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

https://www.wsj.com/tech/meta-cocaine-opioids-ads-dea8e0fc

by cwwc • 2 years ago

171 215 2 years ago

wsj.com

arilotter• 2 years ago

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

animal_spirits• 2 years ago

I’ve continually gotten magic mushroom gummy advertisements

axoltl• 2 years 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.

mewpmewp22• 2 years 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?

onemoresoop2• 2 years 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.

jldugger2• 2 years 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.

onemoresoop2• 2 years 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.

freejazz3• 2 years ago

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

lovethevoid3• 2 years 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.

01HNNWZ0MV43FF2• 2 years 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

immibis3• 2 years 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.

pseudocomposer3• 2 years 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, and I have a few instances up at https://jonline.io ("flagship"/demo server), https://bullcity.social (Durham, NC community), and 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).

lovethevoid3• 2 years ago

Agreed, also a lot of room for improvement in this general area. I remember when Mastodon instances used to be a giant pain to get up and going, and now there's one click deploys and even entire businesses who will manage your server.

2OEH8eoCRo03• 2 years ago

They do? If I got the NYT to print an ad for crack what would happen to me and the NYT?

lovethevoid3• 2 years ago

There are loopholes in the US currently for drug advertisements. As an example, a very simplistic one so don't take it as legal gospel - while you cannot advertise Ketamine as a pharmaceutical on print or tv you can advertise "direct to consumer" on social media/web as long as your company doesn't specifically pack/distribute the drugs themselves.

I reckon NYT might be a little more tuned into this due to still being a news org with print still going and likely having more restrictions on their web ads due to this, but other platforms you could get away with that no problem as noted from various sources like https://www.vice.com/en/article/g5p38b/ketamine-therapy-inst... and https://www.nytimes.com/2023/03/01/opinion/ketamine-ads-depr...

anigbrowl3• 2 years ago

I'm surprised that cops haven't started arresting people for receiving ads about contraband, which would imply (to a cop brain) that they must be creating the demand for such items.

vondur• 2 years 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• 2 years 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.

01HNNWZ0MV43FF2• 2 years 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• 2 years 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.

nradov• 2 years 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.

ben_w2• 2 years ago

Stuff like "a 19 year old invented this that saves you a hundred bucks on your power bill but Big electricity is suppressing it"

I had some of the booklets on that theme when I was a kid: https://archive.org/details/george-trinkaus-tesla-the-lost-i...

Given how cheap PV is these days, I'm surprised that particular scam is still a thing.

Scoundreller2• 2 years ago

It’s possible they’re not legal.

Google got hit for internet pharmacies and forfeited all the revenue they got.

I’m sure Google had no problem paying the same number of dollars in 2011 but really liked that money in their earlier days when there wasn’t as much big $ legit ad demand.

https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/google-forfeits-500-million-g...

mfkp2• 2 years ago

https://archive.md/D4EnE

edit: hm, maybe this isn't working for the full articles on WSJ anymore...

mgh2• 2 years ago

Yeah, they don't anymore

Previous: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41115602

BillSaysThis• 2 years ago

Your archive.md link works for me.

mfkp2• 2 years ago

Interesting, it updated now with the whole article. Earlier it was just the first 2 paragraph preview.

atonse2• 2 years 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.

dragontamer4• 2 years 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.

reaperman3• 2 years 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.

mewpmewp22• 2 years ago

GPT vision can describe what is on images though quite well. Definitely should be able to understand.

But I assume this was before the release of that some time, but I don't have access to the article.

ssl-32• 2 years ago

Have you... actually used the image recognition features of even something like the web-accessible ChatGPT 4 interface, or are you just guessing here?

I feed it unstructured images of all kinds of things and it generally does a rather good job of describing them.

Just now, I found (what is allegedly) a screenshot of a Facebook ad about microdosing mushrooms. I fed the image to the bot and asked it to identify whether or not it was an ad, and the content of it, and to rate the legality of it on a scale of 1 to 50, with 1 being perfectly legal and 50 being criminally punishable.

It nailed all three questions and gave it a score of 45.

I then did the same thing with a screenshot of a Facebook ad for an Audi Q5, and it nailed all three questions and gave it a score of 1.

I followed this up with some human-made drawing of 4 horses that I found fairly randomly. It also nailed all three questions and gave it a score of 1.

Satisfied with the result, I then stopped. I don't get paid enough to make a study of this. I have little doubt that these results are reproducible.

(And is this an LLM trick or something else? Perhaps a combination of things? Is it AI, LLM, LMNOP, or some kid in a sweatshop overseas? I don't really know -- that distinction is also beyond my pay grade.)

atonse2• 2 years ago

That's exactly what I'm asking for. Yes, technically LLMs do generate text but with some prompt engineering, can be used to classify things, especially ones that require Natural Language Understanding. We have literally used them for highly targeted classification tasks and they've done a great job.

Image recognition too, of course (using Machine Learning). My point is that, all the stuff FB has spent billions on in the last few years, they have the ability to fix these issues in their sleep.

As others have said, the key is that regulators are absent.

Muromec2• 2 years ago

Because the cost of running the classifier is higher than fines imposed ( 0 euro dollar crowns ).

The moment the regulator asks them to do something, the cost of running the classifier will instead be compared to legal expense and lobbying attempts.

thaumasiotes2• 2 years ago

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

xipho• 2 years 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• 2 years ago

Do you people have FB accounts? Drug sales really make up a notable portion of ad slots recently.

barbazoo3• 2 years 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-faceb...

thaumasiotes2• 2 years ago

How did they promote it?

newsclues• 2 years ago

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

janalsncm• 2 years ago

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

tamiral• 2 years ago

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

immibis3• 2 years ago

You either do anything for money, or you are not a household name.

zht• 2 years 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• 2 years ago

Is faceless marketing (borderline) illegal?

Arrath• 2 years ago

What even is faceless marketing?

CoastalCoder• 2 years ago

[deleted]

RIMR3• 2 years 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.

freejazz3• 2 years ago

Because there is absolutely zero evidence that there are drugs being physically trafficked at Meta's offices?

Well that's not why they would raid Meta. They would raid them to preserve evidence and documents of Meta's complicity with the drug trafficking that does occur on their platforms.

singleshot_• 2 years ago

Prosecutors have a professional responsibility only to bring a case that has a substantial likelihood of a conviction.

RIMR3• 2 years 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".

kosolam• 2 years ago

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

grecy2• 2 years 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.

Muromec2• 2 years ago

They still get the money in both cases. Why would they care?

grecy2• 2 years 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.

vjulian2• 2 years 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.

jddj2• 2 years 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.

vjulian2• 2 years ago

I agree, and that would be a smaller, less interesting story for the newspaper.

rightbyte3• 2 years ago

The insidious scam would be to ask significantly above retail price and drop ship it to you.

photonthug• 2 years 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

righthand2• 2 years 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.

xigoi• 2 years ago

I came to this comment section expecting someone to argue that aykshually drugs are good. Never disappointed.

righthand2• 2 years ago

I’m arguing that drugs are good? Doesn’t take much to get you going.

hnpolicestate• 2 years 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• 2 years ago

buying drugs from a rando on Instagram is bad

no, selling drugs is illegal

aeturnum3• 2 years 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-ov...

[2] https://www.theverge.com/2016/7/10/12127638/uber-ergo-invest...

[3] https://www.cbsnews.com/news/feds-charge-ebay-stalking-scand...

ricardo813• 2 years 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• 2 years 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.

ronsor• 2 years ago

The last thing I'd complain about is YouTube not doing enough copyright enforcement. If anything, they do far too much, beyond what is reasonable or necessary! And in a lot of cases, the studios don't care, because they slurp up most of the profits, not Google.

myaccountonhn• 2 years ago

Same with providing support. They can't provide proper support at the scale they operate at, so they just neglect it completely and get away with it.

Also Amazon just completely gives up on quality assurance and let people ship whatever.

RobRivera• 2 years ago

Ubers Greyball was an eye opener for me

jbpnoy6fifty• 2 years ago

Music has always been a great way to advertise drugs and other criminal acts, however, they never get chosen to get arrested.

lcnPylGDnU4H9OF• 2 years ago

Meta has an obligation to ensure those they do business with are not criminal enterprises. The "advertising" you mention doesn't have a specific illicit enterprise paying for a call-out in the songs; it's just people expressing themselves.

meroes3• 2 years ago

I’d call that promoting drugs, which is not illegal. Advertising means there is a product for sale through the advertiser.

mulmen• 2 years ago

Seems pretty simple to me. They should pay crippling fees until their business shrinks to a point they can operate it legally. It’s unclear what benefit there is to society that an organization like Meta can scale beyond responsible operation. There is a natural self-regulation to hyperscaling. At some point you’re too big to exist. I see no reason we should forgive Meta’s incompetence. They’re not a natural monopoly. Let them fail.

AnthonyMouse6• 2 years ago

The flaw here is in expecting Facebook to be the police.

Here's what happens if you make Facebook do it. They become aware of someone running an illegal ad and ban them. But the advertiser is a criminal and still wants to make money, so they make a new account or find some way to avoid detection, and the ad ends up back in the system, and the advertiser can do this forever because they're making a net profit by continuing to play the cat and mouse game.

Here's what happens if you have law enforcement responsible for enforcing the law. Someone runs an illegal ad on Facebook, law enforcement subpoenas Facebook to find out who it was, and the advertiser gets arrested. This provides an actual deterrent because there is a penalty in excess of a ban, so it exceeds the profits from the criminal activity, and criminals dumb enough to not be deterred go to jail where they can't run any more ads.

Why are we trying to do it the stupid way and expect a non-stupid result? Corporations are not law enforcement. Stop trying to make it otherwise.

squigz• 2 years ago

I don't believe GP was suggesting Facebook do it; rather just pointing out that the second option is extremely costly and difficult, which is a consequence of the scale and influence of Facebook

jessekv2• 2 years ago

Since ads are targeted, only Facebook can know when an illegal ad is run. Are you suggesting Facebook should be reporting the people running ads to law enforcement?

datavirtue3• 2 years ago

If this was happening on my platform, I would want to know about it. Facebook is the police, of their own concerns. I'm sure they are genuinely trying to identify all these people and report them to law enforcement. What is the miss, here?

Any decent journalism on this subject? NPR takes too much money from Facebook to preclude them from rooting around in their business, and they pretty much stopped covering Facebook, other than mentions and basic AP press releases. The same is probably true with other media interests as well.

Nonetheless, I doubt Facebook wants these people and it certainly threatens their business by overrunning it with creepy drug ads, so what we see is the tiny bit that manages to bubble up through the cracks. Everyone wants Facebook to magically seal all the cracks.

aeturnum3• 2 years ago

I fully agree it's a hard problem, but Facebook is the one telling us they can be the police. If you really feel you can't operate a business without doing crimes, you shouldn't operate the business. It's understandable - there are some businesses that it takes too much skill to operate without doing a crime and so people don't (there are lots of things that banks won't do that fall into this category). Facebook, by operating in this area, is saying they think they can do it.

Someone runs an illegal ad on Facebook

The problem, to me, is that everything you said applies down stream too. You can't be sure the person purchasing the ad is trying to commit a crime either (perhaps they were hacked, perhaps they were dumb, etc). If you are promoting the "this is complex, actually" view - it's complex at every level.

The problem for society is that Facebook, as the company offering the service that occasionally breaks the law, is in a nice position. They get to profit off law breaking every once in a while and, as you say, it's hard to feel like it is possible to offer this service in such a way to perfectly avoid doing all crimes. So you get into this situation where Facebook (and everyone else at that scale) can do some crimes, but not so many that it's a big part of their business. It seems bad.

itishappy• 2 years ago

If somebody uploads illegal content (like CSAM) today, does Facebook simply delete the account and call it a day? I'd hope for a system where the police handle enforcement and Facebook simply reports its.

jdiff• 2 years ago

Facebook is the only one with access to all the information to know that a crime has even happened. Practically, there is no way for someone on the outside to be able to detect many of the illegal things that Facebook is facilitating. Unless you want all of big tech's data to be explicitly funneled to law enforcement, this is not a solution, especially when Facebook's incentivized to turn a blind eye and keep collecting checks.

gessha• 2 years ago

law enforcement subpoenas Facebook to find out who it was

See, here’s the catch - this requires law enforcement to be a functional organization. Judging on how widespread drug abuse and drug dealers are, I don’t think this would be a winning approach.

Also, I wonder how newspapers dealt with this approach? Human vet everything?

anigbrowl3• 2 years ago

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

Succinctly put. Just as LLCs function as a legal device to distributing and limiting financial risk (but strangely, not profits), they increasingly perform the same function for other kinds of legal liability. It's the worst of both worlds.

rqtwteye• 2 years ago

"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. "

If a company is too big to be managed properly it shouldn't exist. We saw that in 2008 with "Too big to fail" banks. I also remember the AG back then stating that some companies are too big to prosecute which is also big problem. Seems health insurances also have reached that scale where they can screw with people without consequences.

deathanatos2• 2 years 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.)

realusername2• 2 years 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.

warkdarrior• 2 years 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?

markovs_gun• 2 years ago

I recently got an ad for some kind of scammy garden hose nozzle that supposedly turns your garden hose into a "military grade" (whatever that means) pressure washer but the ad had a weird conspiracy theory theme and kept talking about how the big corporations and Congress were conspiring to try to make the garden hose nozzle illegal because it was too powerful for civilian use. It was like it was trying to get the 2nd amendment crowd but it's a garden hose nozzle that you can buy from Lowes anywhere.

Also, as an aside, all of these things are sort of scams even when they're not taking a weird conspiracy theory route. While it is true that they can get decent velocity through the nozzle, it's nowhere near what a real pressure washer does because fundamentally it's not adding any energy to the fluid.

tzs• 2 years ago

I wonder how they decide who to show the scam ads to?

I get them, but only very rarely. What I'm getting recently are mainly ads for Old Spice, Walmart, Consumer Cellular, Verizon Visible, Exxon, a couple upcoming movies, Target, automobile insurance, and fundraising for the Harris campaign.

The one thing almost all the ads I have gotten on YT have in common is that they are useless. Some are useless because they are advertising something that I have no interest in. The ones that are advertising something that I am interested in are either for something I've already bought or for something that I've already evaluated and bought a competitor.

I did recently switch from T-Mobile Connect to Verizon Visible, and I learned about Visible from a YT ad, but I don't think the ad influenced my decision to switch.

The reason I left T-Mobile Connect is that I'm planning on replacing my replacing my Series 4 Apple Watch soon. I'm going to get a model with cellular this time and T-Mobile Connect does not support Apple Watch cellular so I had to look for a new carrier. That led me to a page at Apple that lists all US carriers that have watch plans [1]. Visible is on that list so I would have ended up looking at them even if I hadn't heard about them earlier from that YT ad.

[1] Appalachian Wireless, AT&T, C Spire, Cellcom Wisconsin, Consumer Cellular, Cricket Wireless, GCI, Nex-Tech Wireless, Spectrum Mobile, T-Mobile USA, UScellular, Verizon Wireless, Visible, and Xfinity Mobile.

pavlov• 2 years ago

“Ethereum scams … passive income of varying amounts, but often on the order of $1M USD/y … actually just steals your money“

I bet Andreessen Horowitz have funded this company. After all it’s web3 and has both user growth and revenue.

xyst2• 2 years ago

This is why I just block them entirely. No use in reporting anymore.

finnthehuman• 2 years ago

You have to hint to the YouTube AI to give you different ads.

Just mobile signed into your primary gmail account you’ll see they’re night and day different from desktop/tv.

The old android device I use for streaming in the kitchen with an alternate gmail account? That’s where they really get good.

deathanatos2• 2 years ago

You have to hint to the YouTube AI to give you different ads.

I mean, I could, but there's nothing in that for me except the work of doing it.

Even reporting them to YT is a charity I perform mostly on the off hope that they'll get taken down so that some other person isn't scammed, but as you can see, that is met with limited success.

KTibow• 2 years ago

That's where they really get good.

Any favorites?

TiredOfLife• 2 years ago

Ads can be Premiumed/uBlocked. The countless fake channels posting fake videos for all possible search terms can't. Also those account hijacks that run cryptoscams as spacex livestream's are still happening and it takes days/weeks for Google to remove them.

qsdf38100• 2 years ago

For me it was ads from a shady guy that was telling me that schools are how the "elites" make sure the masses don’t now the truth. Then he explained how his online reeducation courses would open a new world to me (and get rich).

I reported it and YT said the ad wasn’t violating any TOS. Meanwhile I was getting this exact ad like 20% of the time.

When corporations are complicit with the spread of conspiracy theories, we’re headed for a dystopian and fascist future.

yieldcrv• 2 years 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.

brap• 2 years 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!

meroes3• 2 years 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?

throwup2382• 2 years 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.

meroes3• 2 years 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.

zoklet-enjoyer• 2 years 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• 2 years 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• 2 years ago

https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/companies/meta-has-run-hundr...

2OEH8eoCRo03• 2 years ago

Gotta love that Section 230 immunity!

barbazoo3• 2 years ago

That's about not being liable for what users of their service publish I believe, not what's happening here.

2OEH8eoCRo03• 2 years ago

Advertisers are users.

jklinger410• 2 years 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• 2 years 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).

Suppafly3• 2 years 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• 2 years ago

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

PaulHoule• 2 years 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.

galdosdi4• 2 years 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• 2 years 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.

toast02• 2 years 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 [2] https://www.eff.org/files/zeran-v-aol.pdf

Nextgrid• 2 years ago

Section 230 was drafted at a time where algorithmic (and/or ML-driven) curation of content (whether ads or actual content) wasn't a thing.

If you use algorithms to selectively choose which content the user gets exposed to (in an objective to increase your profits obviously), this is literally the definition of a publisher.

We are way past the "we just provide a dumb pipe for content between publishers and users". The pipe is no longer dumb and hasn't been for over a decade.

anigbrowl3• 2 years ago

So just rewrite or repeal it. If we make social network and UGC companies common carriers, then they'll be subject to different kinds of regulation, too bad. Right now they are having their cake and eating it, to the general detriment.

stevenicr• 2 years ago

fwiw - https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2024/07/30/seante-...

This has a good chance of being the additional cracks in 203 that bring the whole thing down imho.

The cracks were created years ago when fb and ggle did a 180 on the sopa / pipa censorship.. I knew then that the cracks would only get bigger..

A fediverse will be more and more used in the future I feel, maybe not by the masses of grandmas but certainly as more is censored in main portals people will nose around elsewhere.

galdosdi4• 2 years ago

Section 230 isn't some immutable force, so yes, political force is all that's needed,

Exactly. Glad you agree. It's just an act of congress. We pass many every year, including far bigger ones.

you've got to define advertisement.

I did in my post. I'll repeat myself for you:

(1) the platform is profiting from it

(2) the platform is pushing and selecting the content to the user at the platform's whim, not the user's request.

Seems reasonable to me but these details can be worked out if the political will for the big picture change ever actually appears.

My definition would allow the main thrust of Section 230 to remain intact. Section 230 was, in my view, most nobly intended for cases like ISPs hosting content, such as GeoCities or Cloudflare or Google Sites. This is content that the end user specifically seeks and requests. Ads as well as algorithmically recommended content don't meet this test. If I go to criminalhatespeech.com on purpose, that's on me. If TikTok advertises criminalhatespeech.com to me or puts it in my For You for whatever reason they think it'll engage me, that's on them. Simple, isn't it?

All we're doing is putting humans and robots on an even footing instead of priviliging robots over humans as the current law does (never thought I'd type that sentence someday, but it's basically true-- the platforms are getting away with doing things they could not get away with if the code was being "executed" by "hand" by humans with flow charts instead of automated with CPUs and network cards.)

mrguyorama2• 2 years ago

Section 230, if it's even remotely applicable to companies doing their own advertising on their own platforms, requires a "Good faith effort" to moderate that platform.

If a court is willing to call the moderation google and facebook do currently in advertising "good faith", that court is flat out wrong.

SissyphusXOXO• 2 years ago

Yeah, it's probably not going to be easy just because Section 230 is or at least was essential for the growth of the internet.

Is it as important now? I'm not sure, but I wonder how essential it is for big companies like Google or Meta to have this sort of protection when they don't have as much competition to incentivize moderation and may have enough money to do better research on what content they're hosting.

RomanPushkin2• 2 years 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.

dzjkb2• 2 years ago

I totally agree, but why do you think people don't use DMT recreationally?

squidsoup• 2 years ago

Because experiencing death is not a recreational activity.

RomanPushkin2• 2 years 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).

jddj2• 2 years ago

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

joeytuk• 2 years 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-f...

xyst2• 2 years 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.

lacoolj• 2 years ago

Anyone know if section 203 would cover this?

neals• 2 years ago

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

Teever• 2 years 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.

standardUser2• 2 years 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• 2 years ago

That's a bit desperate.

snowpid2• 2 years 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-...

You are welcome.

kazinator• 2 years ago

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

Ajedi323• 2 years 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• 2 years 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_• 2 years ago

And guns.

bryan_w• 2 years ago

The timing of these kind of stories should make people curious

devvvvvvv• 2 years ago

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

nurettin• 2 years 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.

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

Related Stories