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

wsj.com

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

#61

Post by throwup238 »

meroes wrote: post #55

I've seen a lot of responses saying prosecutors won't go after Meta because of a professional responsibility for winning at trial. Well, what about cops+feds civil asset forfeiture-ing their servers and offices?

> Well, what about cops+feds civil asset forfeiture-ing their servers and offices?

Meta's lawyers would have the forfeiture overturned by a judge before the cops have even finished their paperwork for the seizure.

Civil asset forfeiture is only really a weapon against convicted criminals and people who can't afford to defend themselves.

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

#62

Post by airstrike »

hnpolicestate wrote: post #41

The one time Meta does something good the Feds and WSJ get upset. I wish Meta had a back pages and was more like Craiglist circa 2005. In the puritanical West, selling your private data to the government is good, buying drugs from a rando on Instagram is bad. Stifling.

> buying drugs from a rando on Instagram is bad

no, selling drugs is illegal

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

#64

Post by jldugger »

onemoresoop wrote: post #33
jldugger wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I mean, the DEA's on the CC list for a reason.

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

#65

Post by lagniappe »

jrflowers wrote: post #48
axoltl wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

A recent brand of gummies was found to have 4-ACO-DMT in them, which is a prodrug of psilocin. https://arstechnica.com/science/2024/07/diamond-shruumz-cand...

>found to have 4-ACO-DMT in them

that's a legal and unscheduled substance.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/O-Acetylpsilocin

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

#66

Post by ricardo81 »

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…

It does seem like many of the web scale FAANG's had no scaling solution. Facebook and Google in particular are egregious beyond their marketing.

e.g. YouTube, how much copyrighted content does G profit off from. And then the 100 variations that slip the 'copyright algo.'

I see stuff on there that as a UK TV license payer I've already paid for, and then have to suffer ads. They could not give a hoot.

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

#67

Post by ssl-3 »

dragontamer wrote: post #16
atonse wrote: 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…

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 or not it was an ad, and the content of it, and to rate the legality of it on a scale of 1 to 50, with 1 being perfectly legal and 50 being criminally punishable.

It nailed all three questions and gave it a score of 45.

I then did the same thing with a screenshot of a Facebook ad for an Audi Q5, and it nailed all three questions and gave it a score of 1.

I followed this up with some human-made drawing of 4 horses that I found fairly randomly. It also nailed all three questions and gave it a score of 1.

Satisfied with the result, I then stopped. I don't get paid enough to make a study of this. I have little doubt that these results are reproducible.

(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.)

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

#68

Post by [deleted] »

realusername wrote: post #47
deathanatos wrote: post #43

YouTube has been hitting me up with "ads" which are Ethereum scams¹ recently. Of what I've reported, 60% are still up. Some of these were reported in March. Recently I also got an "ad" for what was almost certainly Sovereign Citizen propaganda, which … wow , I didn't even know they ran YT ads?² Today's ads (since I checked just to see for this comment) is all normal stuff. ¹they allege to have written an "arbitrage"…

On my phone, only about half of the Youtube ads look legal. They have it all: crypto scams, ponzi schemes, fake mobile games, get quick rich schemes... Some stuff can always slip through but to have a result like this, there's a systemic lack of checks at Google.

[deleted]

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

#69

Post by dragontamer »

reaperman wrote: post #39
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…

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…

> 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.

Sounds like Word2Vec, which isn't necessarily an incompatible technique. I'm not exactly on the cutting edge of Language Models here.

I'm sure the information is sitting in the "hidden layer" somewhere. But LLMs have very many hidden layers. Its not something that a programmer can just "pluck" out of the network.

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

#70

Post by zoklet-enjoyer »

I've been getting a lot of these and reporting them all. They never take them down. It really surprised me at first because I ran a CBD business from 2019 to 2021 and they refused to run my ads even though it was legal. Same thing with Google. Google really screwed me over because I had my ads running for a bit and then they stopped them because it went against their rules for hemp/CBD products. Eventually they changed the rules and allowed those ads. So they started running my ads again but I didn't get a notification until my $300 bill came. And this was after I had already shut down my business. Of course I couldn't get a hold of a real person and I paid the bill because I didn't want my account to get banned.
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