Facebook approves alcohol, vaping and gambling ads targeting 13-17 year olds

Notice something about those ads excluded? They are simple red line unconditional "no's". Add in judgement calls and there will be fuck-ups. Of course lack of judgement can lead to its own class of fuck ups like offending people for "reject ads for military recruiting because they showed a gun in them".

>When watching TV during a football (Aussie rules football not soccer) game I see probably 15-20 gambling ads and so would the 0-17 year olds watching.

There's a huge difference between targeting an age group and the age group being exposed by association.

If you saw ads on the Sunday morning cartoons for whiskey and gambling, you could rightly say they are targeting children.

Ads put on during a football game that targets 25-50 year olds that may happen to have younger viewers != targeting those younger viewers.

Facebook is targeting 13-17 year olds.

I think it's important to recognize that Reset Australia is a traditional media lobby group, and that this report amounts to a zero-day attack on Facebook's automated advertising system. Facebook would never choose to advertise these products to children for a variety of reasons. Reading the sentiment in this thread, when exactly did we create the expectation that Facebook (or any social media entity) must execute as a perfect moral system?

>the responsibility of a public company to operate in its shareholders’ best interest

The shareholders are only interested in profits.

Without a link to the actual report, which hopefully contains more information, anyone who's ever spent $5 running a campaign on FB would know this is a little suspicious.

You can upload content to your hearts content, but ads are not actually 'approved' until they running.

And there's no way to actually 'target' without running an ad ... which they didn't do ... so ...

If they were looking for hard evidence, they could have in fact put $5 into FB, and put the ad 'live' and simply taken it down once it was approved, but before it received any views (though technically that might not be perfectly possible, it is pragmatically possible).

It's possible to mine data sets, and do queries on userbase behaviours etc, but none of that would be in the context of a specific ad being run. I think this is also what the article alludes to, and it crosses streams with the other part of the story and probably causes confusion.

All of that aside, the notion that FB, a $800B company is going to risk that by blatantly running ads for alcohol to minors where it is clearly illegal kind of defies the logic of a very self-interested entity like Facebook.

How much money would they make from that, while risking sanctions and major fallout? Probably almost none, as the buyers of ads would probably be doing something illegal, how many breweries are going to be running ads to 14 year olds? Basically none, so there's no money in this activity, and only downside.

More appropriately, it would help the case if someone, somewhere in Australia actually found FB ads that are targeting children.

Finally, there is nowhere them to hide, making the claims a little more suspicious. Everyone on the planet, can right now (including you reading this), pop open Facebook, upload an ad and try to run it. Judge, police, regulators, you, me, anyone in the world can just 'see for ourselves' at a moments notice, at any time, with less than 5 minutes without any need for complicated research - find out if FB is really enabling vaping ads to teenagers. It seems odd that something so illegal would be so out in the open, visible to everyone.

Edit: not 'defending' FB here, just calling out what I see as possibly a big inconsistency and problems with truthiness.

I've never been a fan of Facebook, I loathed them from the start, but facts are facts, and this story does not pass the smell test, we'll need to see more data.

There are probably a ton of legit things to deal with on FB, I could be wrong, but I seriously doubt they are running vaping ads to kids.