Reuters Exposes Meta’s Tactics to Avoid Scam Ad Oversight

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Originally published at: Reuters Exposes Meta’s Tactics to Avoid Scam Ad Oversight - TidBITS

In a Reuters Special Report, Jeff Horwitz writes:

As regulators press Meta to crack down on rogue advertisers on Facebook and Instagram, the social media giant has drafted a “playbook” to stall them. Internal documents seen by Reuters reveal its tactics, including efforts to make scam ads “not findable” when authorities search for them.

In the same vein as Sarah Wynn-Williams’s book Careless People: A Cautionary Tale of Power, Greed, and Lost Idealism, Horwitz paints a damning picture of Meta as a company that would rather deflect regulation than lose revenue from scam advertising. It’s both understandable and appalling: understandable that a company like Meta would balk at spending $2 billion to develop universal verification that would reduce revenue by 4.8%, and appalling that the revenue at stake—as much as $7 billion annually—comes from scam ads that victimize real people.

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Sadly, this is far from exclusive to Meta.

I’ve found insane amounts of obvious scams from just about every ad-based web site I visit, whether it is streaming video, social media, in-app/in-game ads or anything else.

I’d love it if the government and media would crack down on these scams, but it won’t happen because it will probably put the entire advertising industry out of business. I’m OK with that, but I doubt any media company or government agency agrees.

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I think given the centrality of the ad networks run by Meta and Google in the entire online advertising industry, any increase in verification by either company would be a positive development.

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The headline is somewhat overwrought:

First, they identified the top keywords and celebrity names that Japanese Ad Library users employed to find the fraud ads. Then they ran identical searches repeatedly, deleting ads that appeared fraudulent from the library and Meta’s platforms.

The tactic successfully removed some fraudulent advertising of the sort that regulators would want to weed out. But…

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In my best Claude Rains voice, I’m shocked. Reminds me of my longstanding complaint about the spam texts I (still, despite being on no-call) every day. Tell me the phone companies don’t know who’s doing it and can’t stop it — I’m sure they’re happy to take the money and run.

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