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Meta projected 10% of 2024 revenue came from scams

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Re: Meta projected 10% of 2024 revenue came from scams

#361

Post by jimbokun »

strogonoff wrote: post #138
the_snooze wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"If you're not paying for the product, you are the product." It's an outdated way of looking at tech. Many classes of paid products (e.g., cars, streaming services, IoT, operating systems) double-dip into tracking and advertisement. Why would a business actually want to do the hard work of serving user needs when they can hedge their bets with ad revenue? Line must go up.

First, in any case, the right solution is to make this business model (treating your users as a product, whether by offering free service or heavily discounted/subsidised product) simply illegal. It violates the way market is supposed to work and exploits information asymmetry—regulation against which there is plenty of precedent of. This makes the rest moot, but I will still list why I don’t think it’s like you say…

How would you write that law?

So now every social network charges $0.01 per month and makes all the rest of their revenue through advertising.

Would you set the minimum price for every service and outlaw advertising entirely?

Re: Meta projected 10% of 2024 revenue came from scams

#362

Post by aaroninsf »

Their entire business model is corrupt and a significant driver of the degraded state of our society, civility, and politics.

What is the core of their business? Maximizing and totalizing surveillance, in service whoever has money in hand, including those interested not (just) in selling you shit, but steering your behavior, mood, and beliefs.

There's a reason for the constant drumbeat of stories about whistleblowing, lawsuits, suppressed research, literal criminality, and contempt for the wellbeing of their "users."

It's not "polite" to talk about this on HN, but if you work there or do business with them, you better be at peace with your moral complicity.

There's also a reason they pay so well. It's to make people hold their noses.

Re: Meta projected 10% of 2024 revenue came from scams

#363

Post by joering2 »

wahnfrieden wrote: post #51
notahacker wrote: post #14

Certainly puts the £3m lawsuit settlement with Martin Lewis (UK consumer financial advice guru who sued because he's the go-to fake endorsement of any scam product targeting Britons using Facebook ads) into perspective. No wonder scammers are still spamming his likeness all over Facebook paid ads even though it's technically trivial for them to algorithmically flag it

The news here per https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2025/11/bombshell-report... is that Meta set an internal policy that scammers above 0.15% of Meta’s revenue must be protected from any flagging. It’s not a technical challenge. It’s something they desire to maintain and have codified.

This just came out yesterday but what the hell man! its like only keeping your top cocaine sellers in hope less of your people on the streets, less possibility to get caught. Everyone else out.

How the heck are they not being raided and at least temporarily shut down at this exact moment? No wonder Trump is best friend of Mark as of recently... it really does scream "guilty".

Re: Meta projected 10% of 2024 revenue came from scams

#364

Post by tgsovlerkhgsel »

simpaticoder wrote: post #102
macNchz wrote: post #16

Alongside a password manager and keeping things up to date, using an ad blocker is truly a foundational security practice these days. The big advertising players simply have all of the wrong incentives to control this problem. They could massively reduce the volume of scams advertised on their networks, but it’d be worse for them on two fronts: they’d have to pay for more moderation, and they’d lose billions in reven…

*>They could massively reduce the volume of scams advertised on their networks I'm not entirely sure that's true. It's equivalent to asking a platform to moderate all "harmful content" off the site. "Scam" is fundamentally subjective, just as "harm" is. The real solution is to reform the justice system such that a citizen feeling they've been defrauded has a quick and easy process to get satisfaction for themselves a…

Except in this case, the platform is actually paid real money for that content, so yeah, I absolutely expect them to review each and every piece of it.

If ads worked this way:

- Victim clicks crypto scam ad, loses their savings ($xx,xxx)

- Forensic investigation happens, determines that this happened due to a paid ad on site X. Site X knew that this was an ongoing problem and didn't manage to control it, but was still showing ads.

- Site X is considered complicit and just as liable for the loss as the scammer. Since the scammer is hard to find, the user sues the site and the site has to pay the losses.

- The site is now free to pursue their "business partner" for the damages, the user doesn't have to care.

I bet the ads would suddenly get reviewed a lot more. No sane publisher would allow ads from an ad platform that doesn't provide a guarantee against this issue. If a "good" ad platform started showing scams, the site would drop it once notified (because now they're on notice, and would be liable for any future scams). Thus, the platform would make damn sure that this doesn't happen.

"Scam" might be subjective but the legal system usually has a definition for it and judges to apply any remaining subjective judgement necessary. It's usually also pretty easy to avoid the need for a judge deciding by not trying to max out the we-think-this-is-technically-not-illegal grey area.

This doesn't require huge legal costs for the ad networks - they can simply refuse to do business with entities that are not verified, or allow ads for shady business areas where 40% of the businesses are borderline scams and 50% blatant scams...

Re: Meta projected 10% of 2024 revenue came from scams

#366

Post by m_a_g »

bensonn wrote: post #265

I wonder how much of Meta the corporation is a scam waiting to crumble. Hundreds of billions of dollars can make people do questionable things. -their revenue is 99% ads with more than 80% coming from FB and IG -they can only sell ads if they have a large and active user base -DAP (daily active people) is reported publicly but calculated internally -ad spending, views, and engagement are calculated by Meta's own plat…

Did they take control of the email account?

Re: Meta projected 10% of 2024 revenue came from scams

#367

Post by tgsovlerkhgsel »

The key sentences:

> the company prioritized enforcement in regions where the penalties would be steepest, the reporting found. The cost of lost revenue from clamping down on the scams was weighed against the cost of fines from regulators.

The companies don't necessarily want scams, and they might even be willing to forgo the scam revenue itself. But if the consequence of allowing the scam is low, and the consequence of doing something about it would be a loss of non-scam revenue (e.g. by disallowing legit customers or verification requirements making customers go to an "easier" competitor), they won't do anything about it.

It's time to treat them as accomplices. As the report shows - if they had to pay the damage they're helping to cause, priorities would shift and they would find a way to make the problem go away. As is, they have no reason to even try.

Re: Meta projected 10% of 2024 revenue came from scams

#369

Post by mrguyorama »

bluGill wrote: post #295
carlosjobim wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Real companies don't give a damn about what they are actually doing. Facebook tells them that their ad which nobody clicked on got them 40 000 new customers. The worker who put the ad on Facebook gets a pat on the back from his boss. The boss gets a raise and maybe a promotion. Leadership gets shown numbers of how great advertising on Meta is and doesn't take 5 minutes to check them. If sales are low it is those god…

Yet in the days of newspapers companies collected data to see how well their ads worked. There are a lot of statisticians working in this area - or there were 20 years ago.

The scam in online advertising is far more sinister;

Google uses their panopticon to show your ad to a user who is just about to buy your product and then claim a conversion. So the stats look like Google is getting you thousands of conversions, when they only actually got a hundred people to look at your product who weren't already interested.

This kind of bullshit was not possible in legacy advertisement. A billboard cannot change itself to always be showing an ad that can be claimed as a conversion to every single user.

The newspaper ads could not change to ensure that you saw an ad that matched what you were about to purchase.

>There are a lot of statisticians working in this area - or there were 20 years ago

Weren't those people the exact ones who came up with "Half of ad spend is wasted but we don't know which half"?

Targeted and online tracking based advertising has fundamental information asymmetry problems that fuck over everyone but Google and Meta.

Re: Meta projected 10% of 2024 revenue came from scams

#370

Post by [deleted] »

lm28469 wrote: post #25
cjonas wrote: post #8

At least 50% of the YouTube promoted videos I get are crypto currency scams where some paid actor walks you though deploying an eth contract that empties your wallet. I report every one and nothing changes :(

I get 50% AI generated tai chi promising strength gain, weight loss and enlightenment, the other 50% israel sponsored ads assuring me people in gaza are not starving at all and completely healthy

[deleted]
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