What I can't get is that the platforms don't understand that the scam ads reduce trust in the good ads -- when I see something on YouTube that looks legit and like something I want I am very inclined to be skeptical because I just saw five obvious scams in a row. Accepting those scam ads is penny wise and pound foolish.
The explanation is that the platform firms operate with a high level of market power, which is another way of saying that they benefit from monopoly or near-monopoly effects that make them relatively immune from things like what their customers want.
This is actually textbook monopoly stuff, well established in antitrust literature and well understood by regulators: when you see a firm institutionalizing how to defend criminal activity as a part of their business model, it's a big flag that said firm probably has some kind of immunity from how healthy, regulated markets operate. Why America has decided not to prosecute corporate criminals anymore (given that at various points in its history it was actually pretty good at this) is the really interesting question of our time.
I’d say the real explanation is that individual PMs have KPIs tied to ad sales, and that is more important to them than the overall success of either the company or the ideals of social media.
The reason started in the 70’s - https://reclaimdemocracy.org/powell_memo_lewis/
Somehow I knew in my heart this was about Ronald Reagan even though you said the seventies.
We remember Reagan because he was a colorful character and vociferous advocate of markets, but the changes we associate with him (e.g. Ralph Nader getting shut out of Congress) started under Carter and were continued under Clinton.
> the really interesting question of our time.
The answer is corruption.
I suspect that your explanation is what people in those organizations think is happening, but I believe that what’s really going on is that they’re ‘spending’ (and depleting) their brand equity.
Being immune to the "depletion of their brand equity" is part of the near-monopoly effects the GP was referring to.
Those brands are not immune at all. Everybody I know (who isn't in tech) has a negative opinion of these brands.
I do not believe that those brands are immune.
I'm not sure it stops there, either - I wonder if others feel the same. If every platform is doing this, then are they destroying the trust of online media (the internet?) in general? Facebook isn't exactly alone in its reputation of monetising people's attention and serving them dangerous content.
I'm eagerly waiting for the day when the elderly people in my family swear off the internet entirely.
I think it's more likely that the newer gens swear it off than the older ones, who have become thoroughly brain rotted by it. It's like they have no immunity. At least gen-z is more aware of the damage it does.
We're at the "hmm, I think smoking is probably bad for us" stage. Next up, serious attempts at quitting.
Things go in cycles because people who get into power on a crusade against something are never satisfied that they've done enough to address that issue.
In the gilded age we had robber barons and trusts. That lead to trust-busting and anti-monopoly regulation. Eventually the history is forgotten and people see the current regulations as burdensome. Someone gets into power with a mandate to deregulate, and we eventually end up with monopolies again.
Private enterprise and free markets are good. Monopolies are not. It doesn't have to be one or the other but nobody can seem to take their hands off when we reach a happy middle ground.
Facebook ads absolutely allow criminal activity.
https://www.thestar.com/news/investigations/we-ordered-cocai...
Don't forget that there's implicit collusion. No back door deals need to be made between competitors when they see they can both benefit. There's a Carlin quote about conspiracy somewhere in there
It's definitionally not a monopoly. Just because a company can provide a flawed product and maintain customers doesn't mean they are abusing monopolies. Jfc, it's like people throw darts at a grid to ascribe causes to problems and every square these days is either "capitalism" or "monopolies"
I think it's just not adversely impacting "big tech", their profits and margins are soaring while they've spent years and years selling counterfeit goods, scam apps, scam videos, scam ads. They have no liability for it (section 230 immunity) and seem to have zero incentive to do better.
Yeah, for them, it doesn't matter. As long as they get paid and nobody important complains, it will stay business as usual.
They built a meta-scam, on top of other scams.
It’s a scam made of scams!
I think the same thing but maybe it’s you and me are wrong. Maybe it’s simply more profitable to run scams than it is to do “legit” business selling “real” products and services. Maybe the users who make ads valuable are the ones who are undiscriminating and naive and vulnerable to scams, and those users aren’t bothered by proliferation of scam ads.
Maybe it does hurt the value of “normal” ads to be shown next to scams, but the scam ads are so valuable that it actually works out as a long term net positive
I think that I used to assume that if scams became prominent enough they would produce a backlash, either regulatory or otherwise, but maybe that’s just not the case.
They simply do not care about trust or anything else you think they should care about. The scam ads get probably get clicked ten or a hundred times more than legit ads. This makes money, therefore it is good and should be encouraged. They do not care how much worse the platform gets or how many people get scammed.
Money changes psychology. The brains of the people that work in these departments operate differently. They believe in protection and growth of the revenue - not pay attention to ethics.
They have to work hard to shut out critics as long as possible.
It's about getting as much money from the platform for as long as possible, regardless of the externalized damage done along the way. Anything that negatively impacts the "number goes up" goal, year over year, gets suppressed, ignored, or redirected. They hire a sufficient number of people so as to diffuse responsibility and the sense of wrongdoing by any one person or group within the company, and different aspects of the overall abusive mechanics organically get compartmentalized, so that no one manager or employee or department ever recognizes the wrongs being done.
You end up with a few greedy asshats aware of the harms being done that just don't care, lots of money being made, and plausible deniability all around, with things never getting bad enough for an employee to feel like they have to take a stand or report wrongdoing.
Which quartal number reflects this reduced trust? There is your answer. They never see that negative impact, because they can't see that, which does not happened.
There's a sweet spot they want to hit, where their internal scam ad reduction efforts do enough to make sure people don't leave in droves, and they are totally fine with the scam ads that make it through bringing in revenue.
The last thing they want is regulators forcing them to spend at least $X in resources to limit scam ads to some target and have it hurt their margins.
> regulators forcing them to spend at least $X in resources
Even if X is 0, it would mean lost revenue from the scammers as well.
Exactly. I never ever buy a product advertised on Facebook. Almost without a doubt, the ad turns out to be misleading.
If something looks cool, I will search it instead of clicking through. I have been seen malvertising campaigns on FB (some not even requiring a click).
If the product seems legit and fair priced, I will buy it. Rarely do I find both are true when I learn about it via Facebook. My default is: scam, or at least scamm-y.
Are most people less careful? I wonder.
Genuine clicks on useful ads are a tiny part of ad revenue. There’s no incentive for media to work on that slice of clicks.
Even if we were to accept that people who see scam ads ona platform will be less likely to trust good ads on said platform (and honestly I doubt how impactful that is), it’s not a metric Facebook cares about.
You are not the customer. The customers are the people paying for the ads, and they will keep using it as long as they think it’s better than not using them.
While I tend to agree with you, to the point that I've never willingly clicked on an ad, this isn't how most people that I've seen operate.
I actively skip over ads in search results, skip whenever possible in video, and pay to remove them completely if it's offered (subscribing to Kagi and YouTube Premium). If I do end up seeing an ad for something that looks interesting/useful, I don't click on it. I search for it separately. I treat ads the same way I would a random text claiming to be my bank. I don't click the link, I go there on my own so I know I'm in the right place free of any funny business. The side effect of this is the merchant loses context on how effective their ad was.
In contrast, when I see almost anyone else using Google, they actively look at the ads first. They treat the ads as if they were the top organic search results. If they search for "Microsoft" and Microsoft paid for a top ranked ad to their homepage, they will click on the ad link instead of the real organic result a few lines down. This makes these people very susceptible to advertisements posing at legitimate websites, yet their behavior never changes. I've said something to multiple people about skipping down to the actual results, and they claim to like the ads, or don't see a difference and just pick the first link that seems like what they want. Many of these people are otherwise tech savvy, some of whom spent decades working in the tech sector.
It seems we are the weird ones for avoiding the ads or losing trust. After watching MegaLag's 2 most recent videos on YouTube about Honey[0], I can start to see why the companies behind all this don't care. Policing these types of issues lowers their profits, which effectively incentivizes scams and fraud. The people hurt are the merchants and the consumers. You'd think they would be the only two who matter at the end of the day when it comes to advertising, but apparently not.
[0]
Part 1 (from 1 year ago): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vc4yL3YTwWk
What's the alternative? Orkut?
There's two markets here. (1) The market of advertisers buying ads and (2) the market of users who are attracted to these platforms and who might click on the ads and buy the product.
I'm not against advertising, in fact many times I have seen something advertised, thought "I want that!" and bought it and sometimes that thing became my new favorite.
If I am a platform user (2) and don't like the ads I can "exit" the platform as a whole or I can "exit" by being unresponsive to ads and when it comes to ads on YouTube and Meta platforms at least, I'm not buying it!
People in market (1) are going to invest in advertising up to the point where it is profitable, and the less responsive market (2) people are the smaller the pool. Many advertisers are also sensitive to brand safety and part of that is the content you are against but another part is the other ads on the platform.
I think the adtech-industrial complex has thrown in the towel on wanting quality ads and customers who trust those ads. It's easier to just welcome in the scammers and accept that the top 80% "savviest" people all know their ads are mostly scams. There will always still be enough marks that the scammers, who have excellent margins to play with, will come to feed at the trough of the ignorant and naïve by buying the ads. If needed, the platform can adjust the ad:content ratio to near 100%. Their 'competition' is all doing the same thing anyway, so they won't lose eyeballs in the aggregate.
> many times I have seen something advertised, thought "I want that!" and bought it and sometimes that thing became my new favorite.
This happens. It matters to you and to the people paying for those ads … if they could really quantity it.
But it’s too tiny to matter to the media outlets. You’re talking about real clicks, which are already a small fraction. Real clicks on ads that actually offer anything desirable … that’s just too small a part of total clicks. Nobody can make much money on that 0.5% (?) of the traffic, no matter how idealistic they are. Fake clicks on misleading ads are the bread and butter of the market.
As a vendor, expecting online advertisers to get you customers efficiently is like expecting a real estate agent to get you the best sale price. They care about their own revenue, not yours.
Look at even Amazon's own site. They're hardly bothering to show you real stuff that you actually want. Either they're completely incompetent, or that's just not where the money is.
When billions are being collected in scams and those organizations are paying for more ads, it doesn't matter what you normally do, it matters what you do when you're emotional, or drunk, or what your parents do
You know how Facebook became a popular employer among new CS grads, by paying more than anyone else?
You know that book/movie, "The Firm", in which the new law school graduate gets a surprisingly lucrative job offer? (spoilers) It turns out that the reason is Crime.
It's a short leap from "the hacker company" to "the scammer company". A short and very, very, very profitable leap
What point are you trying to make? Any company offering above market compensation is engaging in illegal activity?
Not always- see Costco. But in a world where every company is trying to minimize expenses to maximize profits, paying significantly above market is at the very least an indicator that there may be something fishy going on.
It's a valid business strategy to hire the best and brightest in the field, and to pay higher than average to attract that talent -- if you can afford it.
"Big law" firms are a good example of this too: they pay way more than some random family law practice.
The "if you can afford it" is pulling all the weight there. Why can certain companies afford it more than others in the same market? The context of this thread is suggesting that those companies are doing more crime or crime-adjacent activities.
Yes and what do large, white shoe law firms work on primarily? The largest clients are the ones with lots of…legal activity.
What types of clients might those be?
Costco's IT department is not above market rates in the Seattle area fyi.
I don't think he implied that. Criminality and ghoulish ethics are just one of many reasons a company may offer above market compensation.
Sure seems that way, no?
Yes. But only because every company is engaging in illegal activity, big tech just more so.
Low ethics high pay? Higher margins from lower ethics?
At some point does complacency with scammers become racketeering or criminals conspiracy? Knowledge is an element of crime and they know people are being scammed yet look away from it.
Any company offering above market compensation is engaging in illegal activity?
To quote Randall Munroe, "Correlation doesn't imply causation, but it does waggle its eyebrows suggestively and gesture furtively while mouthing 'look over there'."
What point are you trying to make? That Facebook is not trying to push the boundary of laws and ethics?
I searched for a used steamdeck in my area and got 100% fraud sellers. My elders in my family fall for fraud via meta’s platforms. Its caused me lots of stress and pain.
The only thing I can do is delete all my Meta accounts. One of the riches companies in the world with some very smart people and its ruined by toxic leadership.
If this was my product, I’d feel ashamed by how trash it is. I really hope governments force stricter regulations on meta and ads in general. Meta should be liable if a user is scammed by an ad on their platform. Plane and simple.
> One of the riches companies in the world with some very smart people and its ruined by toxic leadership.
Leadership can certainly be blamed, but I think it comes down to their hiring practices. When you prioritise leetcode-isk wrote memorisation and deprioritise intrinsics (like ethics, shocker), you end up with a company full of people who are willing to do anything to achieve their singular goal of making TC go up. Morality or product quality be damned.
>One of the riches companies in the world with some very smart people and its ruined by toxic leadership.
The rank and file are complicit. There are people commenting on HN every day who are paid handsomely to work at Meta and to act willfully blind to the awful ethics their company has displayed for two decades.
I often have the question: how much money do we waste on selfishness.
It's a clear example here. Meta is wasting good customer's money by showing them alongside scams and just devaluing ads by decreasing user trust. But also we only have these regulatory agencies because of this type of selfish behavior in the first place.
It sucks that these regulatory agencies cost so much money. But why do we blame the government? It's completely a problem we create. If people and companies didn't act like shit we wouldn't need those expenses in the first place. Let's not blame the regulators (for existing, but do for being ineffective) and blame the "bad apples" that are spoiling the barrel.
But what I do appreciate is that other countries are stepping up and not just waiting for the US to fix things. Real progress is being made because of this even if it still has a long way to go.
> But why do we blame the government? It's completely a problem we create.
Yes but if the government is ineffective at solving the issue with the vast amounts of money we give them, we now have two problems.
Your point basically boils down to "regulators are ineffective, but that's okay because the original problem isn't their fault". Sorry, but I actually care about throwing my hard earned money into the void because it's "ok" that the regulators suck.
This is one of my key arguments AGAINST "libertarianism" - a proper functioning market has three things, consumers, producers, and regulators, and they each need to be well balanced.
If producers have too much power in the market we see distortion, eg. When monopolies exist.
If consumers have too much power in the market we see exploitation.
If regulators have too much power in the market we see stagflation.
Markets don't operate efficiently without all three components.
Yeah I'm actually with you on this. The government is part of the market no matter what. Through action or inaction they are still a critical player.
But I think we often miss the messaging on regulators. In some way I agree with the right. It's a waste of money. But ones creating the waste isn't the government, it's those that need to be regulated
What do you consider an "efficient market" to look like? Do you just mean one that tends towards outcomes you personally deem important?
Wow.
Possible ways to kept Meta ad records honest and transparent:
- CCing archive.org
- Store on an append-only system with hashing, hello blockchain use-case ha ;D.. IPFS or even GitHub should do, no crypto payments required.
- Third-party government bodies could require copies.
Meta now has an extensive track record of doing unethical things because they're slightly more profitable. This case is relatively minor compared to what they did in Myanmar[1]. Meta has some very smart people working for them but, unfortunately, Meta's management prefers to set them to the task of creatively evading responsibility rather than actually addressing problems.
Governments seem to be a step behind when it comes to protecting their citizens from unethical social media corporations. As in this case, any sensible regulations that are imposed will be circumvented in the most dishonest ways possible. Regulations often aren't imposed at all due to pressure from the U.S. government, whom Meta has considerable influence over. Could international cooperation to regulate social media solve some of these issues?
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[1]https://systemicjustice.org/article/facebook-and-genocide-ho...
I'm sure one of these days Facebook will face a consequence for the amoral, corrupt and lazy culture they've engendered.
Any day now.
In some roundabout way, it’s really pathetic that the evil corporations of our times are merely dopamine peddling advertisers, and not something more sinister.
I guess we should count ourselves lucky..
Yeah back in the day evil companies used to kill people in 3rd world countries and give their workers horrible diseases and injuries. I guess this is better?
Back in the day evil companies would overthrow governments and starve children.
It feels a bit darker that the US government is doing it now and being cheered on by their faithful voters in the name of religion and tax breaks for the wealthy and company leaders kowtowing and outright bribing in the open for favorable treatment.
Back in the day?
Let's see how many people we have in poverty and poor, unaffordable medical conditions in the US in 10 years due to government destruction/stagnation and a lack of controls on the impacts of AI.
[laughs in Burmese]
Meta has been responsible for a lot worse than merely dopamine peddling.
It reminds me of something funny my grandma told me.
She told me that she saw an ad on Facebook to double her money and asked her daughter if it was a legitimate opportunity. Her daughter said to her "If you ever think about calling me to ask that question, you can put down the phone because it's a scam."
I imagine something like this is what happens at all those companies that send spam texts and calls like bandwidth.com or Sinch or others - a strategy to make money supporting criminals
What underlies this is that the USA is a fundamentally scammy country. I mean no disrespect: I'm a US citizen and have lived here for 30 years and made plenty of money from the US economy. But nevertheless it's a scam culture. And sure enough when I read the article, it says "Facebook battling Japanese regulators". Of course there wouldn't be a regulator in the USA telling Facebook to not host scam ads.
Consider the TV industry in the USA: it makes huge amounts of money from political ads, which are for the most part scams. The same people who make money from those scam ads also control the news. So guess what? No pressure to not scam the population with false advertising.
Perhaps it helps to have not grown up in the US. If you've been here your entire life there's a frog boiling syndrome where none of the weirdness seems weird. This is why JD and co witter on about how terrible Europe is -- they need to keep up the delusion that scammers should get to scam and there's no hope to stop them. The recent moves to sanction European campaigners against big tech disinformation is really: the scammers got the root password to the country and are using it to fight back.
The scamming is pervasive in works of American fiction through the last century - Mark Twain’s works, The Jungle(more than just meat packing industry), Elmer Gantry and Steinbeck. Many of the described scams still take place on industrial scale.
No I've lived in the US my whole life and I agree with you. Ever since I bought my house I feel like I'm constantly bombarded by people trying to scam me out of my money. I'm sure it was always like that but it seems like getting a mortgage put me on some "financially stable guy" list that attracts the vultures. Medical, home repair, finance services. Without constant vigilance it's so easy to get grifted.
Seriously. I actually want a bunch of renovation work done to my house, and door-to-door salesmen come by all the time to try to sell me that type of service. After one horrible experience that started with such a salesman, never again. I assume everyone out there is a freaking scammer because too many are.
And even the companies and industries that used to be pretty benign have realized that all the growth is in scams, so they've added whole divisions of their business to try to get you onto recurring payments for stuff you probably don't want, which can all be signed up for with like 1 click, but cancelling needs a phone call during Eastern Time business hours and a 25 minute wait on hold.
I've basically shifted to negatively weighting any advertisements I see, the thinking being that if a company needs to advertise, they're more likely to be a scam; companies who are actually great at what they do can survive off word of mouth (or at the very least, don't have it in their margins to pay someone to advertise door to door.) Basically the same logic as the old "never go to a restaurant that has someone standing outside trying to drum up business because it's a tourist trap."
It's a major problem with US culture. The guy 'hustling' and making big bucks scamming people is seen as virtuous somehow. The guy working a 9-5 or owning a small scale honest business are seen as the suckers.
> Perhaps it helps to have not grown up in the US. If you've been here your entire life there's a frog boiling syndrome where none of the weirdness seems weird.
Eh - some other countries I've lived are way scammier. The difference in the US is the distinction between legal and illegal scams, and because of better enforcement, most of the "scams" in the US are legal. They can be more sophisticated because the bar is higher here.
If I'm reading this right, the playbook was... deleting scam ads ? And the implied problem is they only deleted searchable ads, and not trying harder to get rid of all of them.
It's interesting that Facebook was trying NOT to uncover identities, they're famous for insisting on real names.
All ads are searchable. They found the exact words and phrases that regulators used and then made sure those were clean.
>As a result, Meta decided to take the tactic global, performing similar analyses to assess “scam discoverability” in other countries. “We have built a vast keyword list by country that is meant to mimic what regulators may search for,” one document states. Another described the work as changing the “prevalence perception” of scams on Facebook and Instagram.
> the implied problem is they only deleted searchable ads
Well, more just the ads that matched the specific queries the regulators were using. So yes, they removed some scam ads, but there are probably many more that people are still seeing just because those didn't match the search queries the regulators were searching for.
> It's interesting that Facebook was trying NOT to uncover identities, they're famous for insisting on real names.
It isn't really surprising. If they required real identities, they wouldn't be able to make money from scammers using throw-away accounts, or from entities subject to US sanctions, so there is a monetary incentive not to know the identity of the ad customers.
Precisely, completely agree.
If this method actually removed a significant percentage of scam ads, rather than just heading off scrutiny, then a) doing proper verification wouldn't cost them $2b a year like they claim it would, and b) their quarterly revenues would be taking a meaningful (single digits %) hit and the share price would suffer.
This is the same tactics VW used. Find out about the test the regulator uses and focus on passing the tests instead of complying with the rules the regulator wants to enforce.
They weren't even deleting the scam ads, that would decrease their revenue. They were just hiding the scam ads from regulators.
I believe that's incorrect - the article quotes Meta as saying "By cleaning those ads from search results, the company is also removing them from its systems overall".
The real problem as I understand it is that they didn't stop the ads from entering the system, but rather identified the words used by regulators and only deleted those ads (after an unspecified amount of time online) from the system.