Facebook fired an employee who was paid bribes to reactivate banned ad accounts

https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/craigsilverman/facebook-fired-employee-bribed-ads-inc

by coloneltcb • 7 years ago

228 99 7 years ago

brenden2• 7 years ago

To be fair, Facebook itself accepts bribes from spammers all the time in order to put ads in front of people who probably don't want to see them.

koheripbal• 7 years ago

It's common for these tech companies to set different ethical standards for paying customers.

... as another example, Indeed does not action/review companies that have been flagged as having inappropriate postings (i. e. MLM scams) as long as they have actively billed job postings.

This is evidenced by the fact that when such a company removes their automated payment and/or pauses all job listings, all the flags then get reviewed and actioned (speaking from personal experience - not MLM, but commission based job listings).

davidw• 7 years ago

I keep reporting a scammy outdoor gear site, and it keeps appearing in my FB ads.

FB is a dumpster fire.

cwkoss• 7 years ago

I get ads for financial services on Facebook. All of them looks somewhere between low-quality and outright scams.

Kind of depressing to think that a non-zero number of people are making decisions about financial management based on facebook ads.

unnouinceput3• 7 years ago

<Quote>: "“Holy shit lol,” said the partner.

“Ya,” Burke replied, punctuating his message with the sack of money emoji.</Quote>

Heh, amateurs. Let me tell you guys a story from my country, from 90's. So in those years cell phones started to become the norm. You know, those Nokia brick types (which had like 1 week of battery in them before requiring charging) but the service was like this. You would call your contact then around 4 or 5 rings will give you plenty of time to close the call, and after that a voice mail message would inform you the contact was not answering and inviting you to leave a message. Problem was that if you went that far, then you'd pay for those seconds when the automated voice mail be initiated just like if your contact would've answered. So far so good. But one CEO of a cell company decided he wanted money. So randomly, he would enable the automated voice mail message to enter just after one ring. Now, individually that was not expensive, around few cents for each subscriber, but on the whole network this would mean for every hour this trick was pulled the company would win one million dollars (yes, you read that correctly).

sekh60• 7 years ago

Very unethical, but pretty brilliant.

Chinjut2• 7 years ago

This trick would hit tens of millions of subscribers every hour?

The number of subscribers and frequency of their calls required to achieve this in the 90s seems difficult.

unnouinceput3• 7 years ago

Eastern Europe country, so when we finally broke off Russia we went to implement very fast Western technologies. This also coupled with the fact that during Communism era fixed phone were something to wait years to be approved off made cell phone penetration extremely fast. People were starving for communication so it didn't matter that we barely had food, we still wanted cell phones.

And not ten of millions, just ten is enough. Call your family and few friends under this trick and oops, you're good to pay an extra dollar at the end of the month.

Cd00d• 7 years ago

I'm not doing the math, but I do recall that time on those phones was _very_ expensive. Dollars per minute.

And, in those days if you didn't press the 'end' button to terminate the call, regardless of the other party hanging up, it kept an open line. I remember my dad getting several hundred dollar bills related to saying 'bye' and tossing the phone onto the passenger seat.

egorfine• 7 years ago

Ааа, старые добрые времена :-)

anticensor2• 7 years ago

Aaa, good old days :-)

says the parent post.

lwb• 7 years ago

Sen. Mark Warner of Virginia told BuzzFeed News that the revelation of a Facebook employee being bribed to reactivate scammy ads was further evidence of the unaccountability of platforms and the corruption endemic to digital advertising markets.

I'm confused. If anything, this seems to me like evidence that Facebook is holding people accountable for violating regulations on the platform.

AngeloAnolin• 7 years ago

I think this pertains to the fact of how easy it was for people / organizations to directly contact people inside Facebook to do things at their bidding. FB does hold their staff accountable but the Senator wants more safeguard so that it is very difficult for such an event to be carried out successfully.

kevinh• 7 years ago

The article continues:

“For over four years, I have raised concerns to the [Federal Trade Commission] that behavioral advertising markets are rife with fraud – not just in the form of clickfraud but, exploiting the scale of large platforms, in scams and criminal schemes that directly exploit American consumers,” he said in a statement. “Because of Section 230, neither the victims of these schemes nor state [attorneys general] can seek to hold the platforms accountable for their continued facilitation of these frauds.”

Which suggests that he does not want to rely solely on Facebook policing itself for accountability.

tedunangst• 7 years ago

That sounds like a smokescreen for "section 230 let's people say things about me that I don't like and we need to find a way to repeal it."

austincheney• 7 years ago

Reactive versus proactive, which where I believe the Senator is speaking to. If Facebook were proactively monitoring for this the way most organizations monitor PII they would be more accountable.

mehrdadn2• 7 years ago

I never understood why firing is seen as sufficient punishment for bad actors inside a company. There are so many situations where the payoff is still much higher even if you get fired.

stickfigure• 7 years ago

What more do you want? Criminal prosecution for violating Facebook's internal policy?

asdfasgasdgasdg• 7 years ago

It shouldn't be, but it's not Facebook's job to prosecute criminal bribery and embezzlement charges. They should and probably would refer the employee to the authorities, but that's the full extent they can go.

dragonwriter2• 7 years ago

I never understood why firing is seen as sufficient punishment for bad actors inside a company.

It's seen as sufficient, often, because:

(1) even if a civil cause of action is available, the cost of litigation far exceeds any plausible benefit to the company, and

(2) The company can't direct criminal prosecution and the high bar of proof and other competing prosecutorial priorities mean even if the conduct the company believes occurred which justified the firing would also be criminal, it often won't meet the criteria a public productor will apply before prosecuting.

There are so many situations where the payoff is still much higher even if you get fired.

Maybe, but that doesn't mean that there is a correction to that circumstance which doesn't itself have social costs that outweigh it's utility.

riazrizvi• 7 years ago

A very cheap way to appear to be holding yourself accountable, that has been used since the dawn of civilization, is to offer a scapegoat as a sacrifice to the gods, then you can carry on as usual.

What incentive is there for this company to continue to behave, now that you have been pacified with this token gesture? Laws are stronger incentives because even though you still can't see what the company is doing, they are a real deterrent. Because the company knows that a disgruntled employee might one day blow the whistle if they carry on as before...

sg47• 7 years ago

In this case accountability would have involved periodically reviewing and catching banned accounts that have been reviewed and making sure they had a valid reason to be revived.

Koremat66662• 7 years ago

Sen. Mark Warner must tell us how many of his colleagues in Congress have gone to jail over far serious crimes.

elliekelly• 7 years ago

In this case it appears Facebook held the person accountable only after journalists started asking questions. That suggests Facebook either didn’t know what was happening or (less likely) didn’t care. Any system that relies on reporters to identify policy violations is weak to nonexistent.

OrgNet• 7 years ago

low level employee is why this was allowed....

Johnny555• 7 years ago

I'm confused. If anything, this seems to me like evidence that Facebook is holding people accountable for violating regulations on the platform.

This would have more weight if Facebook had discovered this on their own, but it was an outside investigation that uncovered it. Firing people once they are outted by an external agency is pretty weak accountability of their platform. And note that this was a contractor so should have had higher scrutiny than a full-time employee, but I know from personal experience that it's often the opposite - the contract company signed a contract saying that they'll abide by all of the rules, so no need to monitor them, after all, they signed a contract.

A company spokesperson confirmed that an unnamed worker was fired after inquiries from BuzzFeed News sparked an internal investigation

y-c-o-m-b• 7 years ago

I don't use Facebook, but I would think a good transparent way to deal with this is open a page to the public that lists the ads a company is running along with statistics like how many times the company has violated policies, how many ad runs they've accumulated and how many dollars have been spent to run those ads.

wayoutthere• 7 years ago

So just for scale, a single ad campaign could have thousands of individual ads. Times a few dozen campaigns at a company. Times millions of buyers, many of whom buy through an ad agency or network reseller.

The scale of this problem is too big for transparency. Hypertargeting of advertisements should just be illegal.

jsonne• 7 years ago

They actually do have the first bit. Look up the "ads library" and you can see every ad a page is running presently.

aberforth123• 7 years ago

Pff, what can we do to break the ad industry? It sucks on so many levels.

oconnor663• 7 years ago

Think of an ad as something like a 1¢ payment from me to the website. Suppose there was no such thing as ads, and the website wanted me to make the 1¢ payment directly. What are our options for doing that? Is there any way to do it without paying fees much larger than 1¢?

If you want ad-supported businesses to go away, invent a convenient way for me to pay Google 1¢. (Convenient as in, I don't need to create an account with a password.) It's extremely difficult, both for technical and legal reasons.

izzydata• 7 years ago

I'd am perfectly comfortable with all ad based internet content disappearing from the internet. A much better internet will take its place.

prox• 7 years ago

Good call... Been thinking about this same system for a while. Give me a cookiejar I can fill with a small amount only from mybank / paypal etc and instead of accepting the flipping cookies, I click a button and throw a couple of cents in the jar of the website. I like what brave is doing, but I want more control over it.

perl4ever5• 7 years ago

I didn't know anything about the ad industry, but it seems like you may be off by an order of magnitude. Click through rates average 3+%, and it costs around $2.70 per click.[1] That seems to mean an impression is worth in the ballpark of 8-10 cents. Based on my recent web browsing history tonight, I seem to have visited around one page per minute.

So, the problem is not how to create the infrastructure for micropayments, but rather that explicit charges would be very high - the effective cost of browsing the commercial web is about $6/hr, which is about twice what it cost in the mid 90s to use AOL.

I'm not sure of all the implications, but I think this should substantially change a person's views.

[1]https://valveandmeter.com/pay-per-click-statistics/

dredmorbius6• 7 years ago

https://www.bbc.co.uk

https://www.npr.org/

https://www.pbs.org/

https://www.cbc.ca/

https://www.abc.net.au/

http://www.ard.de/ (and satellites: NDR, RBB, SWR, MDR, WDR, BR, hr, SR, and RB, because reasons)

And similarly...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_broadcasting

matheusmoreira• 7 years ago

By blocking the ads. Extensions such as uBlock Origin are highly effective and can be used on mobile Firefox.

tempsy• 7 years ago

Will never not be surprised by how little people will accept to ruin their lives. $5k? Really?

catalogia3• 7 years ago

This morning I saw somebody riding their bicycle without a helmet. They could die like that, and for what? A moderate sensation of comfort?

Obviously they perceived the risk as low.

katbyte• 7 years ago

fwiw not all cultures look at bicycle helmets the same: https://www.treehugger.com/bikes/why-dutch-dont-wear-helmets...

matkoniecz• 7 years ago

Note that bicycle helmets are not very useful at improving outcomes. Especially for cycling within cities, MTB or something completely different is likely to have a different risks and helmets may be a clearly good idea there.

amiantos• 7 years ago

If $5k is worth the risk of losing their job, they're not making much money at Facebook, nor think there's potential for much growth in the role. Losing that job isn't going to be a big deal for them, and the article doesn't suggest any legal action may be taken against them.

It's another argument, but I think it's on Facebook entirely that they don't pay their employees enough, keep them happy enough, to prevent this sort of thing from happening. When you leave content moderation to your lowest paid employees, you are only encouraging people to figure out how to game the system for more.

velp• 7 years ago

I think you're making the mistake of assuming people always act rationally. There are countless anecdotes of well paid, ostensibly happily employed people losing their job over juiced expense reports or similar small (in dollar terms) schemes.

imron2• 7 years ago

$5k from one customer. I bet it wasn't the only time he did this.

sriram_sun• 7 years ago

Nope. We do it all the time. Next time you get to an intersection, look around to see how many folks are looking at their phones.

danso2• 7 years ago

OK it's not surprising that rogue insiders – whether it's a regular ads employee, manager, or a site-reliability engineer – can attempt this kind of tampering. It is surprising that FB – who, if anything, is excellent at data and tracking – seems to lack seemingly basic access controls and detection mechanism to prevent this. According to BuzzFeed, FB only launched an internal investigation after BF asked questions about this employee:

A company spokesperson confirmed that an unnamed employee was fired after inquiries from BuzzFeed News sparked an internal investigation. The employee in question was based in the company’s Austin office, according to information obtained by BuzzFeed News.

The article doesn't say exactly [0], but potentially a BF reporter might have noticed that scammy ad accounts that BuzzFeed previously reported on [1] – which FB then banned in response – were inexplicably active again. But why doesn't FB have an internal flag/bit for these egregiously scammy ad accounts (and their unique identifiers) in their systems? A flag that would trigger an automated notice/audit when that account was reactivated for any reason, by any employee?

[0] It's possible the article under discussion was completely sparked by insider leaks to the BF reporter, e.g. "chat messages obtained by BuzzFeed News". I'm just saying that it's possible that the rogue activity potentially seems to have been observable by any outsider, i.e. completely observable and preventable if Facebook had proper access control.

[1] https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/craigsilverman/facebook...

AJ007• 7 years ago

Remember when Google got in trouble for helping advertisers sell illegal drugs and even Larry Page knew a what was going on? I doubt Facebook cares.

https://www.wired.com/2013/05/google-pharma-whitaker-sting/

danso2• 7 years ago

Actually this story did make me think about an even older article about Google [0]: in 2010, when a site reliability engineer was fired after allegedly spying on teens' Google accounts. At the time, it really underscored to me how much power – and potential to abuse it – that insider employees have. Particularly site reliability and security engineers, who inherently need to have this kind of power and access do do their jobs:

"If you're an SRE, for instance, on Gmail, you will have access to mailboxes because you may have to look into the databases," the former Google SRE—who did not work with Barksdale—explained to us by phone. "You'll need access to the storage mechanisms," he explained, pointing out that in order to determine the cause of a technical issue with Gmail, an SRE might have to access emails stored on Google's servers to see if data is corrupted.

I'm assuming in the years since, Google's SRE have mechanisms in place to audit and log the use of sudo-level access and powers. Twitter, on the other hand, seems to not have implemented this, at least as of 2015 [0]

I can imagine FB having decent auditing and logging when it comes to internal access of private data of user accounts. But not when it comes to ad accounts, considering the level of scammy activity these ad accounts had when BuzzFeed News reported on them [2]

[0] https://gawker.com/5637234/gcreep-google-engineer-stalked-te...

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21467921

[2] https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/craigsilverman/facebook...

dboreham• 7 years ago

Also surprised. I've been involved with designing and implementing "customer service portal" functionality for a couple of services that were quite small, and yet this is something we very much considered. For example we added rate limiting such that even though a CSR could override user account state via the portal, they couldn't do it that much without triggering a block on their ability to do it again.

imron2• 7 years ago

OK it's not surprising that rogue insiders – whether it's a regular ads employee, manager, or a site-reliability engineer – can attempt this kind of tampering.

In this case, it was a "contractor". Next time, it will be an "intern" etc etc.

lainga• 7 years ago

"On Sunday, an unidentified wrecker sent by the Imperialist powers to humiliate Facebook..."

HugoDaniel• 7 years ago

was it zuckerberg ?

kls2• 7 years ago

If they where making millions, then this guy sold himself cheap at 5K. He was literally the decision maker between them and millions of dollars. That is why they jumped at the retainer price. He could have hit them for 50k and they would not have blinked.

inetknght• 7 years ago

I don't think you understand how the court system in America works

kls2• 7 years ago

I was not commenting on the morality of what the individual did. Rather that he was shitty at sales. I personally would not have done what he did and find it reprehensibly, I am fully aware of how the court systems work. The point of my post is how these people always seem to undersell their illicit services when said services are a rare commodity and are valuable to the purchaser. My comment was specifically about the seller of services not knowing how to price his market. The morality and legality issues have been covered in several other comments so I figured no need to beat that horse.

sp0dr• 7 years ago

Knowing Facebook it seems like they would rather corner that market themselves.

rntksi• 7 years ago

We run ads for small beauty clinics & spas that cannot afford their own staff to do that kind of work. This includes facebook ads which have high return value for the businesses.

I cannot tell you the amount of frustrating time we had to spend to chase Facebook to stop banning us because of an algorithm that thinks the belly buttons and the ladies in our ads resemble adult ads (it's not in any way nsfw, it just shows more skin than usual because that gets interested clicks)

Sometimes I wish there was someone to talk to at facebook to make the automated process less painful, but we are in an Asian country with no facebook representative.

seibelj• 7 years ago

This is super common, I knew a guy who knew a guy who could get similar stuff done at another famous social network. A company I know got its short url because the employee snagged it from some nobody and gave it to the company. I don’t feel that this is illegal as it is private company that can do what it want, but a low employee doing this unilaterally is sketchy.

henvic• 7 years ago

Ironically, since I interviewed for a Facebook position a year ago, I can't post my website link anymore (hosted on GitHub page - programming/photos, basically) there or on Instagram. It probably happened because I sent my link to too many friends too fast to ask for opinions, and Facebook marked it as spam. I tried to ask for help multiple times by using their 'review' feature, with no answer.

randyrand• 7 years ago

If they paid facebook directly would it have still been considered a bribe?

Facebook fired an employee who was paid bribes to reactivate banned ad accounts

Related Stories