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

wsj.com

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

#121

Post by connicpu »

LeifCarrotson wrote: post #96
gretch wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> So they're actually incentivized to have many creators struck, because struck media means ad impressions whose revenue they need not share. This revenue would go to the copyright claimer. EG if Warner bros struck you for showing their movie, the ad revenue from the video would go to Warner, not simply YouTube

I'm not privy to their deal, but while I'm confident that Warner Bros' has negotiated a revenue sharing agreement better than a typical Youtube Partners' 55% rate, I also suspect it's not 100%.

But that's the point really isn't it? It's no longer illegal once you have a negotiated contract with the copyright holder.

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

#122

Post by mfkp »

BillSaysThis wrote: post #117
mfkp wrote: post #9

https://archive.md/D4EnE edit: hm, maybe this isn't working for the full articles on WSJ anymore...

Your archive.md link works for me.

Interesting, it updated now with the whole article. Earlier it was just the first 2 paragraph preview.

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

#123

Post by joeytuk »

What's worse is that Meta representatives stand up in front of lawmakers and supply information that is false.

I demonstrated the apparent untruthfulness in their claims about fraud here and then interviewed LLaMa about it :-)

https://blog.aviel.tech/Meta-s-LLaMa-AI-LLaMbasts-Meta-for-f...

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

#124

Post by mulmen »

aeturnum wrote: post #42

This is part of a larger pattern for Facebook and other "large scale" advertisers where it's clear they are breaking laws at some rate and are protected from paying a real consequence by the cost of discovering the exact rate of misbehavior. Facebook recently settled a lawsuit related to racially discriminating in housing ads (a federal crime)[1]. I suspect this will get added to the pile of illegal services Facebook…

Seems pretty simple to me. They should pay crippling fees until their business shrinks to a point they can operate it legally. It’s unclear what benefit there is to society that an organization like Meta can scale beyond responsible operation. There is a natural self-regulation to hyperscaling. At some point you’re too big to exist. I see no reason we should forgive Meta’s incompetence. They’re not a natural monopoly. Let them fail.

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

#125

Post by ricardo81 »

ronsor wrote: post #100
ricardo81 wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It does seem like many of the web scale FAANG's had no scaling solution. Facebook and Google in particular are egregious beyond their marketing. e.g. YouTube, how much copyrighted content does G profit off from. And then the 100 variations that slip the 'copyright algo.' I see stuff on there that as a UK TV license payer I've already paid for, and then have to suffer ads. They could not give a hoot.

The last thing I'd complain about is YouTube not doing enough copyright enforcement. If anything, they do far too much, beyond what is reasonable or necessary! And in a lot of cases, the studios don't care, because they slurp up most of the profits, not Google.

They may do a lot of false positives but it doesn't excuse the fact their system can't scale correctly.

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

#126

Post by markovs_gun »

realusername wrote: post #47
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"…

On my phone, only about half of the Youtube ads look legal. They have it all: crypto scams, ponzi schemes, fake mobile games, get quick rich schemes... Some stuff can always slip through but to have a result like this, there's a systemic lack of checks at Google.

I recently got an ad for some kind of scammy garden hose nozzle that supposedly turns your garden hose into a "military grade" (whatever that means) pressure washer but the ad had a weird conspiracy theory theme and kept talking about how the big corporations and Congress were conspiring to try to make the garden hose nozzle illegal because it was too powerful for civilian use. It was like it was trying to get the 2nd amendment crowd but it's a garden hose nozzle that you can buy from Lowes anywhere.

Also, as an aside, all of these things are sort of scams even when they're not taking a weird conspiracy theory route. While it is true that they can get decent velocity through the nozzle, it's nowhere near what a real pressure washer does because fundamentally it's not adding any energy to the fluid.

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

#127

Post by RIMR »

freejazz wrote: post #49
RIMR wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because there is absolutely zero evidence that there are drugs being physically trafficked at Meta's offices? What should happen is that a court should be able to drag responsible executives in front of a judge, issue massive fines for what has already happened, and order that Meta stop running ads until they can present an agreeable plan to prevent these kinds of ads from running. Then they should be under a consent…

>Because there is absolutely zero evidence that there are drugs being physically trafficked at Meta's offices? Well that's not why they would raid Meta. They would raid them to preserve evidence and documents of Meta's complicity with the drug trafficking that does occur on their platforms.

They can do that with a court order. Meta would end up caught with their pants down if they deleted evidence. There's little to no chance that they could do that without either leaving behind damning evidence, or having an employee blow the whistle.

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

#128

Post by dzjkb »

RomanPushkin wrote: post #110

> “DMT,” a psychedelic drug. I would argue that. It's probably the least offensive thing, compared to alcohol you can buy everywhere. DMT and other entheogens are far less harmful than alcoholic drinks available. It's confirmed by many academic papers, and DMT is not something people use for recreational purposes. Moreover, some of these "psychedelic drugs" are used by people who have serious illness, wether it is li…

I totally agree, but why do you think people don't use DMT recreationally?

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

#129

Post by toast0 »

galdosdi wrote: post #107

World's easiest problem to solve if we just get the political will to do so: Pass a law requiring a human being to sign off in "writing" (can be eSigned through an internal moderation platform) on any ad that will be run that the platform will profit from and that will be pushed to users by choice of the platform as opposed to request by the user. This human serves as an agent who will be liable along with their firm…

I don't think it's actually that easy. In the US, we have Section 230[1], which says

> No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider.

Seems to me, that says if you have a problem with the advertisement, you need to go to the source, not the ad network. You're proposing an exception for advertisement, which is reasonable, but you've got to define advertisement. It's not just money for distribution; I'm not an advertiser just because I pay to use a forum, which is money for distribution.

Section 230 isn't some immutable force, so yes, political force is all that's needed, but it's been the norm since 1996, and has been enabling ad networks to show ads without regard to their content since 1997 [2].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Section_230 [2] https://www.eff.org/files/zeran-v-aol.pdf

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