A very recent and disturbing article from Reuters claims that Meta, the mother company that owns Facebook, projected (in other words being AWARE of) 10% of its 2024 revenue would come from ads for scams and banned goods. The social media giant internally estimates that its platforms show users 15 billion scam ads a day. Among its responses to suspected scam ads, Meta is earning even more, it charges them a premium for ads.
Meta internally projected late last year that it would earn about $16 billion (10% of its overall annual revenue) from running scam and banned goods ads, internal company documents show.
Unreported documents reviewed by Reuters also shows that the social media giant for at least three years, failed to identify and stop an avalanche of ads that exposed billions of Meta users on several platforms like Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, to fraudulent e-commerce and investment schemes, illegal online casinos, and even the sale of banned medical products!
One could argue that a huge company like Meta failed to identify these scam ads due to technological limitations. However, the Reuters report suggests this is allegedly a conscious decision made by the company, as it only bans advertisers, if its automated systems predict the marketers are at least 95% certain to be committing fraud, the documents show. That is an EXTREEMLY high threshold set by Meta (or whoever is in charge of setting it). To underscore how infuriating this is, consider this analogy: if a security system had a 94% certainty that a fire was about to start, would it ignore the warning? Meta is effectively letting highly likely scams continue to show because they fall just below this high 95% bar. Even lowering that threshold, would you want a plane to take off with a 25% certainty of a mechanical failure? Why then are the money and mental health of Meta’s users and clients treated as less important?
If the company is less certain, but still believes the advertiser is a likely a scammer, Meta will still show the ad, but it will charge a higher ad rate as a penalty, again according to the documents. And to make things worst, the documents further note that users who click on scam ads are likely to see more of them because of Meta’s ad-personalization system, which tries to deliver ads based on a user’s interests.
Bottom line, not only Facebook has become (in my opinion) a platform for the spread of misinformation, hate of all sorts, political turmoil, it also gives scammers a platform to thrive on, and we all pay the price.