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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

#151

Post by anigbrowl »

toast0 wrote: post #129
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 advertiseme…

So just rewrite or repeal it. If we make social network and UGC companies common carriers, then they'll be subject to different kinds of regulation, too bad. Right now they are having their cake and eating it, to the general detriment.

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

#152

Post by cm2012 »

jessekv wrote: post #147
AnthonyMouse wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The flaw here is in expecting Facebook to be the police. Here's what happens if you make Facebook do it. They become aware of someone running an illegal ad and ban them. But the advertiser is a criminal and still wants to make money, so they make a new account or find some way to avoid detection, and the ad ends up back in the system, and the advertiser can do this forever because they're making a net profit by conti…

Since ads are targeted, only Facebook can know when an illegal ad is run. Are you suggesting Facebook should be reporting the people running ads to law enforcement?

All fb ads + associated general targeting are public in ads library, the gov could enforce this on their own.

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

#153

Post by anigbrowl »

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 surprised that cops haven't started arresting people for receiving ads about contraband, which would imply (to a cop brain) that they must be creating the demand for such items.

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

#154

Post by linotype »

segasaturn wrote: post #85
warkdarrior wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So your solution is for YT/Google/Meta to check the code, operations, finances, and business models of every advertiser that comes to them? Even if YT/Google/Meta could do this at scale, do you want them to have that power?

If Google/Meta/Youtube want to be multi-trillion dollar monopolies that have invaded every aspect of our lives then there should be some very basic corporate responsibility that comes with that power, even if its difficult and maybe even costs them a little bit of money. Lately it seems like the phrase has been inverted to "with great power comes less responsibility". If your small local TV station ran ads for cocain…

Aside from YouTube, there’s an alternative for all of the services provided by Google and Meta. Fastmail, X (Twitter), a billion different messenger apps, Microsoft apps for office applications, etc etc.

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

#155

Post by sprayk »

jklinger410 wrote: post #92

Wow this is terrible! Are you saying someone could buy these drugs over the counter, with regular currency, not on the dark web? Can someone share these ads with me so I could check them out? Just purely out of my own concern? Thanks

I never ged ads for "real" drugs, just the normal OTC/prescription stuff and occasionally some legal analogues (non-psilocybin mushroom gummies come to mind). Very curious what they look like as well and what their sites say about the purchase process (what forms of payment do they accept, how do they ship, etc).

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

#156

Post by photonthug »

vjulian wrote: post #29

Most of what’s being discussed here is naturally subjective views on propriety. Not many years ago, God forbid should one see an ad for cannabis. Even what is and is not considered a scam is quite subjective, is it not? To what extent are these platforms themselves legalised scams? Or the oh-wow-look-what-we-found false editorial strategy that most rags market.

Setting aside the legality and free speech philosophizing and corporate apologism, don’t you find it tasteless, doesn’t it make you angry that there’s a hot granny-sex prostitution / blackmail outfit that’s taken over your local library? It used to be a nice place man. I know we can still check out the books but after 4 hours of abusive conditioning where they pin your eyeballs open and and jab the monitoring device into your brain stem who’s got the energy left to read anything anyway

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

#157

Post by Teever »

I hate this.

I used to run a business in Canada that sold grow equipment and our primary customer base was marijuana growers. When legalization came we started running advertisements for our shop on facebook. Got our hand slapped really hard, really fast and our advertising account banned.

A few months later I see advertisements for chocolates with psilocybin mushrooms in them. Mushrooms remain illegal in Canada. The ads continued for several months.

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

#158

Post by BrianHenryIE »

markovs_gun wrote: post #126
realusername wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 2n…

I live in California and when I try buy shower heads on Amazon I often get

> This item cannot be shipped to your selected delivery location. Please choose a different delivery location.

so there is an angle there – ship interstate and ignore California laws.

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

#159

Post by datavirtue »

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #136
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…

The flaw here is in expecting Facebook to be the police. Here's what happens if you make Facebook do it. They become aware of someone running an illegal ad and ban them. But the advertiser is a criminal and still wants to make money, so they make a new account or find some way to avoid detection, and the ad ends up back in the system, and the advertiser can do this forever because they're making a net profit by conti…

If this was happening on my platform, I would want to know about it. Facebook is the police, of their own concerns. I'm sure they are genuinely trying to identify all these people and report them to law enforcement. What is the miss, here?

Any decent journalism on this subject? NPR takes too much money from Facebook to preclude them from rooting around in their business, and they pretty much stopped covering Facebook, other than mentions and basic AP press releases. The same is probably true with other media interests as well.

Nonetheless, I doubt Facebook wants these people and it certainly threatens their business by overrunning it with creepy drug ads, so what we see is the tiny bit that manages to bubble up through the cracks. Everyone wants Facebook to magically seal all the cracks.

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