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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

#181

Post by marcosdumay »

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?

If they see people committing a crime, pretty much yes, they should report it.

In general, they should not impede investigations, and not intently help criminals.

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

#182

Post by Ajedi32 »

Merely _hundreds_? At Facebook's scale that seems like a really low number, no? Like, even if they were doing manual review of every single ad (which they probably aren't) I'd expect at least a few to slip through merely due to laziness or incompetence on the part of the reviewers, wouldn't you?

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

#183

Post by rurp »

linotype wrote: post #154
segasaturn wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

A company doesn't need a literal 100% market share to have monopolistic power. Products like Google Search or Gmail that dominate their respective markets count.

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

#184

Post by itishappy »

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 somebody uploads illegal content (like CSAM) today, does Facebook simply delete the account and call it a day? I'd hope for a system where the police handle enforcement and Facebook simply reports its.

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

#185

Post by dragontamer »

ssl-3 wrote: post #67
dragontamer wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Have you... actually used the image recognition features of even something like the web-accessible ChatGPT 4 interface, or are you just guessing here? I feed it unstructured images of all kinds of things and it generally does a rather good job of describing them. Just now, I found (what is allegedly) a screenshot of a Facebook ad about microdosing mushrooms. I fed the image to the bot and asked it to identify whether…

> (And is this an LLM trick or something else? Perhaps a combination of things? Is it AI, LLM, LMNOP, or some kid in a sweatshop overseas? I don't really know -- that distinction is also beyond my pay grade.)

That's the thing: The hidden layers that process the text _MUST_ have some kind of language structure getting figured out. Otherwise none of the behaviors of ChatGPT make sense.

Interpreting those layers and passing them to the user in some way should be the core focus IMO anyway.

On the other hand: there's also the problem of brute force. If they paid 50,000 cheap "Mechanical Turks" to manually teach an AI that the "top left" of an image is pixel coordinates (0,0), that's... trickery. Its no longer intelligence. Its disconnected and not innate to the model anymore.

The nature of the training set is what would determine how useful any of this actually is, and how well it generalizes to new tasks.

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

#186

Post by ben_w »

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?

They claim the ads are targeted. Given that I've had ads for:

• Both dick pills and boob surgery

• A lawyer specialising in renouncing a citizenship I don't have for people who have moved to a country I don't live in

• Local news for a city in Florida that I didn't know existed (and I'm not an American resident or citizen)

• A library fun run in a city 903 km away with an entire extra country between me and it

• An announcement, from a government of a country I don't live in, that a breed of dog I've never heard of, is to be banned (and I'm not a dog owner)

I think that the claim "Meta knows how to target ads" is itself in the set of scams. The contents of my email's junk folder is significantly less wrong than this.

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

#187

Post by ssl-3 »

dragontamer wrote: post #185
ssl-3 wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you... actually used the image recognition features of even something like the web-accessible ChatGPT 4 interface, or are you just guessing here? I feed it unstructured images of all kinds of things and it generally does a rather good job of describing them. Just now, I found (what is allegedly) a screenshot of a Facebook ad about microdosing mushrooms. I fed the image to the bot and asked it to identify whether…

> (And is this an LLM trick or something else? Perhaps a combination of things? Is it AI, LLM, LMNOP, or some kid in a sweatshop overseas? I don't really know -- that distinction is also beyond my pay grade.) That's the thing: The hidden layers that process the text _MUST_ have some kind of language structure getting figured out. Otherwise none of the behaviors of ChatGPT make sense. Interpreting those layers and pas…

You're still stuck on "the text," and not seeing the whole picture.

ChatGPT does better than this.

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

#188

Post by vjulian »

jddj wrote: post #98
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.

> what is and is not a scam is quite subjective It can be, and it can also be quite objective. There are ads on there for ecommerce shops which clone the websites of known brands, with the exact logos and colours and names of those brands but which don't actually have anything to do with those brands. These websites ask for your credit card number to purchase items which are advertised significantly below the retail…

I agree, and that would be a smaller, less interesting story for the newspaper.

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

#189

Post by Suppafly »

sprayk wrote: post #155
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).

I'm pretty sure I've seen some for actual psilocybin before. I've seen some for switchblades too, which are illegal a bunch of places, but they at least drum up interest by pretending it's a switchblade spoon and then when you click to their site they are like "it's not a spoon", which is annoying because all of the comments on the facebook side are people saying they actually wanted a switchblade spoon.

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

#190

Post by Suppafly »

RomanPushkin wrote: post #149
dzjkb wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

There is no euphoric effect or any other effect that makes it recreational. It's more of a self-reflection tool that helps to breakthrough into the perception of things that are so much different. And it helps to break bad habits actually: alcohol, tobacco, being aggressive, etc. Also, because it's not euphoric, it is not addictive as other drugs (read: alcohol and above).

>It's more of a self-reflection tool that helps to breakthrough into the perception of things that are so much different.

That can fall under 'recreational'.

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