Meta projected 10% of 2024 revenue came from scams

https://sherwood.news/tech/meta-projected-10-of-2024-revenue-came-from-scams-and-banned-goods-reuters/

by donohoe • 9 months ago

749 534 9 months ago

cyanydeez• 9 months ago

Seems low, they need to pump those numbers up if they want to compete with the trp administration, russia or twittee.

Hungarian ruling party is or was at some point the largest advertiser on Google in EU so yes, the refined recommendation machine has become the perfect polarization machine especially against demographics which tend to believe what they read and watch.

random97498323• 9 months ago

Scams seem like the norm in 2020s. Crypto, Quantum Computing startups, "AI" (LLMs), Amazon delivering fakes, electric vehicles (what happened to all electric by 2030?). Yesterday I saw that the Playstation Store started doing "personalised discounts" where they will now discount the same game at different rates for different people within the same country without explicitly telling people.

Someone recently even tried to attempt scamming me when buying a burger by telling me if I want certain toppings without telling me it will cost more. Apparently now have to play mind games when buying a burger.

miyuru• 9 months ago

Original Reuters article: https://www.reuters.com/investigations/meta-is-earning-fortu...

mrweasel2• 9 months ago

That probably depends on your definition of a scam, but it seems fairly low. Many products and services advertised online just skirts the border of being scams or fraud.

chrischen2• 9 months ago

Agreed. At best most of the stuff I ended up buying from an Instagram ad turned out to be oversold or overpromised and underdelivered. While not a scam outright, it's sort of training me to avoid buying anything from ads...

piva003• 9 months ago

It got so bad that even non-tech savvy people around me learnt to do a lot of research about any product shown on Instagram ads.

To me any product advertised on Instagram, or through YouTubers sponsorships, have become synonymous with overpromised bullshit if not outright scams. Every single time I see a sponsorship deal on a YouTube video I do some research just to validate it, and the vast majority of it are outright shitty products.

It's been working great as a signal of what products not to buy.

mrweasel2• 9 months ago

One of my theories is that there isn't actually enough honest companies buying ad space to satisfy the shareholders in companies like Alphabet or Meta. If they actually care to also filter out the ads for junk products and services, there would probably be a minor collapse in the industry.

Workaccount211• 9 months ago

There is an entire network of "get rick quick just by my pdf" intagramers, who peddle a pdf teaching you how to find a chinese product, make a website, and then drop ship that chinese product for 3x the cost to unsuspecting buyers.

Probably 75% of products you see on instagram ads, you can go find on temu for their actual cost, usually at 80% discount.

wslh• 9 months ago

That probably depends on your definition of a scam, but it seems fairly low.

That probably depends on your definition of a scam but I'd argue we need to resynchronize that definition. They are scams, because the people behind them know what they're saying is plainly false, and they exploit the explosion of digital networks (like ads) to spread those lies. In the 20th century, the channels for scams were far narrower and easier to pinpoint.

carlosjobim7• 9 months ago

Those are the other 90% of Meta revenue. Pure criminal fraud is 10%.

croisillon• 9 months ago

i came to say that, even outdoor advertising probably gets 10 or 20% revenue from snake oil

AbstractH242• 9 months ago

And what percentage of infomericals and other off-peek TV advertising is in the grey area around scams?

balderdash• 9 months ago

I wonder what their definition of scammy is? I bet it’s pretty narrow.

procaryote• 9 months ago

It catches abouth 10% of scams ;)

stronglikedan2• 9 months ago

Probably limited to strictly criminal scams so as to avoid liability.

cjonas2• 9 months ago

At least 50% of the YouTube promoted videos I get are crypto currency scams where some paid actor walks you though deploying an eth contract that empties your wallet. I report every one and nothing changes :(

Kelteseth• 9 months ago

Same. About half of Youtube ads that I get on my AppleTV (no adblock there sadly) are now AI generated scam products.

iso16313• 9 months ago

My TV has ad block for youtube. I pay 20 minutes salary per month and see no adverts at all, on TV, on phone, on computer.

I never understand why well-paid HN commentators refuse to pay for their entertainment.

On the web at large, sure use an ad blocker, there's no choice there. There is on youtube though.

r0fl4• 9 months ago

It’s crazy how bad it has gotten and some channels have like 10 ads if it’s a long enough video

YouTube premium lite has been a game changer. Otherwise I would have given up on watching on Apple TV

FinnKuhn• 9 months ago

For some reason all the YouTube ads on my TV are very very normal ads for well known companies and products.

As soon as I disable my adblocker on my PC though I only get fake scam ads.

cryptoegorophy2• 9 months ago

And sadly I have to compete with them trying to sell physical products on YouTube. Just no way

topkai22• 9 months ago

Just checked my ad history (https://www.clrn.org/how-to-see-recently-viewed-ads-on-youtu...);

Google YouTube TV for NFL Sunday ticket Robinhood Some dog tracker thing Detergent Peloton Liberty mutual Some truck brand Foam insulation

Other than how to buy gold ads and sandy hook promise, my ads are very mild. YMMV

jasonlotito4• 9 months ago

For what it's worth, I see no crypto videos. YouTube recommends stuff I find enjoyable (lots of sketch comedy, TTRPG videos, interesting documentary style stuff, BTS on video game development, etc). I really have to wonder if your tastes align with crypto currency scams.

That being said, I am paying for Premium, so I wonder if you are, and if you are blocking ads.

infecto5• 9 months ago

We are talking about ads and promoted videos. Nothing to do with what it is recommending unless I am entirely conflating the root of this subject. If that is true, then of course you would never have seen these as a premium user.

Scam videos are the chum box ads of the video world. Usually the lowest cost ads and so if you block tracking or are viewing a video in a private session you will have the highest chance of hitting these ads.

timpera• 9 months ago

Same for me, and the worst thing is that they always take 3 days to review my report and delete the scam.

BLKNSLVR4• 9 months ago

Ironically, one of the potentially greatest uses of AI, and it doesn't seem to be getting applied at all.

JohnConnorX99• 9 months ago

Why do you provide free labor to Google by reporting those ads? Just block the adds...

stronglikedan2• 9 months ago

Even better, block them and click them all with the Adnauseam extension.

lm28469• 9 months ago

I get 50% AI generated tai chi promising strength gain, weight loss and enlightenment, the other 50% israel sponsored ads assuring me people in gaza are not starving at all and completely healthy

ben_w5• 9 months ago

Had a few of those too.

Mostly, I'm getting things like German ads for my local German supermarket (that I would've gone to anyway without the ad) dubbed badly into English with an AI that can't tell how to pronounce the "." in a price, plus a Berlin-specific "pay less rent" company that I couldn't use even if I wanted to because I don't rent.

But when I get 30 seconds of ads a minute into a video that had 30 seconds of ads before I could start watching… I don't care what the rest of the video was going to be about, I don't want to waste my life with a 30:60:30:… pattern of adverts and "content" whose sole real purpose is now to keep me engaged with the adverts. (This is also half of why I don't bother going to Facebook, every third post is an ad, although those ads can't even tell if I'm a boy or a girl, which language I speak, nor what my nationality is, and the first-party suggested groups are just as bad but grosser as they recently suggested I join groups for granny dating, zit popping, and Elon Musk).

bluedino2• 9 months ago

Remember broadcast TV, early in the morning or late at night?

Infomercials for all kinds of scams from buying real estate with zero down, crap products that didn't work...

yard20102• 9 months ago

Haha it goes both ways!

iammrpayments2• 9 months ago

I get a lot of ads from unicef asking money to send good to Gaza so I’m not sure how they target users

zahlman8• 9 months ago

israel sponsored ads assuring me people in gaza are not starving at all and completely healthy

I've never seen anything like this and I see the reverse quite a bit.

colechristensen2• 9 months ago

I pay for YouTube so all I get is paid creator promotions for VPNs and Squarespace unless it's someone being sent a free thing in exchange for a review

Normalize paying for things instead of selling your attention to the highest bidder.

r0fl4• 9 months ago

YouTube on Apple TV was one of the last places I saw ads. Ad blockers on browser and iPhone and all other streaming providers I pay for have no ads

Paying for YouTube premium lite (I think it’s new) has been the best thing in ages! The toxic ads are finally gone!

piva003• 9 months ago

YouTube Premium Lite used to exist years ago, then they discontinued it in 2024 (I know because I used to be a very happy subscriber), now they brought it back but only in a few selected markets[0].

Google products' bullshit as usual, I never needed/wanted YouTube Music and the other bloat they wanted to force me to pay for, I was happily paying to not have ads...

[0] https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/6307365?sjid=93860...

koakuma-chan4• 9 months ago

What if you take YouTube to court

2OEH8eoCRo08• 9 months ago

Ideally this but Section 230 guarantees that you will lose.

The laws need to be changed.

Workaccount211• 9 months ago

It's because google has no profile on you, likely because you block all tracking. Which is fine, but at least understand that it's not the norm.

Normal non-tech users (from watching youtube at friends houses or at my parents), mostly get ads for fabric softener and cat litter.

jeffbee3• 9 months ago

Yeah, it's wild how poorly the hackernewses understand this. If the ad platform has few signals for targeting, but it does have the available signals of you're using a weird VPN or tor, and a weird user agent on an uncommon platform, then it's just going to assume you're a crypto loser like the other people sharing those traits.

reaperducer4• 9 months ago

If Google doesn't know what ad to show me, why not show no ad, instead of a scam?

Does trillion-dollar Google desperately need the 3½¢ of revenue the scam ad generates?

arnaudsm• 9 months ago

Most FAANG executive and engineers use premium plans or AdBlockers, they probably don't care or even notice how dangerous their products are getting.

yard20102• 9 months ago

I dunno,I saw a video of mister Elon Musk himself telling me without twitching a muscle in his face except his lips to put all my money on his new crypto venture. Seems pretty legit to me.

jrmg• 9 months ago

I’m buying his new heater that will heat my house in minutes with virtually no electricity usage!

Home Depot doesn’t want me to know about it, but I saw the ad!

Hammershaft• 9 months ago

I've seen many variants of this, often with deepfake Elon sharing his new crypto project with "10% returns per day"

cuu508• 9 months ago

protip, install uBlock Origin - no more ads in Youtube

rozab• 9 months ago

The recent YouTube updates made me disabled my adblocker for a bit. Almost every ad I got was a scam. I reported one to YouTube, a deepfake investment scam. They actually got back to me and said they had removed the ad.

2 days later, I got the same ad again.

getnormality2• 9 months ago

As my children become old enough to have more unfettered internet access, I plan to tell them the lessons of my experience: that all online ads are for products that range from disappointing to fraudulent, so do your best to completely ignore them. I would hope that every parent does the same and we end up with a generation that dries up the revenue for this sick racket.

I suppose the next move by advertisers will be corrupting all the other metrics of quality that I rely on. At that point, paywalled services like Consumer Reports (which has its own massive limitations) may be the only relatively authentic signals of quality left in the digital world.

A convergence to that equilibrium can be predicted based on it having already happened in the financial advice industry. The dictum that "if it's free, you're the product" is just as true of old-school in-person finance as it is of the digital world, except in finance the exploitative free system has been carefully carved out by decades of industry-honed regulation.

AbstractH242• 9 months ago

Do you think your kids are old enough to internalize that? I assume they are somewhere around pre-teen.

I don't have any kids, so asking because I don't know and am curious.

ryandrake2• 9 months ago

I think even more general lessons are appropriate: "Anyone approaching you trying to sell you something, is selling garbage." which includes ads but also other forms of unsolicited commercial communication. Or "Anyone approaching you, when you can't figure out what it is they want, is likely trying to sell you garbage." You need to have your shields way up these days.

getnormality2• 9 months ago

I have never forgotten this since the day I naively sat through a meandering two hour pitch from hell for James Hardie siding.

Honestly, in every area of my life where I have to rely on others, someone has tried to grift me at least once. And that's only the cases where I have definitive evidence.

2OEH8eoCRo08• 9 months ago

Scam ads and the sale of banned goods. They don't do anything about it because they aren't liable.

Repeal section 230

If you place these ads you should be held accountable. Meta has a duty to know who they're taking money from.

r0fl4• 9 months ago

Not sure why you got downvoted so hard!

Banks can’t take money from drug cartels. Why can meta and google take money from crypto scams ripping people off

2OEH8eoCRo08• 9 months ago

Repealing section 230 scares the users here but a lot of these problems stem from a lack of liability.

They say the people placing ads should be liable. This sounds reasonable but in practice they're anon overseas and can't be held accountable but Meta will still take their money!

jcranmer• 9 months ago

Repeal section 230

§230 protects Meta from liability for user-generated content. Ads are not user-generated content. So repealing it would do absolutely nothing in this case.

2OEH8eoCRo08• 9 months ago

Advertisers are business users and the ads are generated by them.

kmeisthax• 9 months ago

Naah, I'd rather not go back to the days of noted penny-stock scammer Jordan Belfort suing every online forum to hide evidence of his crimes as "defamation", thank you very much.

Furthermore, the precedent that CDA 230 was intended to overturn would not help much. Fraud isn't defamation, and there's all sorts of lying you can do in advertising that doesn't rise to the level of fraud in the eyes of the law. So the courts might just decline to extend the Belfort precedent to the advertising business altogether.

What you want is a law that explicitly says "CDA 230 does not apply to fraudulent advertising", explicitly defining advertising as any speech that the speaker is paying to publish on the platform. This neatly exempts all the same speech that CDA 230 was intended to protect while still allowing you to sue the shit out of Facebook[0] for taking money from scammers.

tl;dr Free Speech should only apply to free speech. Money speech is not Free Speech.

[0] It is always ethical to deadname corporations.

baggachipz• 9 months ago

I would posit that nearly 100% of their revenue comes from scams of one sort or another.

buellerbueller3• 9 months ago

you must work in adtech!

notahacker• 9 months ago

Certainly puts the £3m lawsuit settlement with Martin Lewis (UK consumer financial advice guru who sued because he's the go-to fake endorsement of any scam product targeting Britons using Facebook ads) into perspective.

No wonder scammers are still spamming his likeness all over Facebook paid ads even though it's technically trivial for them to algorithmically flag it

wahnfrieden2• 9 months ago

The news here per https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2025/11/bombshell-report... is that Meta set an internal policy that scammers above 0.15% of Meta’s revenue must be protected from any flagging. It’s not a technical challenge. It’s something they desire to maintain and have codified.

joering2• 9 months ago

This just came out yesterday but what the hell man! its like only keeping your top cocaine sellers in hope less of your people on the streets, less possibility to get caught. Everyone else out.

How the heck are they not being raided and at least temporarily shut down at this exact moment? No wonder Trump is best friend of Mark as of recently... it really does scream "guilty".

recursivecaveat• 9 months ago

Despite those efforts, this spring, Meta’s safety team “estimated that the company’s platforms were involved in a third of all successful scams in the US,”

1 third of all scams, crazy.

macNchz5• 9 months ago

Alongside a password manager and keeping things up to date, using an ad blocker is truly a foundational security practice these days. The big advertising players simply have all of the wrong incentives to control this problem. They could massively reduce the volume of scams advertised on their networks, but it’d be worse for them on two fronts: they’d have to pay for more moderation, and they’d lose billions in revenue in the process. Shoulder surfing while a non-savvy user browses Facebook or YouTube without an ad blocker and engages with obviously fraudulent ads is painful.

redwood• 9 months ago

Is there a top recommended ad blocker that has strong security Bona fides you recommend for android?

c0brac0bra• 9 months ago

Brave Browser

coldpie• 9 months ago

Use Firefox and install the uBlock Origin extension in Firefox.

I also suggest turning on the Annoyances and Cookie Banner filters in the uBO settings. They get rid of many popups.

Blocking in-app ads is a whole other ballgame. I don't have any suggestions for that.

macNchz5• 9 months ago

I don’t use Android, but I understand uBlock Origin works with Firefox on it, which is kind of the gold standard on desktop, given the other browsers now restrict extensions in ways that make ad blockers less effective.

kelvinjps102• 9 months ago

Besides Firefox and unlock, I recommend rethink and the block lists, it will block ads in other apps.

Larrikin• 9 months ago

You can actively poison your ad profile by using AdNauseum, which clicks on all the ads and then throws away the response. The actual ads are still hidden using UBO under the hood.

You can also use AdGuard+Tailscale to get DNS blocking of all ads on all devices. Tailscale will let you block in app ads, even on your phone even when on the cell network.

I combine both to block as much as possible.

Noaidi4• 9 months ago

Get Mullvad VPN. It has ad and many other DNS blockers built into the app.

asadotzler5• 9 months ago

uBlock Origin with Firefox. Nothing blocks as well, or from as trustworthy a provider.

fouronnes3• 9 months ago

I don't see how the yearly tech support I do with my parents at Christmas will not one day converge to an outright ban of the internet. I am now demoing the level of sofistication of AI powered scams, telling them that it is now entirely possible they will get a VIDEO CALL from me that's not actually me asking for God knows what in a very convincing way using my face and voice. I am scared and this close to setting up a secret passphrase in case they need to tell me appart from a clone.

cj• 9 months ago

My guess is the already-existing trend towards walled gardens will simply continue. When a public space is dangerous, people retreat into "safe" enclosed spaces.

- "Never download anything unless it's from the Apple App Store"

- "Never buy anything unless you're on amazon.com"

- "Dont use the internet outside of ChatGPT"

ceejayoz3• 9 months ago

it is now entirely possible they will get a VIDEO CALL from me that's not actually me asking for God knows what in a very convincing way using my face and voice

Worse, your fake version will be convincingly begging on the call for God knows what while being horribly tortured. Audio versions of this are already a thing.

Noaidi4• 9 months ago

I am scared and this close to setting up a secret passphrase in case they need to tell me apart from a clone.

I have done this already and convinced a friend to do it after her father fell victim to a scam where he was convinced the sheriffs department wanted him to pay off a fine in gift cards.

I am also concerned that one might steal a trove of texts from someone and plug it into AI which could mimic the writing and tone of someone.

frankc• 9 months ago

We are all going to need to have personal passwords/safe words we don't reveal to untrusted parties for authentication. Or maybe personal retinal scanners? I think personal auth might be an interesting startup to get ahead of this.

BiteCode_dev2• 9 months ago

I already setup a secret passphrase with my family. My mother is particularly naive when it comes to what's online. Of course she is going to get abused.

A passphrase is cheap. If you never need to use it, so what?

nutjob2• 9 months ago

In the future AI bots which are a near perfect facsimile of yourself will indeed call, and an AI facsimile of your mother will answer, and once the appropriate security protocols are exchanged, you'll get through.

God help anyone not armed with AI in the future, that's why it cannot be locked up by corporations or government.

nostrademons2• 9 months ago

I think the Internet will, sometime in the near future, just get shut down. That's been what actually happens in countries that are undergoing civil unrest or war like Russia, Lebanon, Afghanistan, Tanzania, Israel, Myanmar, etc. And it's fairly likely civil unrest or perhaps even war may spread to an increasing fraction of the developed world too.

So my strategy here has been to start downloading anything that I think I might need from the Internet and keeping a local copy. It's free and abundant now. It could become inaccessible within a matter of minutes if the right powerful person says so. There may be a low probability of that happening, but given the potential disruptions to our life of our always-on connectivity going away, it's worth being prepared.

chii2• 9 months ago

I am scared and this close to setting up a secret passphrase in case they need to tell me appart from a clone.

do that sooner rather than later.

Voice mimicry is so much easier now, that you might not be able to tell from the phone. This is why a verbal password from family is important, esp. in unusual situations.

jtokoph• 9 months ago

I half joke that the term “parental controls” will change meaning from restrictions set by parents on children to the opposite: restrictions now set up by children to protect their parents.

mdhb2• 9 months ago

Literally had this conversation this week with my parents. Weird fucking times…

ulrashida• 9 months ago

Frankly, that passphrase should already have been established when you were a kid: it would have been used for if a stranger / unexpected person needed to give you a ride on behalf of your parents.

jprd• 9 months ago

My mom did this in the '80s so we weren't kidnapped, even by a family member. I'm not going to share the secret phrase, but it has stuck with me and I use it with my kids too.

I know most of that was driven by the tragedy of Adam Walsh, but it was still great OpSec I'll never drop.

blitzar• 9 months ago

Explaining the concept of a "safe word" to your parents is not a conversation I expected to have.

malfist6• 9 months ago

This isn't a situation we accept out of other industries. You water provider doesn't get to pipe you sewage every now and again because its too expensive to moderate. We shouldn't accept it for big tech either. And we certainly shouldn't make it the responsibility of the end use to protect themselves

strogonoff10• 9 months ago

If everybody on social media was an actual paying customer of social platforms, like we pay mobile providers (I originally wrote “water providers”, which was in fact a somewhat unfit analogy), we could demand better service and switch away to a competitor who offers it. Unfortunately, we are robbed of our ability to pay with our wallets.

gosub1005• 9 months ago

I had a similar thought regarding OS'. Especially in they heydey of malware in the early 2000s when 3rd party apps were the only way to remove it. You don't buy a truck and accept that its wheel falls off every time you hit a bump. Therefore Microsoft should have been civilally liable for all the costs of software removal and loss of enjoyment of computers that ran Windows (along with OEMs that sold them).

montroser• 9 months ago

Social media is hardly a public utility. Regulation could be part of the picture, but at some point the nanny state is the greater of evils.

willvarfar• 9 months ago

(An aside, there is a lot of scandal in the UK about how the privatised water providers have been basically shitting on the public and environment, and literally discharging raw sewage because its too expensive to moderate!)

noir_lord4• 9 months ago

It's just another form of "socialise the costs, privatise the profits".

In any sane world we'd regulate big tech far more rigorously than we do (we'd tax them more as well but that's a separate issue).

foft• 9 months ago

Yes. If you haven’t yet read it Cory Doctorow’s new book Enshittification is well worth a read. I am still reading it but it certainly explains some of the bad practices by these major advertising/spying giants and the resulting market distortion. We need to up our game as technologists and hold our employers to account.

zoeysmithe2• 9 months ago

Water, power, etc infrastructure regulations and things like the environmental movement happened when there was more working class solidarity and the working class had more power over the capital owning class. Now the working class have been propagandized to believe "regulations bad" and have been depowered as capitalism decays and the capital owning class further takes and consolidate power. The regulations you want are impossible in this political climate and probably impossible without an extremely radical reform movement or some mass resignation or revolution of government.

I mean, lets face it, no government that makes hard right turns and has intense corruption like the USA just goes back to being a proper liberal democracy. Most likely things will get a lot worse before they even get better and on a timescale thats unpredictable. We may be talking 20+ years before any sort of baby steps towards liberal reforms are even possible on the federal level. The right has the gerrymandering, scotus, the courts, the media machine, etc. Pro-working class regulations are just not going to happen like they did in the 60s and 70s for a very long time if history is any guide.

Its so odd to me people just have a "dont worry we'll got back to normal next election." To get back to what we had during those times of pro-worker regulation will take many, many, years if not decades of work now. At the very least until many in SCOTUS retire or pass away from old age. That just isnt happening anytime soon.

brians• 9 months ago

The permitted number of rat parts per pound of breakfast cereal is not zero.

mmmlinux• 9 months ago

Water providers in Flint,MI disagree.

herbst2• 9 months ago

Is there any reason you accept it then? Facebook and all their platform is a danger to people, there is nothing to add there.

bluGill7• 9 months ago

I don't understand why the big advertisers don't scream about this. Facebook gets money from whoever, but the scams dilute the effectiveness of real companies that are not trying to scam you.

vintermann6• 9 months ago

Do they? The difference may not be so clear cut always. A policy which got rid of scammy ads might get rid of a lot of "real companies" ads too.

carlosjobim7• 9 months ago

Real companies don't give a damn about what they are actually doing. Facebook tells them that their ad which nobody clicked on got them 40 000 new customers. The worker who put the ad on Facebook gets a pat on the back from his boss. The boss gets a raise and maybe a promotion. Leadership gets shown numbers of how great advertising on Meta is and doesn't take 5 minutes to check them. If sales are low it is those god damned customers, better hike prices and reduce product quality to show the bastards!

Workaccount211• 9 months ago

The answer isn't ad blocking, the answer is paying directly and in full (so no need to subsidize cost with ads) for the service.

I cannot wrap my head around how generally intelligent people are completely blind to this. I guess 20 years of ad-block-is-the-norm has left people totally confused about internet monetization. I've never encoutered a problem that has such a clear answer, and that so many intelligent people get totally spun around the axle on.

We need to start paying for ad-free services. Wake up.

vintermann6• 9 months ago

Facebook has made it very clear that they don't want you to do this: you can pay for ad-free (I believe it's because they're legally obliged to offer that as a result of some things they'be done and deals they've made), but the cost is easily 100 times what they can make directly on ads for me. The only conclusion can be that they place an immensely high indirect value on serving me ads.

swiftcoder7• 9 months ago

We need to start paying for ad-free services. Wake up.

Where are all these ad-free services everyone keeps talking about? Social media companies don't even find it worth it to offer an ad-free plan last I checked...

Noaidi4• 9 months ago

This would create a two tiered social commons however. Someone like me, homeless and on disability, what could I afford? Where would my word be heard?

It could also create "free" platforms, funded by billionaires, to control the speech on the platform.

The answer is a communal, government owned social media platform, that mimics the rules of the town square. in the US, this includes the same 1st amendment rights. This would allow equal access to everyone's voice.

IMHO, social media should not exists at all. It is too huge and too fast for our tiny brains.

hajile• 9 months ago

We need to have an easy way to pay small amounts for a one-time service. A lot of websites offer content that you need only a couple of times in your life. It's worth paying for, but not worth all the hassle of setting up a normal payment.

This leaves ads as the only form of revenue and because ads don't care about the content, this creates a race to the bottom on generating slop.

seeingnature2• 9 months ago

A lot of people did pay for ad-free Netflix, only to wake up one day in the future to find that product ending, and a similarly priced tier that has ads in it.

Amazon Prime Video didn't have ads. Then one day it did.

Maybe you're right that _the masses_ need to start rejection ad-tiers, but so far we've seen that people will accept advertising to get more.

macNchz5• 9 months ago

I pay for some ad free services, but it’s infeasible across the entire internet and every possible link you might follow. Additionally, I fundamentally disagree with the concept of paying someone so that they don’t show me malicious ads. If they cannot or will not ensure the ads that they accept money to display are not malicious, I will not look at their ads.

insane_dreamer• 9 months ago

We need to start paying for ad-free services. Wake up.

The services (FB etc.) don't want this model, and it's not like the users can force them to switch to a paid model.

Also, a large percentage of users don't care and believe that "free" is better.

scott_w3• 9 months ago

The answer isn't ad blocking, the answer is paying directly and in full

Netflix started showing ads on their lower tiers: https://help.netflix.com/en/node/126831

If you pay for Sky/Virgin/insert Cable provider in your country, you still get copious amounts of ads. If you pay to go to the cinema, you have to sit through 15 minutes of adverts before the film starts.

I'm buying off Amazon, they're showing sponsored products (so... ads).

EA were looking at putting ads into games that you bought back in 2024: https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/ea-are-thinking-about-inser...

Hell, I pay for public transport, they have adverts on.

vladms6• 9 months ago

We need to start paying for ad-free services. Wake up.

You make it sound like there are no people that pay for ad-free services they find valuable. Or that there are no free ad-free services (ex: WhatsApp).

My feeling is that people know some "services" are not that "valuable" (ex: facebook, instagram, etc.), so they would not pay for them, but, like with drugs, they can't reduce their usage.

terminalshort8• 9 months ago

But the truth is that people don't want that. We had that before and it lost in the open market to free but ad supported. There is a very small and vocal group of people (which is massively over represented on HN) that really hate the ad supported model, but the vast majority don't really care and prefer it to paying in cash.

vintermann6• 9 months ago

Facebook is one of the few pages my ad-blocker can't handle. In part I think this is because they do it differently by country, but mostly it's because Facebook makes a ton of effort to make it hard to recognize what's an ad from the page code.

asadotzler5• 9 months ago

Get uBlock Origin, it works, even on Facebook.

ferguess_k3• 9 months ago

Just curious what password manager I should use? I'm considering using a password manager instead of the Google ones and gradually switch all passwords to generated ones instead the one I usually use. Searched through HN for the last 6 months but found just too many posts about PM.

542458• 9 months ago

I believe Bitwarden, 1Password, or the stock Apple one are the typically recommended ones. Bitwarden is free (and can be self-hosted), 1Password is paid and has a slightly nicer UX, and the Apple one is good but requires you to be in their ecosystem. I personally use Bitwarden and have had no issues.

jeffbee3• 9 months ago

The Google one is quite good if you use Chrome anyway.

terminalshort8• 9 months ago

IMO MFA (or a passkey) is much more important. Most online accounts I have I couldn't give a rats ass if someone got in. (Not that they would because there would be no monetary value to them). Best to focus on those that are important and set MFA on them. If they don't offer MFA, find someone else who does. MFA + crappy password is better than strong PW w/o MFA, because even a PW manager can be leaked. This isn't to say you shouldn't care about secure PWs, but IMO it's the less important factor here.

simpaticoder4• 9 months ago

*>They could massively reduce the volume of scams advertised on their networks

I'm not entirely sure that's true. It's equivalent to asking a platform to moderate all "harmful content" off the site. "Scam" is fundamentally subjective, just as "harm" is.

The real solution is to reform the justice system such that a citizen feeling they've been defrauded has a quick and easy process to get satisfaction for themselves and other similarly harmed people. We need a streamlined, totally online court that excels at gathering and interpreting data, and a decision in days not years. The ad networks are themselves the natural allies of such a reform, but such a change can and should start small as a pilot program at the state level. If successful, it removes the considerable legal-cost moat protecting scammers, and so it no longer makes sense to even attempt such a business, and the world becomes a slightly better place.

zoeysmithe2• 9 months ago

Scams are absolutely not subjective and capitalism fails at every level without regulation like this. Your comment is very libertarian housecat coded.

Also 'just go to court' is such a naive take. As someone who has been in litigation before I can tell you those $350/hr billings add up quick. How many consumers can afford a 5 or even 6 digit legal bill for being scammed for a few hundred or thousands dollars on a FB ad? Of those who can, how many would see this pricetag as worth it? Sorry but small claims court isn't going to do discovery for you for some company hidden behind who knows how many storefronts and foreign proxies. You're going to have to do real litigation. Its absurd to expect every working class person to sue all scammers constantly. Instead ad providers should be policing their own ad networks and the working class should be using the government to implement proper regulations to protect ourselves.

scott_w3• 9 months ago

"Scam" is fundamentally subjective, just as "harm" is.

From the article:

Meta projected 10% of 2024 revenue came from scams and banned goods, Reuters reports

I think we can agree that there's no "subjective" situation when a product is banned.

The ad networks are themselves the natural allies of such a reform

The article (and the person you're replying to) point out that a significant portion of Meta's revenue comes from such scams. I'm really struggling to see how they're "natural allies" and not "antagonists" here. You're going to have to show me some research that backs up your claim because it flies in the face of the available information.

macNchz5• 9 months ago

While some things may exist in a grey area, there’s an immense volume of blatant, obvious fraud in mainstream ads. A deepfake of Elon Musk promoting a way to get rich with crypto is just so clearly a scam, and yet it’s one I’ve seen in preroll YouTube ads multiple times.

Making the platforms have some liability for facilitating fraud would be good, though. In the meantime I block ads.

tgsovlerkhgsel6• 9 months ago

Except in this case, the platform is actually paid real money for that content, so yeah, I absolutely expect them to review each and every piece of it.

If ads worked this way:

- Victim clicks crypto scam ad, loses their savings ($xx,xxx)

- Forensic investigation happens, determines that this happened due to a paid ad on site X. Site X knew that this was an ongoing problem and didn't manage to control it, but was still showing ads.

- Site X is considered complicit and just as liable for the loss as the scammer. Since the scammer is hard to find, the user sues the site and the site has to pay the losses.

- The site is now free to pursue their "business partner" for the damages, the user doesn't have to care.

I bet the ads would suddenly get reviewed a lot more. No sane publisher would allow ads from an ad platform that doesn't provide a guarantee against this issue. If a "good" ad platform started showing scams, the site would drop it once notified (because now they're on notice, and would be liable for any future scams). Thus, the platform would make damn sure that this doesn't happen.

"Scam" might be subjective but the legal system usually has a definition for it and judges to apply any remaining subjective judgement necessary. It's usually also pretty easy to avoid the need for a judge deciding by not trying to max out the we-think-this-is-technically-not-illegal grey area.

This doesn't require huge legal costs for the ad networks - they can simply refuse to do business with entities that are not verified, or allow ads for shady business areas where 40% of the businesses are borderline scams and 50% blatant scams...

Semaphor• 9 months ago

Honestly, not just ad networks. It’s also publishers. We tried 2 major non-google ad networks. The amount of scams and borderline scams were crazy. And apparently asking for some quality control is complicated. Even with google and ad-exchange, we had to raise the minimum costs by quite a bit to keep most of the scams out. This lowers revenue so most publishers have the same interest in fighting those scams as the networks.

The only reason to fight against the scams is because one cares a little about ones viewers (well, and I guess maybe a bit of brand safety). Which seems to not be the case for the vast majority.

zahlman8• 9 months ago

Just to be clear, the engagement is the problem, yes? We're reasonably secure against zero-click malware from ads by now I would hope?

ozim• 9 months ago

I think you don’t see ads that are served in there. Those are outright scams like fake investments and not just crypto but outright “buy big company X shares to get rich, photo of celebrity” with celebrities not even knowing they are used for those scam ads - meta doesn’t do shit about it.

Zero click malware would be most likely too sophisticated.

You click the ad contact people who will tell you where to wire money that’s the level we are talking about here.

macNchz5• 9 months ago

Zero click browser exploits still do pop up—it's also hard to say how common they are, because they're hard to detect, and likely to be used very judiciously by the people who discover them to avoid showing their hand. Ad networks have certainly been a direct vector for malware in the past.

Within the past few years there were quite many malicious ads floating around that would trigger a redirect on load on iOS Safari, sending the user to a scam page (phishing, "you've won!", or instant redirect to the App Store), no engagement necessary.

Some recent browser zero days/malicious ads situations, not necessarily "an ad loaded in my browser -> pwned", but reasonably applicable:

https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/malicious-ads...

https://www.welivesecurity.com/en/eset-research/romcom-explo...

https://www.infosecurity-magazine.com/news/chrome-zero-day-f...

duxup• 9 months ago

I have my view history turned off on Youtube. It appears that means I get a lot of low quality ads. Questionable health products, really questionable health products, "5G blocking beanies that prevent brain fuzzing", gross out advertisements about poop, and so on.

It really lowers my perception of Youtube as a product as just any old site with content, but also scams / creepy stuff. Youtube don't care I suspect, it's money for them, and it re-enforces my desire to not give them money... so yeah they take money form who they can.

AJ007• 9 months ago

The night before this story was published I was pondering what percentage of Youtube ads I was watching were scams -- not 100%, but it was higher than 50%. Which raises questions about semi-legitimate looking items might actually be soft scams or some kind of funny billing stuff going on.

What percent of the global economy is scams? Sure, the investment manager charging 1% a year to put all of your retirement savings in ETFs that also charge 1-1.5% a year funneling money in to companies being raided by executives and employees isn't a scam scam, but it is a massive mis-allocation of resources and probably more damaging than some dumb item purchased from a Meta ad that never showed up. Same for recently legalized (in the US) sports betting.

The startling thing is AI is being applied at scale to make this crap more pervasive. 10% scams? Meta would like advertisers to use their generative AI tools to create image and video ads of non-existent products.

Best thing we can do is delete all phone apps and only access online media from behind firewalls that block all ads and tracking. Windows is dead. Apple is transitioning to an adtech company. Linux is the only option.

buellerbueller3• 9 months ago

I am not following the meta, so could you please explain

Windows is dead.

charcircuit2• 9 months ago

but it was higher than 50%

I don't relate with this at all. I get ads for normal insurance companies, uber eats, air bnb, and gacha games to name a few. None of them are scams, so I can't understand understand why so many people on hacker news complain about scams.

Do you live in a region with barely any ad inventory?

vadoff2• 9 months ago

What if you were required to put down a % of ad spend as a security deposit. Then if you were ever caught running a scam, you’d lose the deposit.

It would make running scams unprofitable, or at the very least cut into profit a lot / disincentivize it.

pigeons• 9 months ago

Wouldn't that still not address the two problems mentioned, moderation costs and loss of scam ad revenue?

liquid_thyme• 9 months ago

Apple and Microsoft need to wake up and bake it into the OS. Hopefully that will take meta and google down a notch.

tgsovlerkhgsel6• 9 months ago

I don't understand how more countries don't hold the publisher responsible, especially after they are notified. I'm sure that in a classic newspaper, the publisher would be held responsible for obvious scam ads. But by intentionally automating and outsourcing everything, suddenly that responsibility goes away?

Hold the publisher responsible, let them deal with the ad platform. Suddenly, it becomes very attractive to have an ad platform that doesn't allow scams.

If the publisher and the ad platform are the same, even better.

ChicagoDave3• 9 months ago

Ad blockers don’t block Facebook ads because they appear as legitimate posts.

asadotzler5• 9 months ago

You can use uBlock Origin's element blocker to kill cards that deliver ads (or any other standardized blocks)

aussieguy1234• 9 months ago

I switched back to Firefox after Chrome watered down uBlock Origin's capabilities

chipsrafferty• 9 months ago

With so many sites refusing to serve you without an ad blocker, is there any solution?

tgsovlerkhgsel6• 9 months ago

I've very rarely encountered this with Firefox + uBlock Origin. The few sites that do are easily ignored.

igleria2• 9 months ago

X's scam originated revenue is probably a bigger percent, but 10% is too much... Shame on Meta.

edit: wow, some people REALLY don't like getting told they are knowingly contributing negatively to society.

mk89• 9 months ago

Imagine going in the streets as a normal human being and advertising these companies (the scammers, I mean).

You would never see the light again, after fighting countless battles with lawyers (rightly so!), ending up in prison.

But these guys just can exploit it, because that's what they do, and literally never be accountable for it.

bjourne• 9 months ago

“We aggressively fight fraud and scams because people on our platforms don’t want this content, legitimate advertisers don’t want it, and we don’t want it either.”

I wonder if those who market illegal Israeli settlements counts as "legitimate advertisers": https://www.aljazeera.com/features/2025/3/31/meta-profits-as... I have a hunch that "legitimacy" is directly proportional to the dollar amount of the ad bid...

IronyMan100• 9 months ago

If i Look at all the finfluences and "get thin in 30h with my cale diet eBook"-influencer, i though it was substantially more than 10%.

jm4• 9 months ago

If my company inadvertently made money from scams, I would try to make the victims whole or donate that money. It's so scummy that they sit around waiting to be fined. It's just plain stupid management to document this in emails and not also document a good faith attempt to make it right. I always assume my emails could be made public after my entire mailbox was subpoenaed in a lawsuit my employer was involved in and I was deposed to answer questions about email threads and source code comments from years ago. (I didn't do anything wrong personally, but my employer most likely did.) If I'm going to discuss something that could make me or the company look bad, I'm sure as hell going to write it in a way that's defensible when it gets out.

Havoc3• 9 months ago

Meta is cooked. It's not just scam portion - their entire strategy is in trouble

FB - nobody I know actively uses it anymore.

Insta - is being overrun with AI slop and given meta's stated goal of adding more AI interactions on their platforms I doubt they'll even try to get a grip on it let alone succeed

Whatsapp & FB messenger - some use but has zero moat over other messengers. It's a completely fungible service in a space that has fractured across many providers.

VR/meta/AI/etc - they keep trying. Maybe one day

...that leaves their adtech which only works due to their invasive tracking...that is directly dependent on their other properties succeeding: Their targeting edge comes directly from front row seats tracking users behaviour on their platforms. No users, no insights.

clickety_clack• 9 months ago

Disagree on WhatsApp, it’s the de facto standard messaging app outside the US.

zzzoom• 9 months ago

Yeah, Whatsapp is probably the largest moat in the world atm.

Havoc3• 9 months ago

it’s the de facto standard messaging app outside the US.

Agreed and in combination with FB messenger they've got most of the market...but what of it?

They're literally competing against a donation supported app. Pause for a second and think about what that says about how little direct money there is in the space.

Plus it's E2E encrypted & has significant user privacy expectations so significant limitations on how you can leverage it for their adtech biz

I'm not saying whatsapp is dead or a failure as a messenger. It's a great addition to round out an ecosystem but don't think it's any good as the primary load bearing pillar of a 1.5 trillion company in the same way search is for google

newsclues• 9 months ago

Facebook appeared cooked after the parents of the original user base started using it (boomers). But it seems like that’s profitable because they are so dumb

salil999• 9 months ago

I hear this on almost every bad post about Meta. No they are not cooked. They still generate tons of profit and their user base is one of the biggest in the world. They're not going anywhere any time soon.

empath752• 9 months ago

Blackberry made their best profits in 2008, a year after the iPhone was released, with a stock price of around $140 in May of 2008, their all time high. By December of 2008, their stock price was $30, by 2012 -- $7. That FB are making a ton of profit right now is nothing but inertia.

Havoc3• 9 months ago

A current big user base is not enough on a „line must go up“ world

csomar• 9 months ago

Just because they generate tons of profit doesn’t mean they are not vulnerable. Tiktok has shown that their position is not as solid like some here tend to believe.

smt882• 9 months ago

You're using anecdata to decide if a company with billions of users is viable? Literal nonsense.

I hate Meta, but their ad business is still doing well and WhatsApp is the core of Indian society.

AOL, Yahoo, and Tumblr still operate. Meta won't be dead in our lifetimes.

ceejayoz3• 9 months ago

AOL, Yahoo, and Tumblr still operate.

As empty shells of what they once were.

I've no doubt there'll be something at Facebook.com in ten years. But if it looks like your three examples, that's not a success.

laweijfmvo• 9 months ago

my aunt/uncle etc., who must certainly still use FB, just discovered Reels. I know this because they now send me 10 a day. and last year was the first time i heard them talking about finding christmas gifts advertised on FB, so i don’t think they are cooked yet.

empath752• 9 months ago

FB and google are both basically doomed, IMO.

randycupertino• 9 months ago

Is anyone actually buying and using their glasses? I've tried to find actual sales figures but they keep it very opaque. I am so curious if despite how hard they are pushing them they will just be another flash-in-the-pan. I just can't see wide-market adoptability, maybe some niche users, but maybe I am just a hater/cynic.

mstipetic• 9 months ago

I was thinking that for the last 7 years and every year they grow revenue massively. I don’t get it.

buellerbueller3• 9 months ago

The will just buy their next move. You're not cooked when you're a trillionaire; you never are or will be.*

*Unless you steal from other wealthy folks.

samlinnfer• 9 months ago

A new car built by my company leaves somewhere travelling at 60 mph. The rear differential locks up. The car crashes and burns with everyone trapped inside. Now, should we initiate a recall? Take the number of vehicles in the field, A, multiply by the probable rate of failure, B, multiply by the average out-of-court settlement, C. A times B times C equals X. If X is less than the cost of a recall, we don't do one.

1970-01-013• 9 months ago

I don't think the analogy applies the same way. Meta simply choose to be evil not because it costs less overall but because they're unable to provide/filter actually useful ads to consumers. The rear diff is instead a filthy window but consumers don't sue for better quality because everything else works good enough and those that do crash could have cleaned the windows themselves.

ruined• 9 months ago

ability "to provide/filter actually useful ads" is a function of moderation budget and not much else

bradlys2• 9 months ago

I think there needs to be some moderation here because Meta clearly does offer useful ads to consumers, otherwise it wouldn’t have so much insane revenue from ads. If people don’t find the ads useful then they won’t click on them or give the company money.

I think the average user on HN (who blocks ads constantly, uses things like AdNauseam, pihole, etc.) is not going to be your typical purchaser. If you look at your typical American, they buy a lot of shit through those ads and a lot of people actually like the ads.

My only complaint with the ads has been the targeting has always been crap. If you allow personalization, they do get more relevant. But, that complaint of mine is my own personal one. I’m like a typical HN user, ads don’t typically read me well due to my blocking on all kinds of platforms.

xandrius2• 9 months ago

Ohh, so naïve. They choose inaction because it's profitable, that's it. They can claim they were unaware and they are out either scot-free or with a slap on their gigantic wrist.

thinkmoore• 9 months ago

Recalls happen because they are required by regulators...

unglaublich• 9 months ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ford_Pinto#Fuel_system_fires,_...

lesuorac3• 9 months ago

Scroll down on that page.

The pinto wasn't any worse that other cars from that time period. It should come as no shock that older products are worse than newer products.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ford_Pinto#Retrospective_safet...

sota_pop• 9 months ago

Not sure the other responses caught the reference there, Tyler.

pessimizer• 9 months ago

That's a quarter to a third of its entire margin. And that's what it admits to.

Noaidi4• 9 months ago

I wonder if the government and lawmakers would care if 10% of my income came from selling heroin...

vintermann6• 9 months ago

That's not the right comparison. The question should rather be, would they care if 10% of their tax revenue came from heroin sales?

And the answer would depend on where the externalities from all that heroin sale happened (e.g. if it was abroad), whether the government would be expected to carry the cost of them (e.g. by having a public healthcare system), and probably also on how actually democratic they are.

jeffbee3• 9 months ago

10% scams is bush league rookie stats. They gotta pump that up to play in the same league as Nextdoor.

dkdcio2• 9 months ago

ban digital advertisement

StayTrue• 9 months ago

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43595269

dkdcio2• 9 months ago

https://dkdc.dev/posts/ban-advertisement/ (not as much content I admit)

hightrix• 9 months ago

I'd add billboards and other physical ads too.

ChrisArchitect• 9 months ago

[dupe] Earlier on source: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45834840

stusmall3• 9 months ago

Once I got an Instagram ad for buying ketamine that just linked to a telegram channel. They didn't even bother being coy or using mispelling or slang. A simple keyword search to flag for more review would have caught it. I can't even wrap my head around what internal controls exist when something like that makes it out to users.

seelmobile• 9 months ago

The bad actor serves a benign ad to the ad review system, and only serves the scam to real users. It's called "cloaking" - an interesting (but a bit depressing) topic to explore.

zahlman8• 9 months ago

So the ad review system is just requesting the ad from the advertiser, and not ever bothering to disguise itself? Didn't we have this shit figured out for brick-and-mortar restaurant reviews decades ago?

herbst2• 9 months ago

You can change the link target, but you cannot change the media afterwards without a new check.

BLKNSLVR4• 9 months ago

That's called a broken system and implies either incompetence or malicious intent by the ad platform.

The fact the ad platforms are multi-billion dollar companies leans my opinion towards malicious intent.

iammrpayments2• 9 months ago

There’s zero to none manual review. The people who run these type of ads probably burn 100 facebook ad accounts per day

stusmall3• 9 months ago

Oh definitely. I have zero expectation of high level of manual reviews. You can run limited runs of adds for next to a couple dollars. The math could never work out. I understand a lot with make it through the system, this was just so blatant. It should be so easy to catch with an automated system. It was nothing but red flags. The automated systems could reject outright or maybe escalate to manual review if it met enough criteria (account reputation, spend floor, etc)

cantor_S_drug• 9 months ago

Zuck and Meta are playing the role of Robinhood. They take the money from scammers and advance their philanthrophy.

https://x.com/a16z/status/1986486508355002584

Priscilla Chan and Mark Zuckerberg on Curing All Disease

We sat down with Dr. Priscilla Chan and Mark Zuckerberg, co-founders of the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, to discuss their ambitious plan to cure, prevent, and manage all disease by the end of the century.

spencerflem• 9 months ago

I’m assuming this is satire but in case it’s not- He’s PROVIDING A SERVICE for the scammers. Not stealing from them lol

stusmall3• 9 months ago

Did Facebook's LLM write this comment?

danny_codes2• 9 months ago

Zuck has donated something like 2% of his net worth. Not really “ambitious”. For a normal American that’s like donating to “cars for kids” every 8 years when you upgrade your Mercedes and claiming you’re a philanthropist

ok123456• 9 months ago

There are Facebook groups devoted to selling stolen cars (strikers).

podgorniy• 9 months ago

What a business/ethical dilemma ~not~ to solve

whatamidoingyo• 9 months ago

I've been seeing legitimate pornography on Facebook while scrolling through reels. I thought it was "just my algorithm", but co-workers brought it up during lunch. Quite a few of them are seeing the exact same ads.

I've reported them a few times, but surprisingly (or maybe not), Facebook responds back with "we didn't find anything that goes against our community standards".

These ads usually link to a website where you can download an application (a chat app, or some AI generation). Of course, they're not in the play store. It's frustrating when I think of the times I was flat out rejected for my legitimate ads related to programming, or a job board, or real estate, but they approve PORNOGRAPHY. What in the world do those posters of pornography know that I don't? How could they get that approved? There has to be some cleverness going on.

tryauuum2• 9 months ago

the obvious question to you is "have you tried adding pornography to your ads"?

LtWorf2• 9 months ago

I've once seen an ad for escorts (literal word they used) in my area on fb. But that one did get removed.

overfeed• 9 months ago

What in the world do those posters of pornography know that I don't?

The power of persistence. I'm not being glib: these people probably get most of their ads/accounts blocked or banned, and have a dismal success rate baked into their business model, but they keep submitting until one goes through.

Misrepresentation is another key ingredient, but I hope you're not willing to buy a network of bot or havked accounts just so you can get an ad approved.

__turbobrew__• 9 months ago

Yea, I have got ads for hardcore porn starting a month or two ago on Facebook. I only use marketplace, have no friends on the platform and have only used it to buy and sell as marketplace is unfortunately the only platform which is used for private transactions where I live.

kilroy123• 9 months ago

It's very clear that social media is dead. My mom sometimes tells me to go look at a picture on Facebook. I'm astonished that there is literally nothing on there to see but ads.

I and anyone I know only post stories on Instagram at best. My feed is JAM packed with ads and cringe people still trying to be influencers.

Threads is a rounding error.

X is blah

Meta is desperate to move to AI because they know this. They see the data and are not dumb. They want to squeeze every last dime out while they still can.

input_sh• 9 months ago

Meta doesn't know anything, the last successful "product" that they built (as opposed to buying) was splitting off Messenger into a separate app.

Since then, they invested heavily in providing free internet that failed (Free Basics), wasted a bunch of money on some sort of a global cryptocurrency that never even launched (Libra/Diem), tried to invent a whole new market with VR and it went nowhere, and now they're going all in on "AI" but the only thing they have to show for it are some sort of celebrity-impersonating Instagram bot accounts and some glasses whose selling point is that they're branded as Ray-Bans.

danny_codes2• 9 months ago

FB is an extractive institution. The business model is to get people addicted and profit from it. It’s little different in my eyes from drug dealing. Well, I guess there’s a lot more harm done by FB

seydor• 9 months ago

They should remove the marketplace, i know so many people who got scammed

carefulfungi• 9 months ago

Snakeoil on every corner these days - from online scams to text message scams to the whole supplements industry to prosperity gospel to ... it sure feels like we're surrounded by hustlers and charlatans.

random97498323• 9 months ago

Supplements industry? I only take whey protein and creatine from known sources. Anything on this?

GuinansEyebrows• 9 months ago

i think they're talking about Hims-type businesses and the type of stuff that makes low/mid-level right-wing grifters their money: colloidal silver, methylene blue, anything else Alex Jones is hawking. maybe you could group Tucker Carlson's Nicotine Pouches For Christian Nationalists in there too, idk.

bradlys2• 9 months ago

They’re talking about all the other types of supplements with questionable benefits like turkesterone.

mrguyorama7• 9 months ago

Creatine is the closest the supplements industry has ever gotten to actually producing something that helps people. If you are physically active, you could probably see minor benefits from it.

If you eat an American diet, you do not need protein supplements. You do not need the absurd amount of protein per day that mens health influencers insist, and they usually push you pretty close to the actual danger zone, and it's all just a fucking waste anyway.

The current protein trend is just a fad diet for men. It doesn't help. Bulk whey protein is literally the least bad part of that industry though, so eh.

Everything else about the supplements industry is fully scam though. If any of it worked, they would scientifically prove it so they could get near infinite American healthcare dollars. Most of it not only doesn't do anything, but the batch quality is atrocious, and plenty often you can buy a supplement that does not include the ingredient it claims at all. I feel like the fact that it is sold next to the literal "poison a child" homeopathic pills should be more meaningful to people than it is.

That shelf is for things that don't work.

jesse_dot_id• 9 months ago

https://jesse.id/blog/posts/im-telling-yall-its-adbotage

I wrote a blog about turning advertising against advertisers, and as I see more and more stuff like this, I wonder how the ad-based Internet survives this era of unfettered and unpunished scamming.

josefritzishere• 9 months ago

10% seems very conservative as estimates go.

throw7• 9 months ago

"...scammers obtain sexual images of a user, often a teenager, under false pretenses and then blackmail them – ... was becoming commonplace on Meta’s platforms"

There you go U.K. OFCOM. Here's child endangerment propagated knowingly by Facebook. Don't worry, I know you won't do anything to Facebook because you "protecting" kids is pretext.

swarnie• 9 months ago

Listen throw7, Meta paid almost £30 million in tax in 2023, an effective tax rate of 12%. I'm unsure why numbers for 2024 aren't available but you'll need to speak to legal about that.

If you want to throw7 that all away over some media speculation be my guest. I'll tell the NHS to fund themselves for 11 minutes next year to make up the shortfall.

squigz• 9 months ago

30 million out of how much total tax revenue?

siliconc0w• 9 months ago

If you include speculation and gambling I'd bet 10% of all economic activity is heavily dependent on either outright scams or scam-adjacent behavior.

mv4• 9 months ago

As a former Meta employee (also dealt with Shopping and Ads), I am quite shocked at the percentage of "commerce" scams in my Instagram feed now. Easily 9 out of 10 promoted "buy" posts use AI videos of non-existent products leading to scammy sites. Any current employees willing to chime in?

bensonn• 9 months ago

I wonder how much of Meta the corporation is a scam waiting to crumble. Hundreds of billions of dollars can make people do questionable things. -their revenue is 99% ads with more than 80% coming from FB and IG -they can only sell ads if they have a large and active user base -DAP (daily active people) is reported publicly but calculated internally -ad spending, views, and engagement are calculated by Meta's own platform

Anecdote (why I think it is a scam)- I had a FB account, I needed it for a previous job but didn't want it. I set up a random email address at a host I had never used, had a made-up FB name, and used a password generator for both the email address and FB accounts. My FB account had almost no activity besides viewing company posts. FB was only used from a single desktop computer. Passwords were stored in my (local only desktop) password manager.

After a couple years, FB emailed me and claimed my account was hacked. The "hacker" changed my profile picture (was a blank avatar icon) to an AI photo of a random guy. Facebook says it is hacked but they keep it visible, my two friends are still friends with the old account (they know it was hacked). FYI - I didn't care enough to send them a copy of my ID, nor did my ID match my user name, so I couldn't reclaim my account.

How would a hacker combine a random username, with a random email (has not been pwnd) only used for FB, guess a ~20 character random password, etc? And why, to steal an account with no followers and to do nothing with the account? That is a lot of work and criminal charges for nothing.

I am fine with FB saying the account was hacked and closing it. It has been years and the account is still live. Is it "active" and counted towards their users? They have a HUGE financial incentive to keep and count all accounts, and they have no oversite to verify accounts since it is all calculated internally with opaque algorithms.

m_a_g• 9 months ago

Did they take control of the email account?

noslenwerdna• 9 months ago

Your desktop was hacked or your email was hacked?

phillipcarter• 9 months ago

I wonder how much of Meta the corporation is a scam waiting to crumble.

I imagine almost none of it. Social networks solve connectivity problems that people want solved. Talk to some "casuals" who aren't in tech about how they find out about new restaurants, social trends, arts and crafts, places to go visit, etc. and the answer is Instagram or TikTok. And FB does the same but for older generations.

Ads are also a fundamental revenue pillar in this world. You can layer in relevance ads for a product to anyone, at any time, for any topic. If something exists and people pay attention to it, there's a way to make money advertising around it.

There's ... certainly deeper questions to be had about if this stuff is actually good for us, but in the mean time, it's very real and worth a lot of money.

kj800x• 9 months ago

Meta's security team seemingly does not care. My mom had her long-time Facebook account taken over during the summer. It was a credentials stuffing attack (she's now using a password manager with random passwords), and the bad actor immediately put on 2fa TOTP and signed up for some advanced security so the account couldn't be recovered without the 2fa.

We spent weeks trying to recover the account, but recovery codes weren't being sent through to her email or phone, the email and phone that has been on the account for 10+ years. The bad actor started making posts that she had cars to sell and to message her if they wanted to buy (also claiming that her sister was sick and she needed the money which is why she was selling the cars, completely untrue) Tens of her friends including her son reported the account as taken over and the posts as fraudulent. All responses from Facebook saying there was no indication of anything violating the guidelines, which is insane because all this behavior taken together screams account takeover.

Eventually, I reached out to a friend who worked at Meta who filed an internal report and we were hopeful that might actually fix it, but nothing ever came of it and when I reached out to the friend a month later he said the report was closed and he couldn't see any more details (for security reasons). If my mom meeting me in person, and me reaching out to my former teammate on a live phone call and proving my identity, and that teammate filing a report with the security team can't get it fixed, what can?

At this point, we think the original account is still up (we can't see, since the bad actor has blocked the entire family) and every new account she makes gets deleted for being a sockpuppet / ban evader.

She's devastated that someone ruined her online life like this, and that she was in Facebook groups for her career that she no longer has access to, she can no longer keep up with her friends and family. So many local businesses post their events and updates on Facebook and she has no ability to see these anymore.

We don't know what to do next. I'm so thoroughly disappointed with how Meta handled the situation. It's clearly an account takeover if someone looked at the account and the indicators. I think our next step is to write a letter to Meta legal alleging gross neglect after being presented with evidence of identity theft. Maybe that finally would get someone's attention. I'm nearly to the point where I would potentially spend thousands of dollars of my own money for a lawyer just to prove a point.

jddj• 9 months ago

Sad, because I know first hand of legitimate businesses who struggle to run Instagram ads due to unexplained blocks or payment gateway issues

jqpabc123• 9 months ago

Google and Meta are kinda like cattle ranches --- they're not being run to benefit the cattle.

Users of these platforms are being farmed like cattle.

almosthere2• 9 months ago

So Meta made billions of dollars so that your mom could lose her entire life savings?

wagwang• 9 months ago

Meta makes hundreds of billions on people collectively spending trillions of hours doom scrolling and you're worried about scams?

almosthere2• 9 months ago

I forgot because the worst thing exists, nothing else is important. I bow down to thee oh smart one.

diob• 9 months ago

I tried to get Kickstarter to take down an obvious scam a while back. Best I could do was post on Reddit to warn folks though.

Checked on it recently, so many comments of folks asking for shipping details / anything. Hundreds of thousands of dollars just scammed from folks. And they're still raising / stringing folks along.

It's wild.

stickfigure2• 9 months ago

That sounds tantalizing! Link please?

Telaneo• 9 months ago

Why aren't we (society) fining Meta et cetera for collaborating in scams again? Or at least having the fines actually be equal to the money they're earning so the fines aren't just cost of business?

dec0dedab0de2• 9 months ago

Forget fines, they should be liable for any losses incurred by people scammed.

xandrius2• 9 months ago

Because there is no "we". It's currently just who has the money and they all seem to be pal somehow.

dec0dedab0de2• 9 months ago

I got scammed on Instagram when I was in the hospital getting chemotherapy.

It was christmas time, and I got an ad for a cool looking steam punk keyboard. I ordered it for my kid who had recently got into PC gaming. It was only $60, and when it didn't come I checked my bank and credit card and didn't see any charges, so I assumed that I didn't actually finish the order. Until almost a year later when I realized I paid with paypal, and they used funds I had sitting in there for some reason. By then it was too late to challenge.

skizm• 9 months ago

To me this basically says roughly 10% of all internet advertising revenue is from scams. I’d bet Google has a much higher number than 10%, since they do more volume.

zipy124• 9 months ago

Imagine if a bank admitted 10% of it's revenue came from criminals or money laundering. A staggering proportion with no government action.

schmookeeg• 9 months ago

Seems like the word for this is "complicit"

iamleppert• 9 months ago

It's also full of people selling counterfeit money as well. I am shocked how they allow it, there's a guy with a profile that shows him printing and testing his "bills" along with a link to buy them. Not trying to hide it, no code words, nothing.

The same on Tiktok. I have reported it multiple times but every time they say "no violation".

(facebook wouldn't copy a URL, but here he is on Tiktok): https://www.tiktok.com/@blastedbills

aaroninsf• 9 months ago

Their entire business model is corrupt and a significant driver of the degraded state of our society, civility, and politics.

What is the core of their business? Maximizing and totalizing surveillance, in service whoever has money in hand, including those interested not (just) in selling you shit, but steering your behavior, mood, and beliefs.

There's a reason for the constant drumbeat of stories about whistleblowing, lawsuits, suppressed research, literal criminality, and contempt for the wellbeing of their "users."

It's not "polite" to talk about this on HN, but if you work there or do business with them, you better be at peace with your moral complicity.

There's also a reason they pay so well. It's to make people hold their noses.

tgsovlerkhgsel6• 9 months ago

The key sentences:

the company prioritized enforcement in regions where the penalties would be steepest, the reporting found. The cost of lost revenue from clamping down on the scams was weighed against the cost of fines from regulators.

The companies don't necessarily want scams, and they might even be willing to forgo the scam revenue itself. But if the consequence of allowing the scam is low, and the consequence of doing something about it would be a loss of non-scam revenue (e.g. by disallowing legit customers or verification requirements making customers go to an "easier" competitor), they won't do anything about it.

It's time to treat them as accomplices. As the report shows - if they had to pay the damage they're helping to cause, priorities would shift and they would find a way to make the problem go away. As is, they have no reason to even try.

wongogue• 9 months ago

People advocating for regulation-free economy are just temporarily embarassed scamsters.

HarHarVeryFunny• 9 months ago

Let's hope they don't let a paperclip-maximizing AI decide how to maximize revenue!

mattmcknight• 9 months ago

Can we fix the title to be "scams and banned items"?

It seems like the banned items bit is misleadingly left out, and this title falsely implies it is 10% from scams alone.

gummydogg2• 9 months ago

I deal with domain impersonation and fraudulent ad takedowns nearly every day. A year ago, Meta would remove fake ads falsely using my company’s branding within a day or two. Now these same ads run for over a month with no action taken. This isn’t just an inconvenience these scams cause real harm. The money fraudsters extract fuels their expansion into larger operations. Meta has become completely negligent in its enforcement responsibilities and shows no empathy for the victims it enables. Meta is the single largest enabler of this fraud ecosystem the operations fund human trafficking, force, labor, and systematic financial fraud, targeting vulnerable populations, particularly elderly victims, who lose their life savings at a point in time where they have no time to earn it back. Every dollars these criminals make through Meta platform goes to some of the most depraved actors on the planet.

ChicagoDave3• 9 months ago

I actually got suckered by the 3d printer scam. My bank helped while PayPal figured it out (2 months). Facebook is still showing the fake Bambu labs ads. There’s no FBI to enforce online fraud so why would they care?

sentrysapper• 9 months ago

There is. It's known as the Internet Crimes Complaint Center (IC3).

ChicagoDave3• 9 months ago

Sure, but I meant "is anyone answering the phone?"

keeda• 9 months ago

This is why, despite being a huge fan of their engineering, I'm leery of Facebook and Google and any advertising-based tech company in the long run. The incentives to block fraudulent, malicious and even simply ineffective ads are just not there.

Anybody remember this? https://consumerwatchdog.org/uncategorized/google-shells-out...

Google stopped that practice then... or it might not have! We'll never know since, apparently unlike silly little Meta, it has been much more careful about not having any kind of incriminating internal documents or correspondence being preserved for discovery.

And in any case, it could fall back to the much more lucrative business of anti-competitive manipulation of the ads market: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Google_LLC_(2...

I've had a hint that the ad industry was rotten for a decade+ when in a prior life I saw our regional head of marketing casually throw stats on the whiteboard showing something insane like 30 - 50% of ad clicks on all major platforms being fraudulent. She was cynical but also jaded to the fact that, despite being widely known and accepted in the industry, it wasn't clear if things would ever improve. Shocked, I followed the ad industry and such reports for a while, anticipating a crash. Glad I didn't bet on it, because the crash never came.

Unfortunately, there is so much money in this that it seems nothing will happen.

ikekkdcjkfke• 9 months ago

Well, they need to be fined 10% then

estebarb• 9 months ago

That would explain why they never do anything against obvious financial scams.

jongjong• 9 months ago

100% of all revenue, of all companies came from scams because everything is a scam.

celestialcheese• 9 months ago

Google should have to make this disclosure as well. I'd guess >50% of their AdX revenue is from click-trick, fake button, scam ads. Across the board I'd expect Google's ad revenue to be at least 10% from scams, if not more.

Source: a decade of running a website monetized with adx and having to hire people to manually monitor and block scam display ads multiple times a day.

555watch• 9 months ago

In my country there are obvious clones of known portals with clickbaity titles, visually hard to distinguish from real. Always with some random url. Sometimes just fake news and propaganda, sometimes selling fake things. Under paid sponsorship. Reported them multiple times. Always the response is as follows: we looked at it and found nothing wrong. All the disputes are also killed. So its done on purpose

g8oz• 9 months ago

NextDNS or a similar solution is absolutely essential these days. You can't always configure every device your loved ones use. And Chrome on mobile will always be a problem. NextDNS solves this for me to a large extent.

BobbyTables2• 9 months ago

If 10% of my income came from scams, I’d be thrown in prison…

tiew9Vii• 9 months ago

I've gave up reporting scams on FB, they don't care. It always an automated response "we've reviewed the content and it doesn't break our community guidelines" or similar.

These are for obvious scams, account in different country to items they are trying to purchase/sell, haven't been used in a long time and suddenly active. When selling vehicles the account tries to make you go to malicious websites to pay for vehicle checks falsely insisting the seller is legally required to do so.

When 10% of their revenue is from scams, without government policy there's no incentive for FB to fix. Scams feels like a feature they silently tolerate while doing the bare minimum by providing a button and automated responses to look like they are trying to prevent it.

GuestFAUniverse• 9 months ago

So, they donate to victims?

10% seems a bit high, while claiming they made efforts -- I only heard arguments for 2-3% that are hardly avoidable; Or are these numbers wishful thinking?

BLKNSLVR4• 9 months ago

Tangential point:

Whilst I don't hear as much about people getting banned from their Facebook accounts as I do about Google accounts getting perma-banned with little to no recourse, it does seem that legitimate users of their services are treated as second class citizens, whilst literal scammers and fraudsters are given the white glove treatment because it contributes to their revenue.

And it must be a non-trivial contribution to their revenue, because it must be worth having their reputation smeared.

All of the hard problems they've been able to solve, and the questionable application of AI to everything, and yet they cannot solve this? Complete BS.

shadyKeystrokes• 9 months ago

So why are the users not adapting llms en mass to make scaming unviable?

game_the0ry• 9 months ago

Veritasium had a really good video on how facebook benefited from people buying legitimate (not fraudulent, click-farm) likes from fb. [1] Its over 10 years old now, but really good.

Basically, you could pay fb to boost your fb page, which is the "legitimate" way to get more reach. The problem was that click farms would like your page anyway, Why? Bc liking pages they were not paid to like would help hide fraudulent activity. So if one click farm clicked many likes on one page, that would be eady to spot as fraud, so that same click farm would like many other pages as well, ones that fb customers paid to boost and also got in front of the same click farms.

This created a dynamic where buying legitimate traffic from fb would hurt reach anyway bc the algo would key off of engagement, which would plummet bc the click farms saw the post that the page legitimately paid for. But that just incentivized the page owners to pay for more reach, thus fb would get paid more - fb had no incentive to stop this and paying fb in the first place would be worse tha not paying them at all. LAWL.

I guess the moral is -- never pay for boosting. And makes you question the quality of meta's revenue.

But the flip sides is that many companies (mine included) rely on instagram ads for revenue.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oVfHeWTKjag

Meta projected 10% of 2024 revenue came from scams

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