Meta has run hundreds of ads for cocaine, opioids and other drugs • Hacker News Board

Re: Meta has run hundreds of ads for cocaine, opioids and other drugs

#51

Post by pavlov » Wed, Jul 31, 2024, 6:34 PM UTC

deathanatos wrote: post #43

YouTube has been hitting me up with "ads" which are Ethereum scams¹ recently. Of what I've reported, 60% are still up. Some of these were reported in March. Recently I also got an "ad" for what was almost certainly Sovereign Citizen propaganda, which … wow , I didn't even know they ran YT ads?² Today's ads (since I checked just to see for this comment) is all normal stuff. ¹they allege to have written an "arbitrage"…

> “Ethereum scams … passive income of varying amounts, but often on the order of $1M USD/y … actually just steals your money“

I bet Andreessen Horowitz have funded this company. After all it’s web3 and has both user growth and revenue.

Re: Meta has run hundreds of ads for cocaine, opioids and other drugs

#52

Post by xyst » Wed, Jul 31, 2024, 6:35 PM UTC

deathanatos wrote: post #43

YouTube has been hitting me up with "ads" which are Ethereum scams¹ recently. Of what I've reported, 60% are still up. Some of these were reported in March. Recently I also got an "ad" for what was almost certainly Sovereign Citizen propaganda, which … wow , I didn't even know they ran YT ads?² Today's ads (since I checked just to see for this comment) is all normal stuff. ¹they allege to have written an "arbitrage"…

This is why I just block them entirely. No use in reporting anymore.

Re: Meta has run hundreds of ads for cocaine, opioids and other drugs

#53

Post by brap » Wed, Jul 31, 2024, 6:35 PM UTC

My favorite Meta ad that I keep getting is a deepfake video of Elon Musk saying he will be handing out free money for “Neuralink AI” to the first people who will invest. They’re saying thousands of dollars PER WEEK are guaranteed! Nice!

And I just got the same exact scam on FB, but this time they used a deepfake video of my country’s president, saying they’re working with Elon Musk to give money to all citizens. Yay!

Re: Meta has run hundreds of ads for cocaine, opioids and other drugs

#54

Post by immibis » Wed, Jul 31, 2024, 6:36 PM UTC

tamiral wrote: post #13

did 404media do an expose story on this ? I swear Meta will allow anything for money

You either do anything for money, or you are not a household name.

Re: Meta has run hundreds of ads for cocaine, opioids and other drugs

#55

Post by meroes » Wed, Jul 31, 2024, 6:37 PM UTC

I've seen a lot of responses saying prosecutors won't go after Meta because of a professional responsibility for winning at trial.

Well, what about cops+feds civil asset forfeiture-ing their servers and offices?

Re: Meta has run hundreds of ads for cocaine, opioids and other drugs

#56

Post by mewpmewp2 » Wed, Jul 31, 2024, 6:37 PM UTC

dragontamer wrote: post #16

atonse wrote: post #10

There's just no excuse for this anymore – why don't they apply their own state-of-the-art LLMs to analyze these and flag the adds as pushing potentially illegal substances? Because as it's painfully obvious now, Meta doesn't care, they're happy to take the money.

LLMs create text. They don't understand them in the traditional sense. LLMs are backwards. Much like how Stable Diffusion is text-to-image, not image-to-text. You need to rework the neural network entirely to do what you're asking. ------- Its a neat trick that you can train LLMs to perhaps, ingest "text" followed by a question (ex: "Is the previous paragraph spam?"), and then the text-generator generates a yes-or-no…

GPT vision can describe what is on images though quite well. Definitely should be able to understand.

But I assume this was before the release of that some time, but I don't have access to the article.

Re: Meta has run hundreds of ads for cocaine, opioids and other drugs

#57

Post by finnthehuman » Wed, Jul 31, 2024, 6:38 PM UTC

deathanatos wrote: post #43

YouTube has been hitting me up with "ads" which are Ethereum scams¹ recently. Of what I've reported, 60% are still up. Some of these were reported in March. Recently I also got an "ad" for what was almost certainly Sovereign Citizen propaganda, which … wow , I didn't even know they ran YT ads?² Today's ads (since I checked just to see for this comment) is all normal stuff. ¹they allege to have written an "arbitrage"…

You have to hint to the YouTube AI to give you different ads.

Just mobile signed into your primary gmail account you’ll see they’re night and day different from desktop/tv.

The old android device I use for streaming in the kitchen with an alternate gmail account? That’s where they really get good.

Re: Meta has run hundreds of ads for cocaine, opioids and other drugs

#58

Post by immibis » Wed, Jul 31, 2024, 6:38 PM UTC

Arrath wrote: post #25

raybb wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is faceless marketing (borderline) illegal?

What even is faceless marketing?

Apparently it is, literally - get this - marketing without putting your face in from of a camera. Because we all know that was the only way to do marketing before. All that juice from just one bag of oranges!

Re: Meta has run hundreds of ads for cocaine, opioids and other drugs

#59

Post by mewpmewp2 » Wed, Jul 31, 2024, 6:39 PM UTC

arilotter wrote: post #2

Anecdotally, I get Instagram ads for "buy mdma online" all day, every day.

Just to make sure I won't get hit by any, what activities does one have to avoid doing in order to not get any of those?

Re: Meta has run hundreds of ads for cocaine, opioids and other drugs

#60

Post by pseudocomposer » Wed, Jul 31, 2024, 6:41 PM UTC

01HNNWZ0MV43FF wrote: post #24

lovethevoid wrote: post #6

Advertising networks get away with so much, it's quite ridiculous. The same company that will ban your account for posting about such content, will regularly run ads about such content. Worse, there's nothing you can do about it except run ad blockers (which they in turn will use various measures as punishment for you doing so). Guess we didn't learn anything from Cambridge Analytica.

I'm trying to get more into self hosting and things like federation that can allow technical people to be admins of low-maintenance services for their friends and family. It's a slow push but it's gonna happen. Microtransactions are stuck in deployment hell, advertisements are a deal with the devil, and this is the only third option I know of

You might be interested in my AGPL federated social network, Jonline, which I've built specifically for this purpose. Source is at https://github.com/JonLatane/jonline, and I have a few instances up at https://jonline.io ("flagship"/demo server), https://bullcity.social (Durham, NC community), and https://oakcity.social (Raleigh, NC community).

It's a pure Rust server so it's extremely lightweight to self-host compared to things like Mastodon, plus it supports events (with iCal/Google Calendar export). I'm also happy to host an instance on my DigitalOcean Kubernetes cluster for anyone interested and integrate it into my CI/CD pipeline, which is an option on my GitHub sponsors page (and I'm working on a load balancer which should eventually bring the cost of this down as well).