Not to distract from Meta but I’m surprised Google doesn’t also get heat for this. A number of phishing sites win >30% of the auction on my company’s brand keywords and I see it on many others as well, especially in CPG and e-commerce. I’ve yet to have any luck getting Google to ban the advertisers.
It is profoundly ironic that Meta is apparently using cloaking techniques against regulators. Cloaking is a black-hat technique where you show one version of a landing page to the ad review bot (e.g., a blog about health) and a different version to the actual user (e.g., a diet pill scam).
Meta has spent years building AI to detect when affiliates cloak their links. Now, according to this report, Meta is essentially cloaking the ads themselves from journalists and regulators by likely filtering based on user profiling, IP ranges, or behavioral signals. They are using the sophisticated targeting tools intended for advertisers to target the "absence" of scrutiny.
"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."
That doesn't sound like cloaking. They really are deleting the ads. They're just concentrating on the ads that the regulators are most likely to see based on what they usually search for.
> The scrubbing, Meta teams explained in documents regarding their efforts to reduce scam discoverability, sought to make problematic content “not findable” for “regulators, investigators and journalists.”
This seems to be the "smoking gun"... but it's unclear from the article what the source or context of the quotations are.
I do not yet know if there's wrongdoing here, but even if it was screaming bad, all US government enforcement bodies have been gutted and made completely subservient to the will of the president rather than their legislatively mandated mission, under a novel "unitary executive" philosophy.
Further, that unitary executive is completely corrupt, and has already been laid off by Meta. Ukraine is a model of clean government with proper anti-corruption investigations and teeth compared to the US.
You are expecting third party countries to begin litigation on crimes that happen outside of their borders - even if they're just even strictly illegal where they're headquartered?
That shit never happens, and if it would, you'd first have to start jailing lots of S&P CEOs for the companies crimes that are committed in other companies and never amount to anything, precisely for the same reason
The original reuters article quotes Meta as claiming that making them harder to find by removing them from the system. This article doesn't offer any evidence to suggest that Meta is lying. This is lazy and poor reporting as far as I'm concerned.
Restaurant seen throwing waste in dumpster after removing it from food inspector's plate. Insists there's no other waste on other plates, apparently without checking.
What proportion of the scam ads do you think this approach caught?
It is profoundly ironic that Meta is apparently using cloaking techniques against regulators. Cloaking is a black-hat technique where you show one version of a landing page to the ad review bot (e.g., a blog about health) and a different version to the actual user (e.g., a diet pill scam).
Meta has spent years building AI to detect when affiliates cloak their links. Now, according to this report, Meta is essentially cloaking the ads themselves from journalists and regulators by likely filtering based on user profiling, IP ranges, or behavioral signals. They are using the sophisticated targeting tools intended for advertisers to target the "absence" of scrutiny.
[0] https://www.reuters.com/investigations/meta-created-playbook...
That doesn't sound like cloaking. They really are deleting the ads. They're just concentrating on the ads that the regulators are most likely to see based on what they usually search for.
This seems to be the "smoking gun"... but it's unclear from the article what the source or context of the quotations are.
> but it's unclear from the article what the source or context of the quotations are.
Good point, this quote could just be painting their actions in the poorest possible light.
https://qz.com/dieselgate-sentences-handed-down-1851782440
I do not yet know if there's wrongdoing here, but even if it was screaming bad, all US government enforcement bodies have been gutted and made completely subservient to the will of the president rather than their legislatively mandated mission, under a novel "unitary executive" philosophy.
Further, that unitary executive is completely corrupt, and has already been laid off by Meta. Ukraine is a model of clean government with proper anti-corruption investigations and teeth compared to the US.
0: https://apnews.com/article/volkswagen-germany-diesel-emissio...
Annual revenue of VW at the time was 217B €. In the EU, they paid 1.5B €. So, 0.7% of their annual revenue for a scheme that went on for years.
Granted, in the US, they actually did persecute VW properly, and they ended up paying close to 30B $. A much proper sum.
As for the jail time, they arrested 2 from middle management in the EU. No member from the board or the CEO went to jail here.
Is that what we call justice now? Specially when we want to pretend we are superior to the USA in that regard?
You are expecting third party countries to begin litigation on crimes that happen outside of their borders - even if they're just even strictly illegal where they're headquartered?
That shit never happens, and if it would, you'd first have to start jailing lots of S&P CEOs for the companies crimes that are committed in other companies and never amount to anything, precisely for the same reason
I'm still wondering what the Scam Prevention Framework enacted in Australia will do to mitigate this kind of stuff.
https://www.austlii.edu.au/cgi-bin/viewdb/au/legis/cth/conso... (Part IVF)
What proportion of the scam ads do you think this approach caught?