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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

#31

Is "hundreds" supposed to be a large amount? How many ads has Facebook run for Mountain Dew?

This. They message to billions, every what, hour, and get how many ad contracts every minute? If the problem really is this order of magnitude they are doing an incredible job, aren't they?

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

#33

I reported some of those and got a response in return that I could block the item question but that it's basically green light by them, doesn't break their community standards or some wording like that. At this point I'm surprised there aren't more lawsuits coming up, this is egregious behavior that needs to be penalized fast.

This seems like the kind of thing that can be resolved by emailing a screenshot of that to zuck@fb.com with the head of the DEA on the CC list. I'm sure one of them will be happy to act.

I don't care about a particular advertisement to do that, I'd rather Zuck gets slammed with a bigger lawsuit for allowing this to fester.

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

#34
Are drug ads bad because of the war on drugs? Are they bad because we won’t let tobacco make ads?

The only way this seems shockingly bad is that you can’t actually control what you see as a user of these ad-supported services or if you support the war on drugs.

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

#35

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

I’ve continually gotten magic mushroom gummy advertisements

These are likely for muscimol gummies as opposed to psylocybin gummies. Despite having psychoactive components muscimol containing mushrooms (Amanita Muscaria, etc.) are legal, as is muscimol itself.

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

#36

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.

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

#37

[deleted]

Prosecutors have a professional responsibility only to bring a case that has a substantial likelihood of a conviction.

When you're Ross Ulbricht (not rich) you get life without parole.

When you're Mark Zuckerberg ($166B) "there isn't a substantial likelihood of conviction".

You're not wrong, but I wouldn't call maintaining a two-tier justice system a prosecutor's "professional responsibility".

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

#39
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…

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.

But given that the problem seems to be in the "manual review" because users constantly report these and get brushed off, that "neat trick" you wrote about seems like it could really help explain to manual reviewers exactly why a particular ad violate's Meta's content guidelines.

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

#40

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

There's a sucker born every minute. I suppose that when Googlers look at their huge paychecks it's easy to rationalize building tools that help scammers steal from suckers. From a legal standpoint they have plausible deniability but most YouTube advertising is just so slimy, like even more unethical than TV infomercials.
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