That would explain why they never do anything against obvious financial scams.
Meta projected 10% of 2024 revenue came from scams
421–430 of 549 posts
Re: Meta projected 10% of 2024 revenue came from scams
#422Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 billboa…
If this theory were true companies would see no revenue impact from ad buys on Meta. Then they would stop buying, and Meta would go out of business. You need to face the facts here that no matter how much you hate Meta, it isn't a scam.
Companies will falsely attribute positive revenue impact to whatever sales channels they are using, including Meta. The option would be for dozens of people having to admit that they made a mistake and wasted money on ads which didn't work. It's 2025, people would rather let their company bankrupt than admit they made a mistake.
Re: Meta projected 10% of 2024 revenue came from scams
#423Earlier 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…
I understand that impact calculation for ads is, at best, an inexact science. But I refuse to believe that businesses spend hundreds of billions of dollars on ads every year for absolutely no gain. That's chips in the vaccine level conspiratorial thinking.
Go talk to any small business owner of your choosing. When they have a slow day and nothing to do they like to chip in a few hundred dollars into the Meta casino. Since you can tweak endless parameters on which people will see the ads, you can always spend more until you find your winning number, like on the horse race track or in the lottery.
Re: Meta projected 10% of 2024 revenue came from scams
#424Earlier quoted context omitted.
No, it's already a solved problem. For instance newspapers moderate and approve all content that they print. While some bad actors may be able to sneak scams in through classifieds, the local community has a direct way to contact the moderators and provide feedback. The answer is that it just takes a lot of people. What if no content could appear on Facebook until it passed a human moderation process? As the above po…
> The answer is that it just takes a lot of people. The more of those people you hire, the higher the chance that a bad actor will slip through and push malicious things through for a fee. If the scammer has a good enough system, they'll do this one time with one person and then move on to the next one, so now you need to verify that all your verifiers are in fact perfect in their adherence to the rules. Now you need…
> The more of those people you hire, the higher the chance that a bad actor will slip through and push malicious things through for a fee.
Again, the newspaper model already solves this. Moderation should be highly localized, from the communities for which they are moderating the content. That maximizes the chance that the moderator's values will align with the community. Small groups are harder to hide bad actors, especially when you can be named and shamed by people that you see every day. Managers and their coworkers and the community itself are the "verifiers."
Again, this model has worked since the beginning of time and it's 1000x better than what FB has now.
Re: Meta projected 10% of 2024 revenue came from scams
#425Earlier quoted context omitted.
Changed to what? Should dang become legally responsible for any of the bad legal advice I've been giving people on this forum? Should Murdoch go to prison for the lies in the paid advertising that Fox anchors and opinion wonks are doing every day? Let me take things back a step - it's nearly impossible to hold people who are lying accountable. Surely the platform bears less responsibility than the liars on it?
I don't know but I think there is a room for compromise. If you post illegal things online and the site cannot identify you so that you can be held accountable then the site should be held accountable. As it stands people are harmed and nobody is liable so we end up in this situation.
There's a simple way to do that. Legislate a requirement for ID, the users will provide it to the platform, the platform will provide it to law enforcement when requested.
Kind of like how South Korea (where you need a national ID to access digital services) is doing, or the UK is trying to do with their ID push.
(And then who wants this could go have a fight with the people who don't want this.)
Re: Meta projected 10% of 2024 revenue came from scams
#426Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'd start with Ford. They're well known for their custom builds — what they call VSO. And they're already tooled up for production of an F-150-style vehicle around Kentucky to boot. It won't come cheap like an F-150, but nobody can expect it to be cheap when the value proposition is much higher.
Ford VSO doesn't include the F150 lightning, just the F150.
That's exactly what they told you when you slapped a billion dollars down in front of them? Color me skeptical. I bet you haven't even talked to them.
Re: Meta projected 10% of 2024 revenue came from scams
#427A new car built by my company leaves somewhere travelling at 60 mph. The rear differential locks up. The car crashes and burns with everyone trapped inside. Now, should we initiate a recall? Take the number of vehicles in the field, A, multiply by the probable rate of failure, B, multiply by the average out-of-court settlement, C. A times B times C equals X. If X is less than the cost of a recall, we don't do one.
I don't think the analogy applies the same way. Meta simply choose to be evil not because it costs less overall but because they're unable to provide/filter actually useful ads to consumers. The rear diff is instead a filthy window but consumers don't sue for better quality because everything else works good enough and those that do crash could have cleaned the windows themselves.
Ohh, so naïve. They choose inaction because it's profitable, that's it. They can claim they were unaware and they are out either scot-free or with a slap on their gigantic wrist.
Re: Meta projected 10% of 2024 revenue came from scams
#428Why aren't we (society) fining Meta et cetera for collaborating in scams again? Or at least having the fines actually be equal to the money they're earning so the fines aren't just cost of business?
Because there is no "we". It's currently just who has the money and they all seem to be pal somehow.
Re: Meta projected 10% of 2024 revenue came from scams
#429Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes, but observe how that for all three of the things that immediately came to your mind, you have respectively 1. a thing that still has a lot of scams in it (though it may be the best of the three) [1] 2. A thing so full of scams and fake products that using it is already a minefield (one my mother-in-law is already incapable of navigating successfully, based on the number of shirts my family has gotten with lazy-A…
I don’t accept the excuse it’s too hard. If they have to spend $10 billion per year to maintain an acceptable level trust on their platforms then so be it. It’s the cost of doing business. If I went into a mall and opened up a fake Wells Fargo bank branch it would be shut down pretty instantly by human intervention. These are the conditions most businesses run under. Why should these platforms given such leeway just…
Yes, it's not that it's impossible, it's that it's impossible while operating how they want to operate, scaling as much as they want to scale, and profiting as much as they want to profit. But no business model that can't be pursued ethically and profitably should be execused as simply inevitably unethical. It should be regulated and/or banned.
Re: Meta projected 10% of 2024 revenue came from scams
#430Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes, but observe how that for all three of the things that immediately came to your mind, you have respectively 1. a thing that still has a lot of scams in it (though it may be the best of the three) [1] 2. A thing so full of scams and fake products that using it is already a minefield (one my mother-in-law is already incapable of navigating successfully, based on the number of shirts my family has gotten with lazy-A…
I don’t accept the excuse it’s too hard. If they have to spend $10 billion per year to maintain an acceptable level trust on their platforms then so be it. It’s the cost of doing business. If I went into a mall and opened up a fake Wells Fargo bank branch it would be shut down pretty instantly by human intervention. These are the conditions most businesses run under. Why should these platforms given such leeway just…
We have laws on truth in advertising, and we should start holding advertising channels liable if they don't do enough due diligence.