8 ms·

Meta created 'playbook' to fend off pressure to crack down on scammers

254 points by lossolo 10mo ago

https://archive.ph/Phdes https://archive.ph/Phdes

PaulHoule 10mo ago
What I can't get is that the platforms don't understand that the scam ads reduce trust in the good ads -- when I see something on YouTube that looks legit and like something I want I am very inclined to be skeptical because I just saw five obvious scams in a row. Accepting those scam ads is penny wise and pound foolish.
- trueismywork 10mo ago
  What's the alternative? Orkut?
  - deleted 10mo ago
    [deleted]
  - PaulHoule 10mo ago
    There's two markets here. (1) The market of advertisers buying ads and (2) the market of users who are attracted to these platforms and who might click on the ads and buy the product. I'm not against advertising, in fact many times I have seen something advertised, thought "I want that!" and bought it and sometimes that thing became my new favorite. If I am a platform user (2) and don't like the ads I can "exit" the platform as a whole or I can "exit" by being unresponsive to ads and when it comes to ads on YouTube and Meta platforms at least, I'm not buying it! People in market (1) are going to invest in advertising up to the point where it is profitable, and the less responsive market (2) people are the smaller the pool. Many advertisers are also sensitive to brand safety and part of that is the content you are against but another part is the other ads on the platform.
    - xp84 10mo ago
      I think the adtech-industrial complex has thrown in the towel on wanting quality ads and customers who trust those ads. It's easier to just welcome in the scammers and accept that the top 80% "savviest" people all know their ads are mostly scams. There will always still be enough marks that the scammers, who have excellent margins to play with, will come to feed at the trough of the ignorant and naïve by buying the ads. If needed, the platform can adjust the ad:content ratio to near 100%. Their 'competition' is all doing the same thing anyway, so they won't lose eyeballs in the aggregate.
    - oh_my_goodness 10mo ago
      > many times I have seen something advertised, thought "I want that!" and bought it and sometimes that thing became my new favorite. This happens. It matters to you and to the people paying for those ads … if they could really quantity it. But it’s too tiny to matter to the media outlets. You’re talking about real clicks, which are already a small fraction. Real clicks on ads that actually offer anything desirable … that’s just too small a part of total clicks. Nobody can make much money on that 0.5% (?) of the traffic, no matter how idealistic they are. Fake clicks on misleading ads are the bread and butter of the market. As a vendor, expecting online advertisers to get you customers efficiently is like expecting a real estate agent to get you the best sale price. They care about their own revenue, not yours. Look at even Amazon's own site. They're hardly bothering to show you real stuff that you actually want. Either they're completely incompetent, or that's just not where the money is.
- benoau 10mo ago
  I think it's just not adversely impacting "big tech", their profits and margins are soaring while they've spent years and years selling counterfeit goods, scam apps, scam videos, scam ads. They have no liability for it (section 230 immunity) and seem to have zero incentive to do better.
  - braiamp 10mo ago
    Yeah, for them, it doesn't matter. As long as they get paid and nobody important complains, it will stay business as usual.
  - Qem 10mo ago
    They built a meta-scam, on top of other scams.
    - kfarr 10mo ago
      It’s a scam made of scams!
  - _DeadFred_ 10mo ago
    Why does 230 protect advertising? I get that it protects platforms for the speech made by users on their platform, but why does 230 protect advertising that the company chooses to accept/run?
    - benoau 10mo ago
      I don't know, I don't see why it would protect retail on Amazon either, or apps, none of that stuff is "user generated" they are contractually-bound business partners with verified identities, payments back-and-forth etc. Big difference between that and someone shitposting on Reddit, which ironically gets moderated better than any of them.
  - amanaplanacanal 10mo ago
    I thought section 230 only protected against civil liability, not criminal.
- fullshark 10mo ago
  There's a sweet spot they want to hit, where their internal scam ad reduction efforts do enough to make sure people don't leave in droves, and they are totally fine with the scam ads that make it through bringing in revenue. The last thing they want is regulators forcing them to spend at least $X in resources to limit scam ads to some target and have it hurt their margins.
  - thayne 10mo ago
    > regulators forcing them to spend at least $X in resources Even if X is 0, it would mean lost revenue from the scammers as well.
- einr 10mo ago
  They simply do not care about trust or anything else you think they should care about. The scam ads get probably get clicked ten or a hundred times more than legit ads. This makes money, therefore it is good and should be encouraged. They do not care how much worse the platform gets or how many people get scammed.
  - deleted 10mo ago
    [deleted]
- chopete3 10mo ago
  Money changes psychology. The brains of the people that work in these departments operate differently. They believe in protection and growth of the revenue - not pay attention to ethics. They have to work hard to shut out critics as long as possible.
  - observationist 10mo ago
    It's about getting as much money from the platform for as long as possible, regardless of the externalized damage done along the way. Anything that negatively impacts the "number goes up" goal, year over year, gets suppressed, ignored, or redirected. They hire a sufficient number of people so as to diffuse responsibility and the sense of wrongdoing by any one person or group within the company, and different aspects of the overall abusive mechanics organically get compartmentalized, so that no one manager or employee or department ever recognizes the wrongs being done. You end up with a few greedy asshats aware of the harms being done that just don't care, lots of money being made, and plausible deniability all around, with things never getting bad enough for an employee to feel like they have to take a stand or report wrongdoing.
- serial_dev 10mo ago
  Even if we were to accept that people who see scam ads ona platform will be less likely to trust good ads on said platform (and honestly I doubt how impactful that is), it’s not a metric Facebook cares about. You are not the customer. The customers are the people paying for the ads, and they will keep using it as long as they think it’s better than not using them.
- safety1st 10mo ago
  The explanation is that the platform firms operate with a high level of market power, which is another way of saying that they benefit from monopoly or near-monopoly effects that make them relatively immune from things like what their customers want. This is actually textbook monopoly stuff, well established in antitrust literature and well understood by regulators: when you see a firm institutionalizing how to defend criminal activity as a part of their business model, it's a big flag that said firm probably has some kind of immunity from how healthy, regulated markets operate. Why America has decided not to prosecute corporate criminals anymore (given that at various points in its history it was actually pretty good at this) is the really interesting question of our time.
  - nickff 10mo ago
    I suspect that your explanation is what people in those organizations think is happening, but I believe that what’s really going on is that they’re ‘spending’ (and depleting) their brand equity.
    - socialcommenter 10mo ago
      I'm not sure it stops there, either - I wonder if others feel the same. If every platform is doing this, then are they destroying the trust of online media (the internet?) in general? Facebook isn't exactly alone in its reputation of monetising people's attention and serving them dangerous content. I'm eagerly waiting for the day when the elderly people in my family swear off the internet entirely.
      - llmslave2 10mo ago
        I think it's more likely that the newer gens swear it off than the older ones, who have become thoroughly brain rotted by it. It's like they have no immunity. At least gen-z is more aware of the damage it does. We're at the "hmm, I think smoking is probably bad for us" stage. Next up, serious attempts at quitting.
    - tremon 10mo ago
      Being immune to the "depletion of their brand equity" is part of the near-monopoly effects the GP was referring to.
- zelphirkalt 10mo ago
  Which quartal number reflects this reduced trust? There is your answer. They never see that negative impact, because they can't see that, which does not happened.
- sharkjacobs 10mo ago
  I think the same thing but maybe it’s you and me are wrong. Maybe it’s simply more profitable to run scams than it is to do “legit” business selling “real” products and services. Maybe the users who make ads valuable are the ones who are undiscriminating and naive and vulnerable to scams, and those users aren’t bothered by proliferation of scam ads. Maybe it does hurt the value of “normal” ads to be shown next to scams, but the scam ads are so valuable that it actually works out as a long term net positive I think that I used to assume that if scams became prominent enough they would produce a backlash, either regulatory or otherwise, but maybe that’s just not the case.
- yieldcrv 10mo ago
  When billions are being collected in scams and those organizations are paying for more ads, it doesn't matter what you normally do, it matters what you do when you're emotional, or drunk, or what your parents do
- oh_my_goodness 10mo ago
  Genuine clicks on useful ads are a tiny part of ad revenue. There’s no incentive for media to work on that slice of clicks.
- RajT88 10mo ago
  Exactly. I never ever buy a product advertised on Facebook. Almost without a doubt, the ad turns out to be misleading. If something looks cool, I will search it instead of clicking through. I have been seen malvertising campaigns on FB (some not even requiring a click). If the product seems legit and fair priced, I will buy it. Rarely do I find both are true when I learn about it via Facebook. My default is: scam, or at least scamm-y. Are most people less careful? I wonder.
- al_borland 10mo ago
  While I tend to agree with you, to the point that I've never willingly clicked on an ad, this isn't how most people that I've seen operate. I actively skip over ads in search results, skip whenever possible in video, and pay to remove them completely if it's offered (subscribing to Kagi and YouTube Premium). If I do end up seeing an ad for something that looks interesting/useful, I don't click on it. I search for it separately. I treat ads the same way I would a random text claiming to be my bank. I don't click the link, I go there on my own so I know I'm in the right place free of any funny business. The side effect of this is the merchant loses context on how effective their ad was. In contrast, when I see almost anyone else using Google, they actively look at the ads first. They treat the ads as if they were the top organic search results. If they search for "Microsoft" and Microsoft paid for a top ranked ad to their homepage, they will click on the ad link instead of the real organic result a few lines down. This makes these people very susceptible to advertisements posing at legitimate websites, yet their behavior never changes. I've said something to multiple people about skipping down to the actual results, and they claim to like the ads, or don't see a difference and just pick the first link that seems like what they want. Many of these people are otherwise tech savvy, some of whom spent decades working in the tech sector. It seems we are the weird ones for avoiding the ads or losing trust. After watching MegaLag's 2 most recent videos on YouTube about Honey[0], I can start to see why the companies behind all this don't care. Policing these types of issues lowers their profits, which effectively incentivizes scams and fraud. The people hurt are the merchants and the consumers. You'd think they would be the only two who matter at the end of the day when it comes to advertising, but apparently not. [0] Part 1 (from 1 year ago): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vc4yL3YTwWk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vc4yL3YTwWk Part 2: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wwB3FmbcC88 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wwB3FmbcC88 Part 2.1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qCGT_CKGgFE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qCGT_CKGgFE
- duxup 10mo ago
  I don't think they care because I'm still on youtube, but I agree. I think of youtube as a very scamy place. I have my history turned off so I get some really bottom of the barrel ads, questionable medical advice, gross out ads, borderline porn, weird conspiracy theory stuff (5G blocking hats), and straight scams "buy our product or AI will replace your job" and my recent favorite "if you're not buying our product people are manipulating you ... so give us your money so we can help you" (the irony is thick with those). Youtube is scam / bad idea central when I turn it on.
  - snailmailman 10mo ago
    I get all those same ads on YouTube. It’s easily >90% complete scam products, and most of the non-scam products are at least breaking YouTube’s own “rules” regarding what content is allowed. Like if one of the reportable reasons is “addictive product” why do I see so many ads for nicotine products? I tried to report an ad that had literal nudity/porn in it. The report page was acting funky so I pulled it up manually in safari where I wasn’t logged in. and it made be log in to report the ad because the ad was age restricted. why is it running as an advertisement at all then? Clearly it got flagged somewhere to be age restricted. YouTube has approximately zero incentive to fix this. They are a complete monopoly and there isn’t any consequence to any of the blatantly illegal products that I see advertised on their platform. I’ve seen ads for drugs and firearms. The firearm ad was claiming it was “easy to sneak past security” but the highest consequence is that the ad account gets nuked and another immediately takes its place.
lokimedes 10mo ago
In some roundabout way, it’s really pathetic that the evil corporations of our times are merely dopamine peddling advertisers, and not something more sinister. I guess we should count ourselves lucky..
- deleted 10mo ago
  [deleted]
- mcphage 10mo ago
  Meta has been responsible for a lot worse than merely dopamine peddling.
- Loughla 10mo ago
  Yeah back in the day evil companies used to kill people in 3rd world countries and give their workers horrible diseases and injuries. I guess this is better?
  - ThrowawayTestr 10mo ago
    Back in the day evil companies would overthrow governments and starve children.
    - stevenwoo 10mo ago
      It feels a bit darker that the US government is doing it now and being cheered on by their faithful voters in the name of religion and tax breaks for the wealthy and company leaders kowtowing and outright bribing in the open for favorable treatment.
    - unethical_ban 10mo ago
      Back in the day? Let's see how many people we have in poverty and poor, unaffordable medical conditions in the US in 10 years due to government destruction/stagnation and a lack of controls on the impacts of AI.
  - kmeisthax 10mo ago
axus 10mo ago
If I'm reading this right, the playbook was... deleting scam ads ? And the implied problem is they only deleted searchable ads, and not trying harder to get rid of all of them. It's interesting that Facebook was trying NOT to uncover identities, they're famous for insisting on real names.
- goatsi 10mo ago
  All ads are searchable. They found the exact words and phrases that regulators used and then made sure those were clean. >As a result, Meta decided to take the tactic global, performing similar analyses to assess “scam discoverability” in other countries. “We have built a vast keyword list by country that is meant to mimic what regulators may search for,” one document states. Another described the work as changing the “prevalence perception” of scams on Facebook and Instagram.
- thayne 10mo ago
  > the implied problem is they only deleted searchable ads Well, more just the ads that matched the specific queries the regulators were using. So yes, they removed some scam ads, but there are probably many more that people are still seeing just because those didn't match the search queries the regulators were searching for. > It's interesting that Facebook was trying NOT to uncover identities, they're famous for insisting on real names. It isn't really surprising. If they required real identities, they wouldn't be able to make money from scammers using throw-away accounts, or from entities subject to US sanctions, so there is a monetary incentive not to know the identity of the ad customers.
  - socialcommenter 10mo ago
    Precisely, completely agree. If this method actually removed a significant percentage of scam ads, rather than just heading off scrutiny, then a) doing proper verification wouldn't cost them $2b a year like they claim it would, and b) their quarterly revenues would be taking a meaningful (single digits %) hit and the share price would suffer.
- randycupertino 10mo ago
SilverElfin 10mo ago
I imagine something like this is what happens at all those companies that send spam texts and calls like bandwidth.com or Sinch or others - a strategy to make money supporting criminals
jackhuman 10mo ago
I searched for a used steamdeck in my area and got 100% fraud sellers. My elders in my family fall for fraud via meta’s platforms. Its caused me lots of stress and pain. The only thing I can do is delete all my Meta accounts. One of the riches companies in the world with some very smart people and its ruined by toxic leadership. If this was my product, I’d feel ashamed by how trash it is. I really hope governments force stricter regulations on meta and ads in general. Meta should be liable if a user is scammed by an ad on their platform. Plane and simple.
- stackghost 10mo ago
  >One of the riches companies in the world with some very smart people and its ruined by toxic leadership. The rank and file are complicit. There are people commenting on HN every day who are paid handsomely to work at Meta and to act willfully blind to the awful ethics their company has displayed for two decades.
  - NoToP 10mo ago
    The 1972 Knapp Commission into police corruption introduced some really great vocabulary to express "the rank and file are complicit". "Meat eaters" and "grass eaters". The meat eaters were the officers that actively pursued opportunities to be corrupt and spent a great deal of time on the job engaging in corrupt activities instead of police work. The grass eaters were essentially normal officers who would turn a blind eye or do things that had been normalized such as accepting or soliciting small bribes opportunistically. In the words of the report, "the grass eaters are the heart of the problem".
- llmslave2 10mo ago
  > One of the riches companies in the world with some very smart people and its ruined by toxic leadership. Leadership can certainly be blamed, but I think it comes down to their hiring practices. When you prioritise leetcode-isk wrote memorisation and deprioritise intrinsics (like ethics, shocker), you end up with a company full of people who are willing to do anything to achieve their singular goal of making TC go up. Morality or product quality be damned.
dboreham 10mo ago
What underlies this is that the USA is a fundamentally scammy country. I mean no disrespect: I'm a US citizen and have lived here for 30 years and made plenty of money from the US economy. But nevertheless it's a scam culture. And sure enough when I read the article, it says "Facebook battling Japanese regulators". Of course there wouldn't be a regulator in the USA telling Facebook to not host scam ads. Consider the TV industry in the USA: it makes huge amounts of money from political ads, which are for the most part scams. The same people who make money from those scam ads also control the news. So guess what? No pressure to not scam the population with false advertising. Perhaps it helps to have not grown up in the US. If you've been here your entire life there's a frog boiling syndrome where none of the weirdness seems weird. This is why JD and co witter on about how terrible Europe is -- they need to keep up the delusion that scammers should get to scam and there's no hope to stop them. The recent moves to sanction European campaigners against big tech disinformation is really: the scammers got the root password to the country and are using it to fight back.
- yoyohello13 10mo ago
  No I've lived in the US my whole life and I agree with you. Ever since I bought my house I feel like I'm constantly bombarded by people trying to scam me out of my money. I'm sure it was always like that but it seems like getting a mortgage put me on some "financially stable guy" list that attracts the vultures. Medical, home repair, finance services. Without constant vigilance it's so easy to get grifted.
  - xp84 10mo ago
    Seriously. I actually want a bunch of renovation work done to my house, and door-to-door salesmen come by all the time to try to sell me that type of service. After one horrible experience that started with such a salesman, never again. I assume everyone out there is a freaking scammer because too many are. And even the companies and industries that used to be pretty benign have realized that all the growth is in scams, so they've added whole divisions of their business to try to get you onto recurring payments for stuff you probably don't want, which can all be signed up for with like 1 click, but cancelling needs a phone call during Eastern Time business hours and a 25 minute wait on hold.
neilv 10mo ago
You know how Facebook became a popular employer among new CS grads, by paying more than anyone else? You know that book/movie, "The Firm", in which the new law school graduate gets a surprisingly lucrative job offer? (spoilers) It turns out that the reason is Crime.
- hrimfaxi 10mo ago
  What point are you trying to make? Any company offering above market compensation is engaging in illegal activity?
  - hananova 10mo ago
    Yes. But only because every company is engaging in illegal activity, big tech just more so.
  - jrnng 10mo ago
    Low ethics high pay? Higher margins from lower ethics? At some point does complacency with scammers become racketeering or criminals conspiracy? Knowledge is an element of crime and they know people are being scammed yet look away from it.
  - 01HNNWZ0MV43FF 10mo ago
    What point are you trying to make? That Facebook is not trying to push the boundary of laws and ethics?
  - OGEnthusiast 10mo ago
    Sure seems that way, no?
  - deepspace 10mo ago
    Not always- see Costco. But in a world where every company is trying to minimize expenses to maximize profits, paying significantly above market is at the very least an indicator that there may be something fishy going on.
    - 10mo ago
goodolddays9090 10mo ago
[dead]
beloch 10mo ago
Meta now has an extensive track record of doing unethical things because they're slightly more profitable. This case is relatively minor compared to what they did in Myanmar[1]. Meta has some very smart people working for them but, unfortunately, Meta's management prefers to set them to the task of creatively evading responsibility rather than actually addressing problems. Governments seem to be a step behind when it comes to protecting their citizens from unethical social media corporations. As in this case, any sensible regulations that are imposed will be circumvented in the most dishonest ways possible. Regulations often aren't imposed at all due to pressure from the U.S. government, whom Meta has considerable influence over. Could international cooperation to regulate social media solve some of these issues? _____________ [1]https://systemicjustice.org/article/facebook-and-genocide-how-facebook-contributed-to-genocide-in-myanmar-and-why-it-will-not-be-held-accountable/ https://systemicjustice.org/article/facebook-and-genocide-ho...
- BLKNSLVR 10mo ago
  Twitter also seems to have considerable influence over the US Government. So much so that the US has imposed sanctions on a few people in the EU for suggesting that maybe Twitter should moderate hate speech. https://townhall.com/tipsheet/dmitri-bolt/2025/12/24/five-europeans-barred-from-entering-us-due-to-their-role-in-censorship-n2668450 https://townhall.com/tipsheet/dmitri-bolt/2025/12/24/five-eu...
godelski 10mo ago
I often have the question: how much money do we waste on selfishness. It's a clear example here. Meta is wasting good customer's money by showing them alongside scams and just devaluing ads by decreasing user trust. But also we only have these regulatory agencies because of this type of selfish behavior in the first place. It sucks that these regulatory agencies cost so much money. But why do we blame the government? It's completely a problem we create. If people and companies didn't act like shit we wouldn't need those expenses in the first place. Let's not blame the regulators (for existing, but do for being ineffective) and blame the "bad apples" that are spoiling the barrel. But what I do appreciate is that other countries are stepping up and not just waiting for the US to fix things. Real progress is being made because of this even if it still has a long way to go.
- awesome_dude 10mo ago
  This is one of my key arguments AGAINST "libertarianism" - a proper functioning market has three things, consumers, producers, and regulators, and they each need to be well balanced. If producers have too much power in the market we see distortion, eg. When monopolies exist. If consumers have too much power in the market we see exploitation. If regulators have too much power in the market we see stagflation. Markets don't operate efficiently without all three components.
  - godelski 10mo ago
    Yeah I'm actually with you on this. The government is part of the market no matter what. Through action or inaction they are still a critical player. But I think we often miss the messaging on regulators. In some way I agree with the right. It's a waste of money. But ones creating the waste isn't the government, it's those that need to be regulated
  - llmslave2 10mo ago
    What do you consider an "efficient market" to look like? Do you just mean one that tends towards outcomes you personally deem important?
luke-stanley 10mo ago
Wow. Possible ways to kept Meta ad records honest and transparent: - CCing archive.org - Store on an append-only system with hashing, hello blockchain use-case ha ;D.. IPFS or even GitHub should do, no crypto payments required. - Third-party government bodies could require copies.
cryptica 10mo ago
It reminds me of something funny my grandma told me. She told me that she saw an ad on Facebook to double her money and asked her daughter if it was a legitimate opportunity. Her daughter said to her "If you ever think about calling me to ask that question, you can put down the phone because it's a scam."
etchalon 10mo ago
I'm sure one of these days Facebook will face a consequence for the amoral, corrupt and lazy culture they've engendered. Any day now.
BLKNSLVR 10mo ago
I guess Google are just smarter at hiding the proof of their shit like this. If Meta are profiting off scammers, Google are profiting more.
ta9000 10mo ago
If you still work for Meta, you are the problem and should resign immediately.
commandersaki 10mo ago
I'm still wondering what the Scam Prevention Framework enacted in Australia will do to mitigate this kind of stuff. https://www.austlii.edu.au/cgi-bin/viewdb/au/legis/cth/consol_act/caca2010265/ https://www.austlii.edu.au/cgi-bin/viewdb/au/legis/cth/conso... (Part IVF)

254 points by lossolo 10mo ago

https://archive.ph/Phdes https://archive.ph/Phdes

What I can't get is that the platforms don't understand that the scam ads reduce trust in the good ads -- when I see something on YouTube that looks legit and like something I want I am very inclined to be skeptical because I just saw five obvious scams in a row. Accepting those scam ads is penny wise and pound foolish.

trueismywork 10mo ago
What's the alternative? Orkut?
- deleted 10mo ago
  [deleted]
- PaulHoule 10mo ago
  There's two markets here. (1) The market of advertisers buying ads and (2) the market of users who are attracted to these platforms and who might click on the ads and buy the product. I'm not against advertising, in fact many times I have seen something advertised, thought "I want that!" and bought it and sometimes that thing became my new favorite. If I am a platform user (2) and don't like the ads I can "exit" the platform as a whole or I can "exit" by being unresponsive to ads and when it comes to ads on YouTube and Meta platforms at least, I'm not buying it! People in market (1) are going to invest in advertising up to the point where it is profitable, and the less responsive market (2) people are the smaller the pool. Many advertisers are also sensitive to brand safety and part of that is the content you are against but another part is the other ads on the platform.
  - xp84 10mo ago
    I think the adtech-industrial complex has thrown in the towel on wanting quality ads and customers who trust those ads. It's easier to just welcome in the scammers and accept that the top 80% "savviest" people all know their ads are mostly scams. There will always still be enough marks that the scammers, who have excellent margins to play with, will come to feed at the trough of the ignorant and naïve by buying the ads. If needed, the platform can adjust the ad:content ratio to near 100%. Their 'competition' is all doing the same thing anyway, so they won't lose eyeballs in the aggregate.
  - oh_my_goodness 10mo ago
    > many times I have seen something advertised, thought "I want that!" and bought it and sometimes that thing became my new favorite. This happens. It matters to you and to the people paying for those ads … if they could really quantity it. But it’s too tiny to matter to the media outlets. You’re talking about real clicks, which are already a small fraction. Real clicks on ads that actually offer anything desirable … that’s just too small a part of total clicks. Nobody can make much money on that 0.5% (?) of the traffic, no matter how idealistic they are. Fake clicks on misleading ads are the bread and butter of the market. As a vendor, expecting online advertisers to get you customers efficiently is like expecting a real estate agent to get you the best sale price. They care about their own revenue, not yours. Look at even Amazon's own site. They're hardly bothering to show you real stuff that you actually want. Either they're completely incompetent, or that's just not where the money is.
benoau 10mo ago
I think it's just not adversely impacting "big tech", their profits and margins are soaring while they've spent years and years selling counterfeit goods, scam apps, scam videos, scam ads. They have no liability for it (section 230 immunity) and seem to have zero incentive to do better.
- braiamp 10mo ago
  Yeah, for them, it doesn't matter. As long as they get paid and nobody important complains, it will stay business as usual.
- Qem 10mo ago
  They built a meta-scam, on top of other scams.
  - kfarr 10mo ago
    It’s a scam made of scams!
- _DeadFred_ 10mo ago
  Why does 230 protect advertising? I get that it protects platforms for the speech made by users on their platform, but why does 230 protect advertising that the company chooses to accept/run?
  - benoau 10mo ago
    I don't know, I don't see why it would protect retail on Amazon either, or apps, none of that stuff is "user generated" they are contractually-bound business partners with verified identities, payments back-and-forth etc. Big difference between that and someone shitposting on Reddit, which ironically gets moderated better than any of them.
- amanaplanacanal 10mo ago
  I thought section 230 only protected against civil liability, not criminal.
fullshark 10mo ago
There's a sweet spot they want to hit, where their internal scam ad reduction efforts do enough to make sure people don't leave in droves, and they are totally fine with the scam ads that make it through bringing in revenue. The last thing they want is regulators forcing them to spend at least $X in resources to limit scam ads to some target and have it hurt their margins.
- thayne 10mo ago
  > regulators forcing them to spend at least $X in resources Even if X is 0, it would mean lost revenue from the scammers as well.
einr 10mo ago
They simply do not care about trust or anything else you think they should care about. The scam ads get probably get clicked ten or a hundred times more than legit ads. This makes money, therefore it is good and should be encouraged. They do not care how much worse the platform gets or how many people get scammed.
- deleted 10mo ago
  [deleted]
chopete3 10mo ago
Money changes psychology. The brains of the people that work in these departments operate differently. They believe in protection and growth of the revenue - not pay attention to ethics. They have to work hard to shut out critics as long as possible.
- observationist 10mo ago
  It's about getting as much money from the platform for as long as possible, regardless of the externalized damage done along the way. Anything that negatively impacts the "number goes up" goal, year over year, gets suppressed, ignored, or redirected. They hire a sufficient number of people so as to diffuse responsibility and the sense of wrongdoing by any one person or group within the company, and different aspects of the overall abusive mechanics organically get compartmentalized, so that no one manager or employee or department ever recognizes the wrongs being done. You end up with a few greedy asshats aware of the harms being done that just don't care, lots of money being made, and plausible deniability all around, with things never getting bad enough for an employee to feel like they have to take a stand or report wrongdoing.
serial_dev 10mo ago
Even if we were to accept that people who see scam ads ona platform will be less likely to trust good ads on said platform (and honestly I doubt how impactful that is), it’s not a metric Facebook cares about. You are not the customer. The customers are the people paying for the ads, and they will keep using it as long as they think it’s better than not using them.
safety1st 10mo ago
The explanation is that the platform firms operate with a high level of market power, which is another way of saying that they benefit from monopoly or near-monopoly effects that make them relatively immune from things like what their customers want. This is actually textbook monopoly stuff, well established in antitrust literature and well understood by regulators: when you see a firm institutionalizing how to defend criminal activity as a part of their business model, it's a big flag that said firm probably has some kind of immunity from how healthy, regulated markets operate. Why America has decided not to prosecute corporate criminals anymore (given that at various points in its history it was actually pretty good at this) is the really interesting question of our time.
- nickff 10mo ago
  I suspect that your explanation is what people in those organizations think is happening, but I believe that what’s really going on is that they’re ‘spending’ (and depleting) their brand equity.
  - socialcommenter 10mo ago
    I'm not sure it stops there, either - I wonder if others feel the same. If every platform is doing this, then are they destroying the trust of online media (the internet?) in general? Facebook isn't exactly alone in its reputation of monetising people's attention and serving them dangerous content. I'm eagerly waiting for the day when the elderly people in my family swear off the internet entirely.
    - llmslave2 10mo ago
      I think it's more likely that the newer gens swear it off than the older ones, who have become thoroughly brain rotted by it. It's like they have no immunity. At least gen-z is more aware of the damage it does. We're at the "hmm, I think smoking is probably bad for us" stage. Next up, serious attempts at quitting.
  - tremon 10mo ago
    Being immune to the "depletion of their brand equity" is part of the near-monopoly effects the GP was referring to.
zelphirkalt 10mo ago
Which quartal number reflects this reduced trust? There is your answer. They never see that negative impact, because they can't see that, which does not happened.
sharkjacobs 10mo ago
I think the same thing but maybe it’s you and me are wrong. Maybe it’s simply more profitable to run scams than it is to do “legit” business selling “real” products and services. Maybe the users who make ads valuable are the ones who are undiscriminating and naive and vulnerable to scams, and those users aren’t bothered by proliferation of scam ads. Maybe it does hurt the value of “normal” ads to be shown next to scams, but the scam ads are so valuable that it actually works out as a long term net positive I think that I used to assume that if scams became prominent enough they would produce a backlash, either regulatory or otherwise, but maybe that’s just not the case.
yieldcrv 10mo ago
When billions are being collected in scams and those organizations are paying for more ads, it doesn't matter what you normally do, it matters what you do when you're emotional, or drunk, or what your parents do
oh_my_goodness 10mo ago
Genuine clicks on useful ads are a tiny part of ad revenue. There’s no incentive for media to work on that slice of clicks.
RajT88 10mo ago
Exactly. I never ever buy a product advertised on Facebook. Almost without a doubt, the ad turns out to be misleading. If something looks cool, I will search it instead of clicking through. I have been seen malvertising campaigns on FB (some not even requiring a click). If the product seems legit and fair priced, I will buy it. Rarely do I find both are true when I learn about it via Facebook. My default is: scam, or at least scamm-y. Are most people less careful? I wonder.
al_borland 10mo ago
While I tend to agree with you, to the point that I've never willingly clicked on an ad, this isn't how most people that I've seen operate. I actively skip over ads in search results, skip whenever possible in video, and pay to remove them completely if it's offered (subscribing to Kagi and YouTube Premium). If I do end up seeing an ad for something that looks interesting/useful, I don't click on it. I search for it separately. I treat ads the same way I would a random text claiming to be my bank. I don't click the link, I go there on my own so I know I'm in the right place free of any funny business. The side effect of this is the merchant loses context on how effective their ad was. In contrast, when I see almost anyone else using Google, they actively look at the ads first. They treat the ads as if they were the top organic search results. If they search for "Microsoft" and Microsoft paid for a top ranked ad to their homepage, they will click on the ad link instead of the real organic result a few lines down. This makes these people very susceptible to advertisements posing at legitimate websites, yet their behavior never changes. I've said something to multiple people about skipping down to the actual results, and they claim to like the ads, or don't see a difference and just pick the first link that seems like what they want. Many of these people are otherwise tech savvy, some of whom spent decades working in the tech sector. It seems we are the weird ones for avoiding the ads or losing trust. After watching MegaLag's 2 most recent videos on YouTube about Honey[0], I can start to see why the companies behind all this don't care. Policing these types of issues lowers their profits, which effectively incentivizes scams and fraud. The people hurt are the merchants and the consumers. You'd think they would be the only two who matter at the end of the day when it comes to advertising, but apparently not. [0] Part 1 (from 1 year ago): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vc4yL3YTwWk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vc4yL3YTwWk Part 2: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wwB3FmbcC88 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wwB3FmbcC88 Part 2.1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qCGT_CKGgFE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qCGT_CKGgFE
duxup 10mo ago
I don't think they care because I'm still on youtube, but I agree. I think of youtube as a very scamy place. I have my history turned off so I get some really bottom of the barrel ads, questionable medical advice, gross out ads, borderline porn, weird conspiracy theory stuff (5G blocking hats), and straight scams "buy our product or AI will replace your job" and my recent favorite "if you're not buying our product people are manipulating you ... so give us your money so we can help you" (the irony is thick with those). Youtube is scam / bad idea central when I turn it on.
- snailmailman 10mo ago
  I get all those same ads on YouTube. It’s easily >90% complete scam products, and most of the non-scam products are at least breaking YouTube’s own “rules” regarding what content is allowed. Like if one of the reportable reasons is “addictive product” why do I see so many ads for nicotine products? I tried to report an ad that had literal nudity/porn in it. The report page was acting funky so I pulled it up manually in safari where I wasn’t logged in. and it made be log in to report the ad because the ad was age restricted. why is it running as an advertisement at all then? Clearly it got flagged somewhere to be age restricted. YouTube has approximately zero incentive to fix this. They are a complete monopoly and there isn’t any consequence to any of the blatantly illegal products that I see advertised on their platform. I’ve seen ads for drugs and firearms. The firearm ad was claiming it was “easy to sneak past security” but the highest consequence is that the ad account gets nuked and another immediately takes its place.

lokimedes 10mo ago

In some roundabout way, it’s really pathetic that the evil corporations of our times are merely dopamine peddling advertisers, and not something more sinister. I guess we should count ourselves lucky..

deleted 10mo ago
[deleted]
mcphage 10mo ago
Meta has been responsible for a lot worse than merely dopamine peddling.
Loughla 10mo ago
Yeah back in the day evil companies used to kill people in 3rd world countries and give their workers horrible diseases and injuries. I guess this is better?
- ThrowawayTestr 10mo ago
  Back in the day evil companies would overthrow governments and starve children.
  - stevenwoo 10mo ago
    It feels a bit darker that the US government is doing it now and being cheered on by their faithful voters in the name of religion and tax breaks for the wealthy and company leaders kowtowing and outright bribing in the open for favorable treatment.
  - unethical_ban 10mo ago
    Back in the day? Let's see how many people we have in poverty and poor, unaffordable medical conditions in the US in 10 years due to government destruction/stagnation and a lack of controls on the impacts of AI.
- kmeisthax 10mo ago

axus 10mo ago

If I'm reading this right, the playbook was... deleting scam ads ? And the implied problem is they only deleted searchable ads, and not trying harder to get rid of all of them. It's interesting that Facebook was trying NOT to uncover identities, they're famous for insisting on real names.

goatsi 10mo ago
All ads are searchable. They found the exact words and phrases that regulators used and then made sure those were clean. >As a result, Meta decided to take the tactic global, performing similar analyses to assess “scam discoverability” in other countries. “We have built a vast keyword list by country that is meant to mimic what regulators may search for,” one document states. Another described the work as changing the “prevalence perception” of scams on Facebook and Instagram.
thayne 10mo ago
> the implied problem is they only deleted searchable ads Well, more just the ads that matched the specific queries the regulators were using. So yes, they removed some scam ads, but there are probably many more that people are still seeing just because those didn't match the search queries the regulators were searching for. > It's interesting that Facebook was trying NOT to uncover identities, they're famous for insisting on real names. It isn't really surprising. If they required real identities, they wouldn't be able to make money from scammers using throw-away accounts, or from entities subject to US sanctions, so there is a monetary incentive not to know the identity of the ad customers.
- socialcommenter 10mo ago
  Precisely, completely agree. If this method actually removed a significant percentage of scam ads, rather than just heading off scrutiny, then a) doing proper verification wouldn't cost them $2b a year like they claim it would, and b) their quarterly revenues would be taking a meaningful (single digits %) hit and the share price would suffer.
randycupertino 10mo ago

SilverElfin 10mo ago

I imagine something like this is what happens at all those companies that send spam texts and calls like bandwidth.com or Sinch or others - a strategy to make money supporting criminals

jackhuman 10mo ago

I searched for a used steamdeck in my area and got 100% fraud sellers. My elders in my family fall for fraud via meta’s platforms. Its caused me lots of stress and pain. The only thing I can do is delete all my Meta accounts. One of the riches companies in the world with some very smart people and its ruined by toxic leadership. If this was my product, I’d feel ashamed by how trash it is. I really hope governments force stricter regulations on meta and ads in general. Meta should be liable if a user is scammed by an ad on their platform. Plane and simple.

stackghost 10mo ago
>One of the riches companies in the world with some very smart people and its ruined by toxic leadership. The rank and file are complicit. There are people commenting on HN every day who are paid handsomely to work at Meta and to act willfully blind to the awful ethics their company has displayed for two decades.
- NoToP 10mo ago
  The 1972 Knapp Commission into police corruption introduced some really great vocabulary to express "the rank and file are complicit". "Meat eaters" and "grass eaters". The meat eaters were the officers that actively pursued opportunities to be corrupt and spent a great deal of time on the job engaging in corrupt activities instead of police work. The grass eaters were essentially normal officers who would turn a blind eye or do things that had been normalized such as accepting or soliciting small bribes opportunistically. In the words of the report, "the grass eaters are the heart of the problem".
llmslave2 10mo ago
> One of the riches companies in the world with some very smart people and its ruined by toxic leadership. Leadership can certainly be blamed, but I think it comes down to their hiring practices. When you prioritise leetcode-isk wrote memorisation and deprioritise intrinsics (like ethics, shocker), you end up with a company full of people who are willing to do anything to achieve their singular goal of making TC go up. Morality or product quality be damned.

dboreham 10mo ago

What underlies this is that the USA is a fundamentally scammy country. I mean no disrespect: I'm a US citizen and have lived here for 30 years and made plenty of money from the US economy. But nevertheless it's a scam culture. And sure enough when I read the article, it says "Facebook battling Japanese regulators". Of course there wouldn't be a regulator in the USA telling Facebook to not host scam ads. Consider the TV industry in the USA: it makes huge amounts of money from political ads, which are for the most part scams. The same people who make money from those scam ads also control the news. So guess what? No pressure to not scam the population with false advertising. Perhaps it helps to have not grown up in the US. If you've been here your entire life there's a frog boiling syndrome where none of the weirdness seems weird. This is why JD and co witter on about how terrible Europe is -- they need to keep up the delusion that scammers should get to scam and there's no hope to stop them. The recent moves to sanction European campaigners against big tech disinformation is really: the scammers got the root password to the country and are using it to fight back.

yoyohello13 10mo ago
No I've lived in the US my whole life and I agree with you. Ever since I bought my house I feel like I'm constantly bombarded by people trying to scam me out of my money. I'm sure it was always like that but it seems like getting a mortgage put me on some "financially stable guy" list that attracts the vultures. Medical, home repair, finance services. Without constant vigilance it's so easy to get grifted.
- xp84 10mo ago
  Seriously. I actually want a bunch of renovation work done to my house, and door-to-door salesmen come by all the time to try to sell me that type of service. After one horrible experience that started with such a salesman, never again. I assume everyone out there is a freaking scammer because too many are. And even the companies and industries that used to be pretty benign have realized that all the growth is in scams, so they've added whole divisions of their business to try to get you onto recurring payments for stuff you probably don't want, which can all be signed up for with like 1 click, but cancelling needs a phone call during Eastern Time business hours and a 25 minute wait on hold.

neilv 10mo ago

You know how Facebook became a popular employer among new CS grads, by paying more than anyone else? You know that book/movie, "The Firm", in which the new law school graduate gets a surprisingly lucrative job offer? (spoilers) It turns out that the reason is Crime.

hrimfaxi 10mo ago
What point are you trying to make? Any company offering above market compensation is engaging in illegal activity?
- hananova 10mo ago
  Yes. But only because every company is engaging in illegal activity, big tech just more so.
- jrnng 10mo ago
  Low ethics high pay? Higher margins from lower ethics? At some point does complacency with scammers become racketeering or criminals conspiracy? Knowledge is an element of crime and they know people are being scammed yet look away from it.
- 01HNNWZ0MV43FF 10mo ago
  What point are you trying to make? That Facebook is not trying to push the boundary of laws and ethics?
- OGEnthusiast 10mo ago
  Sure seems that way, no?
- deepspace 10mo ago
  Not always- see Costco. But in a world where every company is trying to minimize expenses to maximize profits, paying significantly above market is at the very least an indicator that there may be something fishy going on.
  - 10mo ago

goodolddays9090 10mo ago

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beloch 10mo ago

Meta now has an extensive track record of doing unethical things because they're slightly more profitable. This case is relatively minor compared to what they did in Myanmar[1]. Meta has some very smart people working for them but, unfortunately, Meta's management prefers to set them to the task of creatively evading responsibility rather than actually addressing problems. Governments seem to be a step behind when it comes to protecting their citizens from unethical social media corporations. As in this case, any sensible regulations that are imposed will be circumvented in the most dishonest ways possible. Regulations often aren't imposed at all due to pressure from the U.S. government, whom Meta has considerable influence over. Could international cooperation to regulate social media solve some of these issues? _____________ [1]https://systemicjustice.org/article/facebook-and-genocide-how-facebook-contributed-to-genocide-in-myanmar-and-why-it-will-not-be-held-accountable/ https://systemicjustice.org/article/facebook-and-genocide-ho...

BLKNSLVR 10mo ago
Twitter also seems to have considerable influence over the US Government. So much so that the US has imposed sanctions on a few people in the EU for suggesting that maybe Twitter should moderate hate speech. https://townhall.com/tipsheet/dmitri-bolt/2025/12/24/five-europeans-barred-from-entering-us-due-to-their-role-in-censorship-n2668450 https://townhall.com/tipsheet/dmitri-bolt/2025/12/24/five-eu...

godelski 10mo ago

I often have the question: how much money do we waste on selfishness. It's a clear example here. Meta is wasting good customer's money by showing them alongside scams and just devaluing ads by decreasing user trust. But also we only have these regulatory agencies because of this type of selfish behavior in the first place. It sucks that these regulatory agencies cost so much money. But why do we blame the government? It's completely a problem we create. If people and companies didn't act like shit we wouldn't need those expenses in the first place. Let's not blame the regulators (for existing, but do for being ineffective) and blame the "bad apples" that are spoiling the barrel. But what I do appreciate is that other countries are stepping up and not just waiting for the US to fix things. Real progress is being made because of this even if it still has a long way to go.

awesome_dude 10mo ago
This is one of my key arguments AGAINST "libertarianism" - a proper functioning market has three things, consumers, producers, and regulators, and they each need to be well balanced. If producers have too much power in the market we see distortion, eg. When monopolies exist. If consumers have too much power in the market we see exploitation. If regulators have too much power in the market we see stagflation. Markets don't operate efficiently without all three components.
- godelski 10mo ago
  Yeah I'm actually with you on this. The government is part of the market no matter what. Through action or inaction they are still a critical player. But I think we often miss the messaging on regulators. In some way I agree with the right. It's a waste of money. But ones creating the waste isn't the government, it's those that need to be regulated
- llmslave2 10mo ago
  What do you consider an "efficient market" to look like? Do you just mean one that tends towards outcomes you personally deem important?

luke-stanley 10mo ago

Wow. Possible ways to kept Meta ad records honest and transparent: - CCing archive.org - Store on an append-only system with hashing, hello blockchain use-case ha ;D.. IPFS or even GitHub should do, no crypto payments required. - Third-party government bodies could require copies.

cryptica 10mo ago

It reminds me of something funny my grandma told me. She told me that she saw an ad on Facebook to double her money and asked her daughter if it was a legitimate opportunity. Her daughter said to her "If you ever think about calling me to ask that question, you can put down the phone because it's a scam."

etchalon 10mo ago

I'm sure one of these days Facebook will face a consequence for the amoral, corrupt and lazy culture they've engendered. Any day now.

BLKNSLVR 10mo ago

I guess Google are just smarter at hiding the proof of their shit like this. If Meta are profiting off scammers, Google are profiting more.

ta9000 10mo ago

If you still work for Meta, you are the problem and should resign immediately.

commandersaki 10mo ago

I'm still wondering what the Scam Prevention Framework enacted in Australia will do to mitigate this kind of stuff. https://www.austlii.edu.au/cgi-bin/viewdb/au/legis/cth/consol_act/caca2010265/ https://www.austlii.edu.au/cgi-bin/viewdb/au/legis/cth/conso... (Part IVF)