta's content guidelines.
    - dragontamer 2y ago
      > If I understand correctly, every LLM has an embedding function which can reduce a block of text to a coordinate in high-dimensional space. That coordinate can be used to determine how likely something is to be talking about selling illegal drugs and automatically flag posts for manual review. Sounds like Word2Vec, which isn't necessarily an incompatible technique. I'm not exactly on the cutting edge of Language Models here. I'm sure the information is sitting in the "hidden layer" somewhere. But LLMs have very many hidden layers. Its not something that a programmer can just "pluck" out of the network.
thaumasiotes 2y ago
Is "hundreds" supposed to be a large amount? How many ads has Facebook run for Mountain Dew?
- xipho 2y ago
  This. They message to billions, every what, hour, and get how many ad contracts every minute? If the problem really is this order of magnitude they are doing an incredible job, aren't they?
  - jaynetics 2y ago
    Do you people have FB accounts? Drug sales really make up a notable portion of ad slots recently.
- barbazoo 2y ago
  It's also only been one people they've promoted genocide against, should still probably care about it. https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2022/09/myanmar-facebooks-systems-promoted-violence-against-rohingya-meta-owes-reparations-new-report/ https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2022/09/myanmar-faceb...
  - thaumasiotes 2y ago
    How did they promote it?
    - barbazoo 2y ago
      Check out the link it goes into it a little bit.
newsclues 2y ago
Linked to this https://www.404media.co/unlocked4life-instagram-scam-no-jumper/ https://www.404media.co/unlocked4life-instagram-scam-no-jump... imo
- janalsncm 2y ago
  Weird situation. I wonder how he is locking and unlocking accounts. Maybe he knows someone who works at IG.
tamiral 2y ago
did 404media do an expose story on this ? I swear Meta will allow anything for money
- immibis 2y ago
  You either do anything for money, or you are not a household name.
zht 2y ago
I've seen many reels for either borderline illegal activity or outright illegal activity -MLMs -"faceless marketing" -"digital marketing" courses -business loan scams -counterfeit luxury goods -extortion
- raybb 2y ago
  Is faceless marketing (borderline) illegal?
  - Arrath 2y ago
    What even is faceless marketing?
    - immibis 2y ago
      Apparently it is, literally - get this - marketing without putting your face in from of a camera. Because we all know that was the only way to do marketing before. All that juice from just one bag of oranges!
      - Arrath 2y ago
        [flagged]
CoastalCoder 2y ago
[deleted]
- singleshot_ 2y ago
  Prosecutors have a professional responsibility only to bring a case that has a substantial likelihood of a conviction.
  - RIMR 2y ago
    When you're Ross Ulbricht (not rich) you get life without parole. When you're Mark Zuckerberg ($166B) "there isn't a substantial likelihood of conviction". You're not wrong, but I wouldn't call maintaining a two-tier justice system a prosecutor's "professional responsibility".
    - deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
- RIMR 2y ago
  Because there is absolutely zero evidence that there are drugs being physically trafficked at Meta's offices? What should happen is that a court should be able to drag responsible executives in front of a judge, issue massive fines for what has already happened, and order that Meta stop running ads until they can present an agreeable plan to prevent these kinds of ads from running. Then they should be under a consent degree, and subject to regular government inspection, and if the agreed upon mitigation plan isn't being followed and these kinds of ads are running again, the same executives should be dragged back in front of court, Meta should be prohibited from running ads for months as a punishment, and to force them back to the drawing board to fix the issue permanently, and the responsible executives should be given significant personal fines, and a short jail sentence for violating court orders. Rinse and repeat until either Meta is permanently barred from running ads, putting them out of business, and/or the responsible executives (including the CEO if applicable) have enough strikes that they get a decade or so in prison to make an example of what happens when you refuse to operate a business within the law and kill people with black market drugs.
grecy 2y ago
I find it really interesting Facebook collect money from someone to run these ads, and they can continue to do that without getting into legal trouble. When I moved countries it took 6 months for Facebook to stop showing me ads for the old country which were very clearly only supposed to be shown to people in that country. Again, people are paying money to run these ads and Facebook are clearly showing them to the wrong people.
- Muromec 2y ago
  They still get the money in both cases. Why would they care?
  - grecy 2y ago
    Both are illegal. One is taking money to advertise illegal substances, the other is taking money for a service and then not delivering that service.
vjulian 2y ago
Most of what’s being discussed here is naturally subjective views on propriety. Not many years ago, God forbid should one see an ad for cannabis. Even what is and is not considered a scam is quite subjective, is it not? To what extent are these platforms themselves legalised scams? Or the oh-wow-look-what-we-found false editorial strategy that most rags market.
- jddj 2y ago
  > what is and is not a scam is quite subjective It can be, and it can also be quite objective. There are ads on there for ecommerce shops which clone the websites of known brands, with the exact logos and colours and names of those brands but which don't actually have anything to do with those brands. These websites ask for your credit card number to purchase items which are advertised significantly below the retail price. I don't know what they do with the credit card number once they have it, but I can guess.
  - vjulian 2y ago
    I agree, and that would be a smaller, less interesting story for the newspaper.
  - rightbyte 2y ago
    The insidious scam would be to ask significantly above retail price and drop ship it to you.
- photonthug 2y ago
  Setting aside the legality and free speech philosophizing and corporate apologism, don’t you find it tasteless, doesn’t it make you angry that there’s a hot granny-sex prostitution / blackmail outfit that’s taken over your local library? It used to be a nice place man. I know we can still check out the books but after 4 hours of abusive conditioning where they pin your eyeballs open and and jab the monitoring device into your brain stem who’s got the energy left to read anything anyway
righthand 2y ago
Are drug ads bad because of the war on drugs? Are they bad because we won’t let tobacco make ads? The only way this seems shockingly bad is that you can’t actually control what you see as a user of these ad-supported services or if you support the war on drugs.
- nom 2y ago
  [flagged]
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
- xigoi 2y ago
  I came to this comment section expecting someone to argue that aykshually drugs are good. Never disappointed.
  - righthand 2y ago
    I’m arguing that drugs are good? Doesn’t take much to get you going.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
hnpolicestate 2y ago
The one time Meta does something good the Feds and WSJ get upset. I wish Meta had a back pages and was more like Craiglist circa 2005. In the puritanical West, selling your private data to the government is good, buying drugs from a rando on Instagram is bad. Stifling.
- airstrike 2y ago
  > buying drugs from a rando on Instagram is bad no, selling drugs is illegal
aeturnum 2y ago
This is part of a larger pattern for Facebook and other "large scale" advertisers where it's clear they are breaking laws at some rate and are protected from paying a real consequence by the cost of discovering the exact rate of misbehavior. Facebook recently settled a lawsuit related to racially discriminating in housing ads (a federal crime)[1]. I suspect this will get added to the pile of illegal services Facebook provides but argues it shouldn't be held responsible for providing. This is, I think, the real moral hazard you saw back in the 2007 financial crisis: companies can reach a scale where it's very costly to definitively assess who is to blame for crimes and can therefor commit any profitable crime up to a certain threshold. It both makes a mockery of the rule of law as a concept (along with many other things in the US legal system) and is an enormous competitive advantage for large companies. I'd include Uber's grey area stalking[2] and the eBay stalking campaign[3] in this category. [1] https://www.cnbc.com/2022/06/21/doj-settles-with-facebook-over-allegedly-discriminatory-housing-ads.html https://www.cnbc.com/2022/06/21/doj-settles-with-facebook-ov... [2] https://www.theverge.com/2016/7/10/12127638/uber-ergo-investigation-lawsuit-fraud-travis-kalanick https://www.theverge.com/2016/7/10/12127638/uber-ergo-invest... [3] https://www.cbsnews.com/news/feds-charge-ebay-stalking-scandal-ina-david-steiner/ https://www.cbsnews.com/news/feds-charge-ebay-stalking-scand...
- ricardo81 2y ago
  It does seem like many of the web scale FAANG's had no scaling solution. Facebook and Google in particular are egregious beyond their marketing. e.g. YouTube, how much copyrighted content does G profit off from. And then the 100 variations that slip the 'copyright algo.' I see stuff on there that as a UK TV license payer I've already paid for, and then have to suffer ads. They could not give a hoot.
  - nadermx 2y ago
    YouTube is probably a bad example in terms of copyright. They in fact have the most restrictive system of reuse of others work in your work, as a large portion of the videos that are auto struck would probably err more on fair use.
deathanatos 2y ago
YouTube has been hitting me up with "ads" which are Ethereum scams¹ recently. Of what I've reported, 60% are still up. Some of these were reported in March. Recently I also got an "ad" for what was almost certainly Sovereign Citizen propaganda, which … wow, I didn't even know they ran YT ads?² Today's ads (since I checked just to see for this comment) is all normal stuff. ¹they allege to have written an "arbitrage" trading bot with ChatGPT, usually, claiming it earns them passive income of varying amounts, but often on the order of $1M USD/y. As the saying goes, if it sounds too good to be true, it probably is. The code actually just steals your money. ²(not that I really think SCs are a formal collective of sorts, I just … don't really think that would be a thing I'd see.)
- realusername 2y ago
  On my phone, only about half of the Youtube ads look legal. They have it all: crypto scams, ponzi schemes, fake mobile games, get quick rich schemes... Some stuff can always slip through but to have a result like this, there's a systemic lack of checks at Google.
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  - warkdarrior 2y ago
    So your solution is for YT/Google/Meta to check the code, operations, finances, and business models of every advertiser that comes to them? Even if YT/Google/Meta could do this at scale, do you want them to have that power?
    - segasaturn 2y ago
      If Google/Meta/Youtube want to be multi-trillion dollar monopolies that have invaded every aspect of our lives then there should be some very basic corporate responsibility that comes with that power, even if its difficult and maybe even costs them a little bit of money. Lately it seems like the phrase has been inverted to "with great power comes less responsibility". If your small local TV station ran ads for cocaine and synthetic opioids nobody would be making these kinds of excuses.
yieldcrv 2y ago
I'm into the federal investigation I'm actually really glad that some companies like this are not really beholden to advertisers anymore. I don't like how that influences social norms per country outside of the legal system, based on what advertisers believe. I like that there is no collective voice possible that could get enough advertisers to leave Meta over disagreeing with a Meta practice. I'm into lawsuits from private persons and the government. Just not social mobs.
meroes 2y ago
I've seen a lot of responses saying prosecutors won't go after Meta because of a professional responsibility for winning at trial. Well, what about cops+feds civil asset forfeiture-ing their servers and offices?
- throwup238 2y ago
  > Well, what about cops+feds civil asset forfeiture-ing their servers and offices? Meta's lawyers would have the forfeiture overturned by a judge before the cops have even finished their paperwork for the seizure. Civil asset forfeiture is only really a weapon against convicted criminals and people who can't afford to defend themselves.
  - meroes 2y ago
    They can prove in civil court standards their severs weren’t part of drug dealing? Because that’s the standard when a person gets pulled over and the cops->feds take their cash without any criminal charges.
    - throwup238 2y ago
      They won’t have to prove anything. Cops pull people over and take their money assuming the person can’t or won’t defend themselves because it’s too expensive or time consuming. I know someone who has had actual drug money seized in California and it took them less than a month to get it back by court order because they knew a lawyer specializing in those cases. There are a lot of judges that don’t take kindly to asset forfeiture without a conviction and a legit corporation like Meta with a big legal team would have their stuff back by the weekend.
brap 2y ago
My favorite Meta ad that I keep getting is a deepfake video of Elon Musk saying he will be handing out free money for “Neuralink AI” to the first people who will invest. They’re saying thousands of dollars PER WEEK are guaranteed! Nice! And I just got the same exact scam on FB, but this time they used a deepfake video of my country’s president, saying they’re working with Elon Musk to give money to all citizens. Yay!
zoklet-enjoyer 2y ago
I've been getting a lot of these and reporting them all. They never take them down. It really surprised me at first because I ran a CBD business from 2019 to 2021 and they refused to run my ads even though it was legal. Same thing with Google. Google really screwed me over because I had my ads running for a bit and then they stopped them because it went against their rules for hemp/CBD products. Eventually they changed the rules and allowed those ads. So they started running my ads again but I didn't get a notification until my $300 bill came. And this was after I had already shut down my business. Of course I couldn't get a hold of a real person and I paid the bill because I didn't want my account to get banned.
whatamidoingyo 2y ago
I've been seeing "AI" apps which offer to take a pic/vid you upload and make it a nude. These ads often have nudity in them, which is wild. Likewise, I saw some ads seriously offering drugs. I reported them and got a reply from Facebook: "We found this post does not go against our community guidelines"???
mrinfinitiesx 2y ago
https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/companies/meta-has-run-hundreds-of-ads-for-cocaine-opioids-and-other-drugs/ar-BB1qWmQH https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/companies/meta-has-run-hundr...
lacoolj 2y ago
Anyone know if section 203 would cover this?
2OEH8eoCRo0 2y ago
Gotta love that Section 230 immunity!
- barbazoo 2y ago
  That's about not being liable for what users of their service publish I believe, not what's happening here.
  - 2OEH8eoCRo0 2y ago
    Advertisers are users.
jklinger410 2y ago
Wow this is terrible! Are you saying someone could buy these drugs over the counter, with regular currency, not on the dark web? Can someone share these ads with me so I could check them out? Just purely out of my own concern? Thanks
- sprayk 2y ago
  I never ged ads for "real" drugs, just the normal OTC/prescription stuff and occasionally some legal analogues (non-psilocybin mushroom gummies come to mind). Very curious what they look like as well and what their sites say about the purchase process (what forms of payment do they accept, how do they ship, etc).
  - Suppafly 2y ago
    I'm pretty sure I've seen some for actual psilocybin before. I've seen some for switchblades too, which are illegal a bunch of places, but they at least drum up interest by pretending it's a switchblade spoon and then when you click to their site they are like "it's not a spoon", which is annoying because all of the comments on the facebook side are people saying they actually wanted a switchblade spoon.
m2f2 2y ago
And counterfeit number plates, and no takedown as everything is OK apparently
PaulHoule 2y ago
... and in the meantime Meta won't let me create an Instagram account from either my home or work computer. I have very little history w/ either since I deleted my Facebook account in 2016 but started a new one to use with an Oculus VR headset. Yes I have run a webcrawler at home but never against Meta properties and I don't believe I've ever made trouble of any kind for Meta. I badly want to support a friend's social media marketing efforts and it's just ridiculous that I'll probably have to create an account with false information despite me sending multiple emails to Facebook asking if they can clear whatever flag is on my account and/or IP addresses.
galdosdi 2y ago
World's easiest problem to solve if we just get the political will to do so: Pass a law requiring a human being to sign off in "writing" (can be eSigned through an internal moderation platform) on any ad that will be run that the platform will profit from and that will be pushed to users by choice of the platform as opposed to request by the user. This human serves as an agent who will be liable along with their firm if there are any illegal issues that should have been obvious to a "reasonable person" reviewing the ad. Require anyone doing this job to be supervised by a licensed attorney, who must document their hiring and supervision practices and can be disbarred for failing to run a reasonably tight ship. Problem solved. Bam. So easy. It is not fair that platforms get to pretend that being able to automate running ads means they have no responsibility for their choices. It's like saying you can't murder with a handgun, but if you set up an automated machine gun turret, now it's OK.
- waveBidder 2y ago
  > It's like saying you can't murder with a handgun, but if you set up an automated machine gun turret, now it's OK. This is a great analogy. You can't actually afford to run this at scale legally? Too bad.
- toast0 2y ago
  I don't think it's actually that easy. In the US, we have Section 230[1], which says > No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider. Seems to me, that says if you have a problem with the advertisement, you need to go to the source, not the ad network. You're proposing an exception for advertisement, which is reasonable, but you've got to define advertisement. It's not just money for distribution; I'm not an advertiser just because I pay to use a forum, which is money for distribution. Section 230 isn't some immutable force, so yes, political force is all that's needed, but it's been the norm since 1996, and has been enabling ad networks to show ads without regard to their content since 1997 [2]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Section_230 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Section_230 [2] https://www.eff.org/files/zeran-v-aol.pdf https://www.eff.org/files/zeran-v-aol.pdf
RomanPushkin 2y ago
> “DMT,” a psychedelic drug. I would argue that. It's probably the least offensive thing, compared to alcohol you can buy everywhere. DMT and other entheogens are far less harmful than alcoholic drinks available. It's confirmed by many academic papers, and DMT is not something people use for recreational purposes. Moreover, some of these "psychedelic drugs" are used by people who have serious illness, wether it is life-threatening like cancer, or all kinds of PTSDs. It is very well known that these "drugs" help to prevent suicides, and very often it makes people's lives less miserable. While I agree with the narrative, and totally against unregulated drug sale, I can't say WSJ put a lot of thought into the article posting a picture of DMT powder as the main evidence to make entire article look more scary. Average Trader Joe's with vodka looks many times scarier to me.
- dzjkb 2y ago
  I totally agree, but why do you think people don't use DMT recreationally?
  - squidsoup 2y ago
    Because experiencing death is not a recreational activity.
    - pvarangot 2y ago
      I mean, not with that attitude
  - RomanPushkin 2y ago
    There is no euphoric effect or any other effect that makes it recreational. It's more of a self-reflection tool that helps to breakthrough into the perception of things that are so much different. And it helps to break bad habits actually: alcohol, tobacco, being aggressive, etc. Also, because it's not euphoric, it is not addictive as other drugs (read: alcohol and above).
    - Suppafly 2y ago
jddj 2y ago
Is the garbage floating to the top / are the filters being relaxed because regular advertising is slipping?
joeytuk 2y ago
What's worse is that Meta representatives stand up in front of lawmakers and supply information that is false. I demonstrated the apparent untruthfulness in their claims about fraud here and then interviewed LLaMa about it :-) https://blog.aviel.tech/Meta-s-LLaMa-AI-LLaMbasts-Meta-for-failing-to-stop-scams-6d22ed80edaf4fdb8025018e14cd30fe https://blog.aviel.tech/Meta-s-LLaMa-AI-LLaMbasts-Meta-for-f...
xyst 2y ago
How does one get these ads anyways? Search history of “drug rehab” or “drug overdose”? If you are addicted to heroin, cocaine, or other opioids (fentanyl), these ads are a test of your resolve. Also Facebook Ads are absolutely predatory.
neals 2y ago
That's amazing news! I love cocaïne, opioids and other drugs!
Teever 2y ago
I hate this. I used to run a business in Canada that sold grow equipment and our primary customer base was marijuana growers. When legalization came we started running advertisements for our shop on facebook. Got our hand slapped really hard, really fast and our advertising account banned. A few months later I see advertisements for chocolates with psilocybin mushrooms in them. Mushrooms remain illegal in Canada. The ads continued for several months.
- standardUser 2y ago
  Every single thing about the drug war is anathema to a just and rational society. Even those who don't care about justice or rationality must care that, in exchange for the billions of dollars spent and the extreme loss to personal liberty, drugs have only become more potent, more readily available and much cheaper. I find myself developing an inability to respect people who believe we should stay the course despite the overwhelming evidence that the drug war is beyond lost, and always has been.
surfingdino 2y ago
That's a bit desperate.
snowpid 2y ago
On hN user to claim that is impossible to forbid meta to spread these ads. Its verboten in the EU https://commission.europa.eu/strategy-and-policy/priorities-2019-2024/europe-fit-digital-age/digital-services-act/europe-fit-digital-age-new-online-rules-platforms_en https://commission.europa.eu/strategy-and-policy/priorities-... You are welcome.
kazinator 2y ago
Who cares. If the shit were decriminalized, like it should be, they would be ads.
Ajedi32 2y ago
Merely _hundreds_? At Facebook's scale that seems like a really low number, no? Like, even if they were doing manual review of every single ad (which they probably aren't) I'd expect at least a few to slip through merely due to laziness or incompetence on the part of the reviewers, wouldn't you?
- rstuart4133 2y ago
  The headline "Facebook's ad filtering is so good it only lets 0.0000001% bad add through" doesn't sounds like good click bait to me, despite it being an impressive achievement if true. So here we are. Facebook has about 3 billion daily users. I expect each will see many ads - probably 10 or more. But if we assume it's just one, 100 displayed in a single day would give you 0.0000001%. The study didn't look at one day of course - the observation period was over 100 days.
andrei_says_ 2y ago
And guns.
bryan_w 2y ago
The timing of these kind of stories should make people curious
agata4151 2y ago
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deleted 2y ago
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devvvvvvv 2y ago
Why does Section 230 not apply to advertisements as it does to comments, videos, etc? The ads are user generated content.
nurettin 2y ago
This is the reason I gave up on google ads for my android apps back in 2015. I turned off all 18+ content and it kept on showing sex and gambling ads to users. The advertisers probably categorized themselves as entertainment and didn't check the correct boxes and I couldn't be bothered hunting all of them.
Andrewmargaret 2y ago
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amadheaton66 2y ago
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171 points by cwwc 2y ago

adidas123 2y ago

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agata4151 2y ago

[flagged]

arilotter 2y ago

Anecdotally, I get Instagram ads for "buy mdma online" all day, every day.

animal_spirits 2y ago
I’ve continually gotten magic mushroom gummy advertisements
- axoltl 2y ago
  These are likely for muscimol gummies as opposed to psylocybin gummies. Despite having psychoactive components muscimol containing mushrooms (Amanita Muscaria, etc.) are legal, as is muscimol itself.
  - jrflowers 2y ago
    A recent brand of gummies was found to have 4-ACO-DMT in them, which is a prodrug of psilocin. https://arstechnica.com/science/2024/07/diamond-shruumz-candies-suspected-of-causing-second-death-fda-reports/ https://arstechnica.com/science/2024/07/diamond-shruumz-cand...
    - lagniappe 2y ago
      >found to have 4-ACO-DMT in them that's a legal and unscheduled substance. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/O-Acetylpsilocin https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/O-Acetylpsilocin
      - jrflowers 2y ago
        From that link, regarding legality in the US: > it would be considered akin to a Schedule I Controlled Substance under the Federal Analogue Act if sold for human consumption. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_Analogue_Act https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_Analogue_Act
        lagniappe 2y ago
        You won't find any of them are conspicuously sold for human consumption, it's easier to stamp "not for human consumption" on the packaging.
        jrflowers 2y ago
        The link I initially posted was about 4-aco-dmt being found in gummies and chocolate — types of candy. It came in packaging with recommended dosing on it. https://arstechnica.com/science/2024/07/diamond-shruumz-candies-suspected-of-causing-second-death-fda-reports/ https://arstechnica.com/science/2024/07/diamond-shruumz-cand... The brand’s website has dosing suggestions as well https://diamondshruumz.com/ https://diamondshruumz.com/
        Suppafly 2y ago
        >You won't find any of them are conspicuously sold for human consumption, it's easier to stamp "not for human consumption" on the packaging. That's not the get out jail free defense that idiots think that it is. Gummies aren't made and packaged and distributed for any other purpose than human consumption, judges aren't stupid.
    - Scoundreller 2y ago
      > Perhaps the most plausible possible cause identified so far is yet another compound identified by Diamond Shruumz itself. > In its recall notice, the company reported that third-party lab testing of some of its candies identified higher than normal amounts of muscimol, a psychoactive compound found in hallucinogenic Amanita mushrooms, including the iconic toadstool A. muscaria. > These mushrooms contain a combination of muscimol and the related ibotenic acid, both of which resemble neurotransmitters. > Together, they could cause the symptoms seen in the cases so far, including seizures, central nervous system depression (loss of consciousness, confusion, sleepiness), agitation, abnormal heart rates, hyper/hypotension, nausea, and vomiting. And in pharmaceutical manufacturing, diluting things is definitely a science. Gotta worry about demixing, adsorption, absorption, granulations, cracking or creaming of emulsions (if present), caking... lots of fun when you need to make something consistent at low concentrations.
mewpmewp2 2y ago
Just to make sure I won't get hit by any, what activities does one have to avoid doing in order to not get any of those?
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]

kosolam 2y ago

Facebook is full with this shit. I deem them legally complicit in drug dealing/trafficking/whatnot

onemoresoop 2y ago

I reported some of those and got a response in return that I could block the item question but that it's basically green light by them, doesn't break their community standards or some wording like that. At this point I'm surprised there aren't more lawsuits coming up, this is egregious behavior that needs to be penalized fast.

jldugger 2y ago
This seems like the kind of thing that can be resolved by emailing a screenshot of that to zuck@fb.com with the head of the DEA on the CC list. I'm sure one of them will be happy to act.
- onemoresoop 2y ago
  I don't care about a particular advertisement to do that, I'd rather Zuck gets slammed with a bigger lawsuit for allowing this to fester.
  - jldugger 2y ago
    I mean, the DEA's on the CC list for a reason.

freejazz 2y ago

Not a huge surprise considering their position on CP and the abusive conduct that occurs on their platforms.

lovethevoid 2y ago

Advertising networks get away with so much, it's quite ridiculous. The same company that will ban your account for posting about such content, will regularly run ads about such content. Worse, there's nothing you can do about it except run ad blockers (which they in turn will use various measures as punishment for you doing so). Guess we didn't learn anything from Cambridge Analytica.

01HNNWZ0MV43FF 2y ago
I'm trying to get more into self hosting and things like federation that can allow technical people to be admins of low-maintenance services for their friends and family. It's a slow push but it's gonna happen. Microtransactions are stuck in deployment hell, advertisements are a deal with the devil, and this is the only third option I know of
- immibis 2y ago
  I don't think widespread self-hosting will ever be easy enough, since anything that makes it easy enough for anyone to do necessarily has as much control over your account as Elon Musk does. Plus it costs a few bucks a month. But what might be possible is widespread co-op-hosting - run one for your whole family or friend group.
- pseudocomposer 2y ago
  You might be interested in my AGPL federated social network, Jonline, which I've built specifically for this purpose. Source is at https://github.com/JonLatane/jonline https://github.com/JonLatane/jonline, and I have a few instances up at https://jonline.io https://jonline.io ("flagship"/demo server), https://bullcity.social https://bullcity.social (Durham, NC community), and https://oakcity.social https://oakcity.social (Raleigh, NC community). It's a pure Rust server so it's extremely lightweight to self-host compared to things like Mastodon, plus it supports events (with iCal/Google Calendar export). I'm also happy to host an instance on my DigitalOcean Kubernetes cluster for anyone interested and integrate it into my CI/CD pipeline, which is an option on my GitHub sponsors page (and I'm working on a load balancer which should eventually bring the cost of this down as well).

vondur 2y ago

As many others have stated, I've reported all kinds of sketchy drug sales to FaceBook and been told they won't do anything about it. I'd love to see them raked over the coals for this.

annexrichmond 2y ago

There are many ads on Instagram that makes me wonder how this is legal; for example, I saw a fake site that pretended to be Marine Layer where the clothes were suspiciously cheap. I reported the ad, but they dismissed it. And don't get me started on all the "mushroom alternative", "caffeine alternative", drugs. And it's like everyone and their grandmother has their own Viagra or Hair Loss drug company now Infomercials for millennials, I suppose.

01HNNWZ0MV43FF 2y ago
I routinely see ads for scams on YouTube and report them and never hear back. Stuff like "a 19 year old invented this that saves you a hundred bucks on your power bill but Big electricity is suppressing it" Just the most bullshit claims over stock footage, things I saw debunked on Snopes 20 years ago as a literal child. It's disappointing
- kjkjadksj 2y ago
  Its not just youtube. I unsubscribed from LA times after their email newsletter had one too many "Doctors don't want you to know about this!!!!" esque ads. Pure poison marketing. I can't believe people greenlight this crap to run on their platform. Maybe they already fired who greenlights ads.
  - bediger4000 2y ago
    For me Washington Post and Daily Beast newsletters were filled with ads for "Grunt Style" brand qanon clothing, sometimes all 5 or 6 of the ads in a given newsletter email. I ended up DNS blackholing some FQDNs, but I suspect that Grunt Style was targeting ads to "own libs".
- nradov 2y ago
  There's a sucker born every minute. I suppose that when Googlers look at their huge paychecks it's easy to rationalize building tools that help scammers steal from suckers. From a legal standpoint they have plausible deniability but most YouTube advertising is just so slimy, like even more unethical than TV infomercials.

mfkp 2y ago

https://archive.md/D4EnE https://archive.md/D4EnE edit: hm, maybe this isn't working for the full articles on WSJ anymore...

mgh2 2y ago
Yeah, they don't anymore Previous: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41115602 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41115602
BillSaysThis 2y ago
Your archive.md link works for me.
- mfkp 2y ago
  Interesting, it updated now with the whole article. Earlier it was just the first 2 paragraph preview.

atonse 2y ago

There's just no excuse for this anymore – why don't they apply their own state-of-the-art LLMs to analyze these and flag the adds as pushing potentially illegal substances? Because as it's painfully obvious now, Meta doesn't care, they're happy to take the money.

dragontamer 2y ago
LLMs create text. They don't understand them in the traditional sense. LLMs are backwards. Much like how Stable Diffusion is text-to-image, not image-to-text. You need to rework the neural network entirely to do what you're asking. ------- Its a neat trick that you can train LLMs to perhaps, ingest "text" followed by a question (ex: "Is the previous paragraph spam?"), and then the text-generator generates a yes-or-no response that is somewhat pleasing. But its not quite the same as what you're asking for.
- reaperman 2y ago
  If I understand correctly, every LLM has an embedding function which can reduce a block of text to a coordinate in high-dimensional space. That coordinate can be used to determine how likely something is to be talking about selling illegal drugs and automatically flag posts for manual review. But given that the problem seems to be in the "manual review" because users constantly report these and get brushed off, that "neat trick" you wrote about seems like it could really help explain to manual reviewers exactly why a particular ad violate's Meta's content guidelines.
  - dragontamer 2y ago
    > If I understand correctly, every LLM has an embedding function which can reduce a block of text to a coordinate in high-dimensional space. That coordinate can be used to determine how likely something is to be talking about selling illegal drugs and automatically flag posts for manual review. Sounds like Word2Vec, which isn't necessarily an incompatible technique. I'm not exactly on the cutting edge of Language Models here. I'm sure the information is sitting in the "hidden layer" somewhere. But LLMs have very many hidden layers. Its not something that a programmer can just "pluck" out of the network.

thaumasiotes 2y ago

Is "hundreds" supposed to be a large amount? How many ads has Facebook run for Mountain Dew?

xipho 2y ago
This. They message to billions, every what, hour, and get how many ad contracts every minute? If the problem really is this order of magnitude they are doing an incredible job, aren't they?
- jaynetics 2y ago
  Do you people have FB accounts? Drug sales really make up a notable portion of ad slots recently.
barbazoo 2y ago
It's also only been one people they've promoted genocide against, should still probably care about it. https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2022/09/myanmar-facebooks-systems-promoted-violence-against-rohingya-meta-owes-reparations-new-report/ https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2022/09/myanmar-faceb...
- thaumasiotes 2y ago
  How did they promote it?
  - barbazoo 2y ago
    Check out the link it goes into it a little bit.

newsclues 2y ago

Linked to this https://www.404media.co/unlocked4life-instagram-scam-no-jumper/ https://www.404media.co/unlocked4life-instagram-scam-no-jump... imo

janalsncm 2y ago
Weird situation. I wonder how he is locking and unlocking accounts. Maybe he knows someone who works at IG.

tamiral 2y ago

did 404media do an expose story on this ? I swear Meta will allow anything for money

immibis 2y ago
You either do anything for money, or you are not a household name.

zht 2y ago

I've seen many reels for either borderline illegal activity or outright illegal activity -MLMs -"faceless marketing" -"digital marketing" courses -business loan scams -counterfeit luxury goods -extortion

raybb 2y ago
Is faceless marketing (borderline) illegal?
- Arrath 2y ago
  What even is faceless marketing?
  - immibis 2y ago
    Apparently it is, literally - get this - marketing without putting your face in from of a camera. Because we all know that was the only way to do marketing before. All that juice from just one bag of oranges!
    - Arrath 2y ago
      [flagged]

CoastalCoder 2y ago

[deleted]

singleshot_ 2y ago
Prosecutors have a professional responsibility only to bring a case that has a substantial likelihood of a conviction.
- RIMR 2y ago
  When you're Ross Ulbricht (not rich) you get life without parole. When you're Mark Zuckerberg ($166B) "there isn't a substantial likelihood of conviction". You're not wrong, but I wouldn't call maintaining a two-tier justice system a prosecutor's "professional responsibility".
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
RIMR 2y ago
Because there is absolutely zero evidence that there are drugs being physically trafficked at Meta's offices? What should happen is that a court should be able to drag responsible executives in front of a judge, issue massive fines for what has already happened, and order that Meta stop running ads until they can present an agreeable plan to prevent these kinds of ads from running. Then they should be under a consent degree, and subject to regular government inspection, and if the agreed upon mitigation plan isn't being followed and these kinds of ads are running again, the same executives should be dragged back in front of court, Meta should be prohibited from running ads for months as a punishment, and to force them back to the drawing board to fix the issue permanently, and the responsible executives should be given significant personal fines, and a short jail sentence for violating court orders. Rinse and repeat until either Meta is permanently barred from running ads, putting them out of business, and/or the responsible executives (including the CEO if applicable) have enough strikes that they get a decade or so in prison to make an example of what happens when you refuse to operate a business within the law and kill people with black market drugs.

grecy 2y ago

I find it really interesting Facebook collect money from someone to run these ads, and they can continue to do that without getting into legal trouble. When I moved countries it took 6 months for Facebook to stop showing me ads for the old country which were very clearly only supposed to be shown to people in that country. Again, people are paying money to run these ads and Facebook are clearly showing them to the wrong people.

Muromec 2y ago
They still get the money in both cases. Why would they care?
- grecy 2y ago
  Both are illegal. One is taking money to advertise illegal substances, the other is taking money for a service and then not delivering that service.

vjulian 2y ago

Most of what’s being discussed here is naturally subjective views on propriety. Not many years ago, God forbid should one see an ad for cannabis. Even what is and is not considered a scam is quite subjective, is it not? To what extent are these platforms themselves legalised scams? Or the oh-wow-look-what-we-found false editorial strategy that most rags market.

jddj 2y ago
> what is and is not a scam is quite subjective It can be, and it can also be quite objective. There are ads on there for ecommerce shops which clone the websites of known brands, with the exact logos and colours and names of those brands but which don't actually have anything to do with those brands. These websites ask for your credit card number to purchase items which are advertised significantly below the retail price. I don't know what they do with the credit card number once they have it, but I can guess.
- vjulian 2y ago
  I agree, and that would be a smaller, less interesting story for the newspaper.
- rightbyte 2y ago
  The insidious scam would be to ask significantly above retail price and drop ship it to you.
photonthug 2y ago
Setting aside the legality and free speech philosophizing and corporate apologism, don’t you find it tasteless, doesn’t it make you angry that there’s a hot granny-sex prostitution / blackmail outfit that’s taken over your local library? It used to be a nice place man. I know we can still check out the books but after 4 hours of abusive conditioning where they pin your eyeballs open and and jab the monitoring device into your brain stem who’s got the energy left to read anything anyway

righthand 2y ago

Are drug ads bad because of the war on drugs? Are they bad because we won’t let tobacco make ads? The only way this seems shockingly bad is that you can’t actually control what you see as a user of these ad-supported services or if you support the war on drugs.

nom 2y ago
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- deleted 2y ago
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xigoi 2y ago
I came to this comment section expecting someone to argue that aykshually drugs are good. Never disappointed.
- righthand 2y ago
  I’m arguing that drugs are good? Doesn’t take much to get you going.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

hnpolicestate 2y ago

The one time Meta does something good the Feds and WSJ get upset. I wish Meta had a back pages and was more like Craiglist circa 2005. In the puritanical West, selling your private data to the government is good, buying drugs from a rando on Instagram is bad. Stifling.

airstrike 2y ago
> buying drugs from a rando on Instagram is bad no, selling drugs is illegal

aeturnum 2y ago

This is part of a larger pattern for Facebook and other "large scale" advertisers where it's clear they are breaking laws at some rate and are protected from paying a real consequence by the cost of discovering the exact rate of misbehavior. Facebook recently settled a lawsuit related to racially discriminating in housing ads (a federal crime)[1]. I suspect this will get added to the pile of illegal services Facebook provides but argues it shouldn't be held responsible for providing. This is, I think, the real moral hazard you saw back in the 2007 financial crisis: companies can reach a scale where it's very costly to definitively assess who is to blame for crimes and can therefor commit any profitable crime up to a certain threshold. It both makes a mockery of the rule of law as a concept (along with many other things in the US legal system) and is an enormous competitive advantage for large companies. I'd include Uber's grey area stalking[2] and the eBay stalking campaign[3] in this category. [1] https://www.cnbc.com/2022/06/21/doj-settles-with-facebook-over-allegedly-discriminatory-housing-ads.html https://www.cnbc.com/2022/06/21/doj-settles-with-facebook-ov... [2] https://www.theverge.com/2016/7/10/12127638/uber-ergo-investigation-lawsuit-fraud-travis-kalanick https://www.theverge.com/2016/7/10/12127638/uber-ergo-invest... [3] https://www.cbsnews.com/news/feds-charge-ebay-stalking-scandal-ina-david-steiner/ https://www.cbsnews.com/news/feds-charge-ebay-stalking-scand...

ricardo81 2y ago
It does seem like many of the web scale FAANG's had no scaling solution. Facebook and Google in particular are egregious beyond their marketing. e.g. YouTube, how much copyrighted content does G profit off from. And then the 100 variations that slip the 'copyright algo.' I see stuff on there that as a UK TV license payer I've already paid for, and then have to suffer ads. They could not give a hoot.
- nadermx 2y ago
  YouTube is probably a bad example in terms of copyright. They in fact have the most restrictive system of reuse of others work in your work, as a large portion of the videos that are auto struck would probably err more on fair use.

deathanatos 2y ago

YouTube has been hitting me up with "ads" which are Ethereum scams¹ recently. Of what I've reported, 60% are still up. Some of these were reported in March. Recently I also got an "ad" for what was almost certainly Sovereign Citizen propaganda, which … wow, I didn't even know they ran YT ads?² Today's ads (since I checked just to see for this comment) is all normal stuff. ¹they allege to have written an "arbitrage" trading bot with ChatGPT, usually, claiming it earns them passive income of varying amounts, but often on the order of $1M USD/y. As the saying goes, if it sounds too good to be true, it probably is. The code actually just steals your money. ²(not that I really think SCs are a formal collective of sorts, I just … don't really think that would be a thing I'd see.)

realusername 2y ago
On my phone, only about half of the Youtube ads look legal. They have it all: crypto scams, ponzi schemes, fake mobile games, get quick rich schemes... Some stuff can always slip through but to have a result like this, there's a systemic lack of checks at Google.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- warkdarrior 2y ago
  So your solution is for YT/Google/Meta to check the code, operations, finances, and business models of every advertiser that comes to them? Even if YT/Google/Meta could do this at scale, do you want them to have that power?
  - segasaturn 2y ago
    If Google/Meta/Youtube want to be multi-trillion dollar monopolies that have invaded every aspect of our lives then there should be some very basic corporate responsibility that comes with that power, even if its difficult and maybe even costs them a little bit of money. Lately it seems like the phrase has been inverted to "with great power comes less responsibility". If your small local TV station ran ads for cocaine and synthetic opioids nobody would be making these kinds of excuses.

yieldcrv 2y ago

I'm into the federal investigation I'm actually really glad that some companies like this are not really beholden to advertisers anymore. I don't like how that influences social norms per country outside of the legal system, based on what advertisers believe. I like that there is no collective voice possible that could get enough advertisers to leave Meta over disagreeing with a Meta practice. I'm into lawsuits from private persons and the government. Just not social mobs.

meroes 2y ago

I've seen a lot of responses saying prosecutors won't go after Meta because of a professional responsibility for winning at trial. Well, what about cops+feds civil asset forfeiture-ing their servers and offices?

throwup238 2y ago
> Well, what about cops+feds civil asset forfeiture-ing their servers and offices? Meta's lawyers would have the forfeiture overturned by a judge before the cops have even finished their paperwork for the seizure. Civil asset forfeiture is only really a weapon against convicted criminals and people who can't afford to defend themselves.
- meroes 2y ago
  They can prove in civil court standards their severs weren’t part of drug dealing? Because that’s the standard when a person gets pulled over and the cops->feds take their cash without any criminal charges.
  - throwup238 2y ago
    They won’t have to prove anything. Cops pull people over and take their money assuming the person can’t or won’t defend themselves because it’s too expensive or time consuming. I know someone who has had actual drug money seized in California and it took them less than a month to get it back by court order because they knew a lawyer specializing in those cases. There are a lot of judges that don’t take kindly to asset forfeiture without a conviction and a legit corporation like Meta with a big legal team would have their stuff back by the weekend.

brap 2y ago

My favorite Meta ad that I keep getting is a deepfake video of Elon Musk saying he will be handing out free money for “Neuralink AI” to the first people who will invest. They’re saying thousands of dollars PER WEEK are guaranteed! Nice! And I just got the same exact scam on FB, but this time they used a deepfake video of my country’s president, saying they’re working with Elon Musk to give money to all citizens. Yay!

zoklet-enjoyer 2y ago

I've been getting a lot of these and reporting them all. They never take them down. It really surprised me at first because I ran a CBD business from 2019 to 2021 and they refused to run my ads even though it was legal. Same thing with Google. Google really screwed me over because I had my ads running for a bit and then they stopped them because it went against their rules for hemp/CBD products. Eventually they changed the rules and allowed those ads. So they started running my ads again but I didn't get a notification until my $300 bill came. And this was after I had already shut down my business. Of course I couldn't get a hold of a real person and I paid the bill because I didn't want my account to get banned.

whatamidoingyo 2y ago

I've been seeing "AI" apps which offer to take a pic/vid you upload and make it a nude. These ads often have nudity in them, which is wild. Likewise, I saw some ads seriously offering drugs. I reported them and got a reply from Facebook: "We found this post does not go against our community guidelines"???

mrinfinitiesx 2y ago

https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/companies/meta-has-run-hundreds-of-ads-for-cocaine-opioids-and-other-drugs/ar-BB1qWmQH https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/companies/meta-has-run-hundr...

lacoolj 2y ago

Anyone know if section 203 would cover this?

2OEH8eoCRo0 2y ago

Gotta love that Section 230 immunity!

barbazoo 2y ago
That's about not being liable for what users of their service publish I believe, not what's happening here.
- 2OEH8eoCRo0 2y ago
  Advertisers are users.

jklinger410 2y ago

Wow this is terrible! Are you saying someone could buy these drugs over the counter, with regular currency, not on the dark web? Can someone share these ads with me so I could check them out? Just purely out of my own concern? Thanks

sprayk 2y ago
I never ged ads for "real" drugs, just the normal OTC/prescription stuff and occasionally some legal analogues (non-psilocybin mushroom gummies come to mind). Very curious what they look like as well and what their sites say about the purchase process (what forms of payment do they accept, how do they ship, etc).
- Suppafly 2y ago
  I'm pretty sure I've seen some for actual psilocybin before. I've seen some for switchblades too, which are illegal a bunch of places, but they at least drum up interest by pretending it's a switchblade spoon and then when you click to their site they are like "it's not a spoon", which is annoying because all of the comments on the facebook side are people saying they actually wanted a switchblade spoon.

m2f2 2y ago

And counterfeit number plates, and no takedown as everything is OK apparently

PaulHoule 2y ago

... and in the meantime Meta won't let me create an Instagram account from either my home or work computer. I have very little history w/ either since I deleted my Facebook account in 2016 but started a new one to use with an Oculus VR headset. Yes I have run a webcrawler at home but never against Meta properties and I don't believe I've ever made trouble of any kind for Meta. I badly want to support a friend's social media marketing efforts and it's just ridiculous that I'll probably have to create an account with false information despite me sending multiple emails to Facebook asking if they can clear whatever flag is on my account and/or IP addresses.

galdosdi 2y ago

World's easiest problem to solve if we just get the political will to do so: Pass a law requiring a human being to sign off in "writing" (can be eSigned through an internal moderation platform) on any ad that will be run that the platform will profit from and that will be pushed to users by choice of the platform as opposed to request by the user. This human serves as an agent who will be liable along with their firm if there are any illegal issues that should have been obvious to a "reasonable person" reviewing the ad. Require anyone doing this job to be supervised by a licensed attorney, who must document their hiring and supervision practices and can be disbarred for failing to run a reasonably tight ship. Problem solved. Bam. So easy. It is not fair that platforms get to pretend that being able to automate running ads means they have no responsibility for their choices. It's like saying you can't murder with a handgun, but if you set up an automated machine gun turret, now it's OK.

waveBidder 2y ago
> It's like saying you can't murder with a handgun, but if you set up an automated machine gun turret, now it's OK. This is a great analogy. You can't actually afford to run this at scale legally? Too bad.
toast0 2y ago
I don't think it's actually that easy. In the US, we have Section 230[1], which says > No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider. Seems to me, that says if you have a problem with the advertisement, you need to go to the source, not the ad network. You're proposing an exception for advertisement, which is reasonable, but you've got to define advertisement. It's not just money for distribution; I'm not an advertiser just because I pay to use a forum, which is money for distribution. Section 230 isn't some immutable force, so yes, political force is all that's needed, but it's been the norm since 1996, and has been enabling ad networks to show ads without regard to their content since 1997 [2]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Section_230 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Section_230 [2] https://www.eff.org/files/zeran-v-aol.pdf https://www.eff.org/files/zeran-v-aol.pdf

RomanPushkin 2y ago

> “DMT,” a psychedelic drug. I would argue that. It's probably the least offensive thing, compared to alcohol you can buy everywhere. DMT and other entheogens are far less harmful than alcoholic drinks available. It's confirmed by many academic papers, and DMT is not something people use for recreational purposes. Moreover, some of these "psychedelic drugs" are used by people who have serious illness, wether it is life-threatening like cancer, or all kinds of PTSDs. It is very well known that these "drugs" help to prevent suicides, and very often it makes people's lives less miserable. While I agree with the narrative, and totally against unregulated drug sale, I can't say WSJ put a lot of thought into the article posting a picture of DMT powder as the main evidence to make entire article look more scary. Average Trader Joe's with vodka looks many times scarier to me.

dzjkb 2y ago
I totally agree, but why do you think people don't use DMT recreationally?
- squidsoup 2y ago
  Because experiencing death is not a recreational activity.
  - pvarangot 2y ago
    I mean, not with that attitude
- RomanPushkin 2y ago
  There is no euphoric effect or any other effect that makes it recreational. It's more of a self-reflection tool that helps to breakthrough into the perception of things that are so much different. And it helps to break bad habits actually: alcohol, tobacco, being aggressive, etc. Also, because it's not euphoric, it is not addictive as other drugs (read: alcohol and above).
  - Suppafly 2y ago

jddj 2y ago

Is the garbage floating to the top / are the filters being relaxed because regular advertising is slipping?

joeytuk 2y ago

What's worse is that Meta representatives stand up in front of lawmakers and supply information that is false. I demonstrated the apparent untruthfulness in their claims about fraud here and then interviewed LLaMa about it :-) https://blog.aviel.tech/Meta-s-LLaMa-AI-LLaMbasts-Meta-for-failing-to-stop-scams-6d22ed80edaf4fdb8025018e14cd30fe https://blog.aviel.tech/Meta-s-LLaMa-AI-LLaMbasts-Meta-for-f...

xyst 2y ago

How does one get these ads anyways? Search history of “drug rehab” or “drug overdose”? If you are addicted to heroin, cocaine, or other opioids (fentanyl), these ads are a test of your resolve. Also Facebook Ads are absolutely predatory.

neals 2y ago

That's amazing news! I love cocaïne, opioids and other drugs!

Teever 2y ago

I hate this. I used to run a business in Canada that sold grow equipment and our primary customer base was marijuana growers. When legalization came we started running advertisements for our shop on facebook. Got our hand slapped really hard, really fast and our advertising account banned. A few months later I see advertisements for chocolates with psilocybin mushrooms in them. Mushrooms remain illegal in Canada. The ads continued for several months.

standardUser 2y ago
Every single thing about the drug war is anathema to a just and rational society. Even those who don't care about justice or rationality must care that, in exchange for the billions of dollars spent and the extreme loss to personal liberty, drugs have only become more potent, more readily available and much cheaper. I find myself developing an inability to respect people who believe we should stay the course despite the overwhelming evidence that the drug war is beyond lost, and always has been.

surfingdino 2y ago

That's a bit desperate.

snowpid 2y ago

On hN user to claim that is impossible to forbid meta to spread these ads. Its verboten in the EU https://commission.europa.eu/strategy-and-policy/priorities-2019-2024/europe-fit-digital-age/digital-services-act/europe-fit-digital-age-new-online-rules-platforms_en https://commission.europa.eu/strategy-and-policy/priorities-... You are welcome.

kazinator 2y ago

Who cares. If the shit were decriminalized, like it should be, they would be ads.

Ajedi32 2y ago

Merely _hundreds_? At Facebook's scale that seems like a really low number, no? Like, even if they were doing manual review of every single ad (which they probably aren't) I'd expect at least a few to slip through merely due to laziness or incompetence on the part of the reviewers, wouldn't you?

rstuart4133 2y ago
The headline "Facebook's ad filtering is so good it only lets 0.0000001% bad add through" doesn't sounds like good click bait to me, despite it being an impressive achievement if true. So here we are. Facebook has about 3 billion daily users. I expect each will see many ads - probably 10 or more. But if we assume it's just one, 100 displayed in a single day would give you 0.0000001%. The study didn't look at one day of course - the observation period was over 100 days.

andrei_says_ 2y ago

And guns.

bryan_w 2y ago

The timing of these kind of stories should make people curious

agata4151 2y ago

[flagged]

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

devvvvvvv 2y ago

Why does Section 230 not apply to advertisements as it does to comments, videos, etc? The ads are user generated content.

nurettin 2y ago

This is the reason I gave up on google ads for my android apps back in 2015. I turned off all 18+ content and it kept on showing sex and gambling ads to users. The advertisers probably categorized themselves as entertainment and didn't check the correct boxes and I couldn't be bothered hunting all of them.

Andrewmargaret 2y ago

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amadheaton66 2y ago

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