User-generated 'free' content - ok, I kind of get it. The volume is insane, the product is not viable with everything reviewed.
Paid advertising though? How is it I get Facebook adverts for drugs, with pictures of the drugs, or fake money, from BLUE TICK advertisers? Obviously zero review, LLM or human.
How is it that with paid advertising they can't have one human or even a savvy LLM in the loop spend one single CENT's worth of time reviewing the adverts?
lwo32k · 1h ago
Cuz the primary goal is hitting revenue targets and showing "growth" in those metrics every quarter. All else is secondary. You can see what their priorities are when they talk to Wall St every quarter - https://investor.atmeta.com/investor-news/press-release-deta...
pjc50 · 37m ago
This will not improve until the platform shares proper liability. The US isn't going to do that, but the EU might be able to.
There's a reasonable argument that user generated content platforms can't survive being held liable for the crimes of their user. However, the advertising is a much smaller volume of content and they're making money directly from it.
matsemann · 24m ago
I've reported so many scam ads that someone has made to look like a link to a real news site. Like, in some field they fill in "wsj.com", and that's then prominently displayed on the ad the same place as you normally use to verify where a link takes you, but clicking it takes you somewhere else entirely. Every report have been denied, saying it didn't violate their standards.
They're just happy they get money, don't care if it screws their users. The users aren't their customers...
quitit · 1h ago
and to take it a step further:
1. reporting such advertising doesn't do anything,
2. nor the reporting of accounts that are directly soliciting such in messages,
3. nor policing of instagram accounts whose entire profile is just photos of drugs with instructions on how to buy them
It's farcical. It's also standard for these accounts to have tens of duplicate accounts which only differ by an incremental number after their handle.
sanswork · 2h ago
I feel like they aren't even trying. The number of times I've reported obvious stolen accounts running scams or spamming only to recieve the "we investigated and found no rules broken" has made me stop trying. Every concert listing is full of scam bots posting the exact same wording to scam people.
Given the ability to shadowban from public posting and a few hours I'm pretty sure I could write a single function to block 95% of the scams. It would be one thing if they were dealing with complex scammers but the fact is they haven't even tried to stop the very low hanging fruit that you could solve with a few regexes.
650REDHAIR · 1h ago
I was perma-banned on Reddit for “abusing” the report feature.
Reporting illegal firearms sales.
The post and report in question were ~6mo old at the time of review and I believe had already been deleted by either the OP or a sub mod.
I got a similar warning (but no ban) reporting similar sales on FB.
They don’t care to fix it
laweijfmvo · 1h ago
haven’t they claimed that their “AI” catches 99% of spam before it gets seen or something? seems like there’s even lower hanging fruit or they’re just lying.
RajT88 · 46m ago
I am not shocked. I recently had a completely legitimate experience with Facebook, no fraud or anything.
My wife opened a restaurant a few months back. We're paying for Facebook ads. The early months of operating a food business is burning massive cash, so we had a ~10 dollar payment get rejected on FB ads.
Something about this rejected payment enabled all prior ad campaigns we had disabled. We are still trying to figure it out - noticed it just today. We're in for ~85 dollars in ad campaigns for just 2 days.
Every stupid bug or dark pattern which makes a big tech company money does not get fixed. It will take getting hauled in front of congress to fix it.
bluecalm · 1h ago
I tried to report a FB page of obvious car (campervan) thieves: no address, name, telephone numbers only visible on the photo (so it's more difficult to scrap/automatically detect). A lot of made up testimonials with hidden comments. The company was supposedly registered in my country but there is no way to check if it exists (we have national public registry of all companies) as no relevant data is provided. I came across the website when someone from another country not speaking my language asked me about the page and if it's legit.
FB doesn't care. There is no way to tell them what the report is about (only that it somehow violates "community standards") and they don't care to check if the company even exists.
The only thing they are battling is negative PR as they don't care to take even baby steps to prevent literal thieves advertising on their service.
SoftTalker · 1h ago
I don't think users really care either, as they keep using the platform. We're long past the point where I thought people would get out of the obvious cesspool they were swimming in, but it hasn't happened.
sanswork · 1h ago
Lock in is a real thing. I dropped the friend feed because of app spam, I stopped using marketplace because of scams, but I'm still on Facebook because 99% of the organisations and groups I need or want to be a member of use it and trying to move communities off platform just results in split communities unfortunately.
I think “battle” is a little generous given the actions Meta is actually taking. Battle implies constant action. Not allowing 32 strikes on fraudulent accounts before taking them down.
hn_throwaway_99 · 1h ago
> The report estimated organized scamming operations—often called “pig butchering” groups—comprise hundreds of thousands of people, many trafficked after falling for fraudulent social-media employment ads. Kept in prisonlike compounds, the workers are forced to work under threat of “extreme forms of torture and abuse.”
> West said the growth of this nightmarish industry stems directly from the inaction of Meta and, to a lesser extent, its social-media peers.
> “If there’s anybody who could make a huge dent here, it’s Meta,” she said. “But there’s no hammer over their head.”
This is just f'ing evil in my opinion. Meta could do something that would make a real dent in this problem, but they don't because money.
Meta is basically like a giant leaded gas or CFC factory - they just rake in money while they spew this toxic crap that society has to deal with. If Meta disappeared tomorrow I think the world would be a much better place, and despite some issues I may have with other companies, I really can't say that about any of the other Big Techs.
Paid advertising though? How is it I get Facebook adverts for drugs, with pictures of the drugs, or fake money, from BLUE TICK advertisers? Obviously zero review, LLM or human.
How is it that with paid advertising they can't have one human or even a savvy LLM in the loop spend one single CENT's worth of time reviewing the adverts?
There's a reasonable argument that user generated content platforms can't survive being held liable for the crimes of their user. However, the advertising is a much smaller volume of content and they're making money directly from it.
They're just happy they get money, don't care if it screws their users. The users aren't their customers...
1. reporting such advertising doesn't do anything,
2. nor the reporting of accounts that are directly soliciting such in messages,
3. nor policing of instagram accounts whose entire profile is just photos of drugs with instructions on how to buy them
It's farcical. It's also standard for these accounts to have tens of duplicate accounts which only differ by an incremental number after their handle.
Given the ability to shadowban from public posting and a few hours I'm pretty sure I could write a single function to block 95% of the scams. It would be one thing if they were dealing with complex scammers but the fact is they haven't even tried to stop the very low hanging fruit that you could solve with a few regexes.
Reporting illegal firearms sales.
The post and report in question were ~6mo old at the time of review and I believe had already been deleted by either the OP or a sub mod.
I got a similar warning (but no ban) reporting similar sales on FB.
They don’t care to fix it
My wife opened a restaurant a few months back. We're paying for Facebook ads. The early months of operating a food business is burning massive cash, so we had a ~10 dollar payment get rejected on FB ads.
Something about this rejected payment enabled all prior ad campaigns we had disabled. We are still trying to figure it out - noticed it just today. We're in for ~85 dollars in ad campaigns for just 2 days.
Every stupid bug or dark pattern which makes a big tech company money does not get fixed. It will take getting hauled in front of congress to fix it.
FB doesn't care. There is no way to tell them what the report is about (only that it somehow violates "community standards") and they don't care to check if the company even exists.
The only thing they are battling is negative PR as they don't care to take even baby steps to prevent literal thieves advertising on their service.
> West said the growth of this nightmarish industry stems directly from the inaction of Meta and, to a lesser extent, its social-media peers.
> “If there’s anybody who could make a huge dent here, it’s Meta,” she said. “But there’s no hammer over their head.”
This is just f'ing evil in my opinion. Meta could do something that would make a real dent in this problem, but they don't because money.
Meta is basically like a giant leaded gas or CFC factory - they just rake in money while they spew this toxic crap that society has to deal with. If Meta disappeared tomorrow I think the world would be a much better place, and despite some issues I may have with other companies, I really can't say that about any of the other Big Techs.