Facebook owner’s staggering revenue from scam ads

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SIX THINGS TO TALK ABOUT
Facebook owner’s staggering revenue from scam ads | Do you know a modern gentlemen | Art of the ‘no star’ review | Buy a home with an island as a back garden

🍸 Social media giant Meta is making billions from ads for scams and banned goods, leaked internal documents have revealed. The Facebook owner reckons it showed - in just one day - 15 billion advertisements for dodgy products and activities, worth an annualised $7 billion. Total income to the company from dodgy ads could be as much as 10% of overall annual revenue, the documents show.

As well as showing the staggering level of grift being worked through its platforms, the trove of leaked documents shows the company failed, for three years, to identify and stop ads that exposed Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp’s billions of users to illegal activity. That included e-commerce scams, bogus investment schemes, illegal gambling and banned medical products.

Also staggering: much of the fraud came from people suspicious enough to be flagged by Meta’s internal warning systems. But the company only bans advertisers if it’s 95% certain to be committing fraud. Otherwise, even if it thinks an advertiser is a likely scammer, is simply… charges them more, as a deterrent.

And finally, click on one scam and - of course - Meta’s systems ensure, in their robot efficiency, that you see lots more. Because, you know, optimisation.

One fraud consultant put it very well: “If regulators wouldn’t tolerate banks profiting from fraud, they shouldn’t tolerate it in tech”.

A Meta spokesperson disputed the figures, said the true numbers were lower… but declined to offer an updated figure. It told Tech Radar it “aggressively fights fraud”. But these astonishing figures are likely to lead to more calls for tighter government oversight of tech platforms. (Reuters £) (Tech Radar)

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