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

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

#171

Post by standardUser »

Teever wrote: post #157

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…

Every single thing about the drug war is anathema to a just and rational society.

Even those who don't care about justice or rationality must care that, in exchange for the billions of dollars spent and the extreme loss to personal liberty, drugs have only become more potent, more readily available and much cheaper.

I find myself developing an inability to respect people who believe we should stay the course despite the overwhelming evidence that the drug war is beyond lost, and always has been.

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

#172

Post by jrflowers »

lagniappe wrote: post #164
jrflowers wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From that link, regarding legality in the US: > it would be considered akin to a Schedule I Controlled Substance under the Federal Analogue Act if sold for human consumption. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_Analogue_Act

You won't find any of them are conspicuously sold for human consumption, it's easier to stamp "not for human consumption" on the packaging.

The link I initially posted was about 4-aco-dmt being found in gummies and chocolate — types of candy. It came in packaging with recommended dosing on it.

https://arstechnica.com/science/2024/07/diamond-shruumz-cand...

The brand’s website has dosing suggestions as well https://diamondshruumz.com/

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

#173

Post by ben_w »

01HNNWZ0MV43FF wrote: post #15
annexrichmond wrote: post #8

There are many ads on Instagram that makes me wonder how this is legal; for example, I saw a fake site that pretended to be Marine Layer where the clothes were suspiciously cheap. I reported the ad, but they dismissed it. And don't get me started on all the "mushroom alternative", "caffeine alternative", drugs. And it's like everyone and their grandmother has their own Viagra or Hair Loss drug company now Infomercial…

I routinely see ads for scams on YouTube and report them and never hear back. Stuff like "a 19 year old invented this that saves you a hundred bucks on your power bill but Big electricity is suppressing it" Just the most bullshit claims over stock footage, things I saw debunked on Snopes 20 years ago as a literal child. It's disappointing

> Stuff like "a 19 year old invented this that saves you a hundred bucks on your power bill but Big electricity is suppressing it"

I had some of the booklets on that theme when I was a kid: https://archive.org/details/george-trinkaus-tesla-the-lost-i...

Given how cheap PV is these days, I'm surprised that particular scam is still a thing.

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

#174

Post by dragontamer »

reaperman wrote: post #99
dragontamer wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If I understand correctly, every LLM has an embedding function which can reduce a block of text to a coordinate in high-dimensional space. That coordinate can be used to determine how likely something is to be talking about selling illegal drugs and automatically flag posts for manual review. Sounds like Word2Vec, which isn't necessarily an incompatible technique. I'm not exactly on the cutting edge of Language Mod…

I use LLM embeddings all the time at my day job (and I work in a very, very low-tech "tech" job, basically an IT department). It's not even remotely difficult and works incredibly well for sifting through absurd amounts of data to filter it down to something that is easy to human-review. https://platform.openai.com/docs/guides/embeddings https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vVGTegRvXg8 I think you may be commenting "confi…

> I think you may be commenting "confidently" on technologies that you're not very familiar with. It is something that we all struggle with sometimes.

Your snarkiness aside, what I've said earlier I stand by.

LLMs are a network of neurons / self-learning units that point towards the "next" word to be predicted". This is fundamental to the architecture of this entire system.

I recognize that there's some kind of parsing and understanding from tokens -> hidden layers of the network. That's just how the math works.

Perhaps you should educate yourself upon neural networks and the fundamental math at play here before caustically criticizing everyone who contributes to a discussion.

I admit that I don't know what an embedding is but I know it's something that is created by a neural network's output layer (or the post-processing of the output layer). This is once again, fundamental to the math of the neural nets at play here. So anything I know about output layers applies to whatever an embedding is.

---------

Not everyone in this field is working off of just using the damn thing. Some of us have experience in the layout and underlying theory of neural nets. And I'm confident in what I've said.

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

#175

Post by stevenicr »

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…

fwiw - https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2024/07/30/seante-...

This has a good chance of being the additional cracks in 203 that bring the whole thing down imho.

The cracks were created years ago when fb and ggle did a 180 on the sopa / pipa censorship.. I knew then that the cracks would only get bigger..

A fediverse will be more and more used in the future I feel, maybe not by the masses of grandmas but certainly as more is censored in main portals people will nose around elsewhere.

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

#176

Post by aftbit »

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 basically do copyright enforcement in two cases:

1. Automatically, based almost entirely on sound, using ContentID - this is heavily weaponized, gamed, and generally over the top.

2. "Manually" (but really automatically) in response to requests from "verified" (sure) rights owners - this one is also heavily gamed, but seems to make up a much smaller fraction of takedowns.

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

#177

Post by datavirtue »

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…

Yeah, all the socialized losses from business have fallen on governments and citizens to pay for it, and figure out how to do it. Superfund sites always spring to mind but we seem to have socialized costs oozing out of every business. Capitalists should abhore this type of gross inefficiency. In theory the business could solve the issues internally: cheaper, faster, better than the government could ever hope, lowering the overall tax burden and ultimately preventing problems at the source.

Regulation is very expensive because you have to enforce it. You can tax anything, though. Maybe that is a better route to promoting good behavior "voluntarily."

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

#178

Post by aftbit »

BrianHenryIE wrote: post #158
markovs_gun wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That's what eBay is for.

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

#179

Post by galdosdi »

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…

> Section 230 isn't some immutable force, so yes, political force is all that's needed,

Exactly. Glad you agree. It's just an act of congress. We pass many every year, including far bigger ones.

> you've got to define advertisement.

I did in my post. I'll repeat myself for you:

(1) the platform is profiting from it

(2) the platform is pushing and selecting the content to the user at the platform's whim, not the user's request.

Seems reasonable to me but these details can be worked out if the political will for the big picture change ever actually appears.

My definition would allow the main thrust of Section 230 to remain intact. Section 230 was, in my view, most nobly intended for cases like ISPs hosting content, such as GeoCities or Cloudflare or Google Sites. This is content that the end user specifically seeks and requests. Ads as well as algorithmically recommended content don't meet this test. If I go to criminalhatespeech.com on purpose, that's on me. If TikTok advertises criminalhatespeech.com to me or puts it in my For You for whatever reason they think it'll engage me, that's on them. Simple, isn't it?

All we're doing is putting humans and robots on an even footing instead of priviliging robots over humans as the current law does (never thought I'd type that sentence someday, but it's basically true-- the platforms are getting away with doing things they could not get away with if the code was being "executed" by "hand" by humans with flow charts instead of automated with CPUs and network cards.)

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

#180

Post by Bluestein »

aeturnum wrote: post #167
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…

I fully agree it's a hard problem, but Facebook is the one telling us they can be the police. If you really feel you can't operate a business without doing crimes, you shouldn't operate the business. It's understandable - there are some businesses that it takes too much skill to operate without doing a crime and so people don't (there are lots of things that banks won't do that fall into this category). Facebook, by…

> can do some crimes

Simple solution: Upon their inability to abide by the law, downright outlaw them and shut them down at the second, known, provable count.-

Zuckbook is a known evil, making billions off of depressed vulnerable population's attention, and causing untold amounts of psychological damage.-

The least they could positively do is police their system, to the ninth percentile or better.-

Or be shut down.-

The next incumbent will figure it out, rather fast.-

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