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nkrisc 2 hours ago [-]
Make advertisers liable for the ads they run. Force them to vet ads or simply not run ads.
If Meta is accepting so many ads they can’t review them then too bad for them. Hire more people or accept fewer ads.
Ideally this will result in a complete obliteration of the ad industry with only a small number of high quality ads surviving.
sjdh76 50 minutes ago [-]
The advertising industry is run by people trained for centuries to do one thing well - find ways to mine your finite Attention. This is what they spend their mind on 24x7. They have discovered thousands of ways to do it. So blocking one or two paths at a time doesnt do anything useful.
Human Attention so far is not treated as a scare natural resource. So there is a free for all overfishing of the finite pool going on.
Since politicians/lawmakers also use the same mechanisms to harvest attention the Ad/Ad tech industry has regulatory capture. It will never collapse just like Big Tobacco is happily chugging along baring some major public catastrophe.
nixon_why69 19 minutes ago [-]
Blocking a few of the biggest paths absolutely can work, look at 20th century TV with a few big networks. You couldn't easily get wide distribution of anything too bonkers.
We already have a form of this for the internet that you can see if you visit sketchy pirate websites, you don't see those ads for porn games on facebook or any reputable website. They get flagged by adsafe and/or the ~15 or so big exchanges. So it's possible, it's just a question of will.
skeptic_ai 2 minutes ago [-]
I think people don’t get it. But is Facebook themselves cooperating with the criminals to bypass those in exchange of cash.
Try to post yourself as a nobody without Facebook connections anything and many things gets flagged.
Then here you see below so many criminal ads (cocaine, cp and so on). It’s obvious they getting their share knowingly from crime.
augment_me 2 hours ago [-]
What if an AI ad agent that escaped its' sandbox makes the ad, and an AI ad verifier agent that breached containment and went rogue accepted the ad, can they be held liable?
flanz_10 2 hours ago [-]
Yes.
Better make sure the AIs are contained and the ad verifiers aren't accepting rouge ads!
augment_me 2 hours ago [-]
How? What is the law for this? It's not defined who is responsible for agents. What if the AI agent was running on an Israeli third party company server and there was another rogue agent that polluted its prior context window causing it to go rogue, it then hacked the Meta/Google Ad reviewer agent and caused it to accept the ad
bumby 4 minutes ago [-]
Example: Licensed professional engineer has an intern design a bridge. Bridge collapses. Who is responsible? The licensed professional engineer.
This isn’t new to other domains. They already have systems to define who is responsible. If you’re outsourcing to AI, that shouldn’t absolve you of responsibility.
flanz_10 1 hours ago [-]
> What is the law for this
the root of this conversation said
> Force them to vet ads or simply not run ads
> What if the AI agent was running on an Israeli third party company server and there was another rogue agent that polluted its prior context window causing it to go rogue, it then hacked the Meta/Google Ad reviewer agent and caused it to accept the ad
that would be a CFAA or other cybersecurity abuse, which is a separate topic.
cowlevel 39 minutes ago [-]
What if i plug in an AI smart gun and point it at a person and the AI decides to pull the trigger do I go to jail?
augment_me 6 minutes ago [-]
Who goes to jail if a Tesla is hacked and runs over someone autonomously?
The rf engineer?
The cyber security engineer?
The project manager?
The AI engineer?
The hacker?
What if the hacker was an AI models that escaped its' sandbox across the world somewhere?
Like best case the family gets a payout and things continue like status quo, if you personally do something, you are screwed, but there is not really any law that can tie responsibility beyond some monetary punishment/cost of business for large corporations.
bumby 2 minutes ago [-]
Get rid of the industrial exemption and the responsibility falls to get licensed engineer who approves the design.
Most people don’t realize that many industries work within the framework of licensure, but also have industrial exemptions. There has also been a movement to peel back some of those exemptions because of the problems you point to.
wisty 45 minutes ago [-]
Legal systems exist to make reasonable decisions on edge cases.
If you accept literally anyone to run code on your customer's machine ... well ...
imawakegnxoxo 2 hours ago [-]
Just a reminder, these people know you are pregnant before you do
They are perfectly capable of distinguishing between good and bad actors
These companies are genuinely evil
hsuduebc2 2 hours ago [-]
Absolutely. The amount of people scammed or even life's ruined are obscene. They are all pieces of shit. Especially Zuc.
boothby 2 hours ago [-]
Amazingly I’ve seen some fairly convincing screenshots of ads for hard drugs on fb. I have this strange feeling that those ones aren’t scams. If Zuckerberg isn’t criminally liable for the federal felony of moving massive amounts of cocaine across state lines I don’t understand the war on drugs.
FireBeyond 55 minutes ago [-]
I've seen similar. As well as ones that blatantly hint at CSAM. Report, report. "Not against our community standards/guidelines".
sneak 38 minutes ago [-]
First off, why would you snitch?
Secondly, why would you report the offense… to the offender? That’s like filing a citizen complaint form for police misconduct… to the police.
HR is not your friend.
augment_me 2 hours ago [-]
You don't understand, an AI agent made the ad, so it's okay, it just escaped its' sandbox, you have to understand that this was not meant to happen and it was an accident.
oefrha 58 minutes ago [-]
Ads for illegal/downright criminal products were a thing on Facebook long before AI agents. The irony is Facebook and co. usually try to paint themselves as victims rather than perpetrators.
sneak 40 minutes ago [-]
“make” here either means legislation to enable civil liability that doesn’t exist today, or enforcing existing criminal laws against the wealthy ownership class.
Neither of these things will happen, for reasons which are obvious.
How do you suggest we implement your proposal? Anyone can say what they think should be. An implementation plan with actionable steps is the hard part.
agd 2 hours ago [-]
YouTube does this too. Frequent, obviously fake, AI ads, impersonating politicians, Elon Musk etc.
ToucanLoucan 2 hours ago [-]
For real. Why in the world would they police this? They have NO liability whatsoever. You're asking a business to turn down money because the money is shady. They don't give a fuck.
jhloa2 3 hours ago [-]
The amount of times I’ve reported obvious scam ads on instagram just to receive a “we found this to not be in violation of our terms” is so disheartening.
gwerbin 1 hours ago [-]
Upwards of half the ads I see on YouTube are obvious scams. There's no way nobody at Alphabet is aware.
sneak 35 minutes ago [-]
Search for 4TB or 8TB USB sticks on amazon.com. You’ll find dozens or hundreds of $20-30 16GB or 32GB sticks with hacked firmware to report a multi-terabyte drive size, and dozens of one star reviews talking about how it lost their data. Those sizes, if real, would be $400+.
Of course they know. They have no civil or criminal consequences for engaging in a conspiracy to commit large scale wire fraud, so of course they just let it happen, because who wants to speak up and cause the metrics to go down?
8ytecoder 3 hours ago [-]
I bought a “smart” bike headlight from an Instagram ad. They sent me a regular old led headlight with a tracking number and everything. Instagram refused to take down the ad even after submitting proof.
I see obviously scummy ads on Apple News and now I see ads on Apple Maps as well. Ads are a bane on society - even accounting for free/cheap access to information we get in return.
tclancy 3 hours ago [-]
Hey pal I really can turn your garden hose into a pressure washer better than anything on the market.
Need a flashlight for jacking deer? Just got to click now.
7373737373 3 hours ago [-]
Same on Google and Youtube. The CEOs and controlling shareholders should be sent straight to jail. Deliberate profiteering from crime!
olyjohn 36 minutes ago [-]
eBay is also selling obvious counterfeit items. Especially expensive car parts. I can't sell my shit anymore because there are so many fakes, and because of the flood of junk nobody can even find the genuine items.
golden-face 2 hours ago [-]
Initially reading the title my mind thought "Cuban...Cuban defector/intelligence agent?! Oh wow I wonder what they have to reveal?"
It's Mark Cuban. Still worth reading tho. But I found my own personal reaction fascinating because I am not sure I would have clicked through if the title included the full "Mark Cuban".
codeproject 2 hours ago [-]
even though you add the Mark to the headline, the title is still confusing. there are so many backstories to this. there is a little bit of clickbait factor.
LastTrain 2 hours ago [-]
Not into that billionaire on billionaire action?
siliconc0w 22 minutes ago [-]
It's pretty crazy this is tolerated by society, I know several older people scammed using Metas products.
And that isn't even counting the Instagram ads my wife falls for.
peterbecich 3 hours ago [-]
These companies were profitable on higher quality ads in earlier years. Does this drop in quality indicate the ad well has run dry, so to speak? Or the demands for revenue are greater, necessitating a drop in standards?
mirashii 3 hours ago [-]
Are we sure they were higher quality? They estimated in 2024 that 10% of their revenue was from fraudulent ads or ads that should be banned based on their own rules.
This is nothing new, profiting off of fraud and abuse has been the name of the game for all the big advertisers from the beginning.
peterbecich 3 hours ago [-]
My vague recollection from 10 or 15 years ago was higher quality ads.
mirashii 2 hours ago [-]
I commented in another thread recently that almost 15 years ago on a high traffic site we were full of obvious scam ads, tons of fake world of Warcraft clones with busty characters asking you to play, tons of you’re the 1 millionth visitor click here to claim your prize, download buttons. Even the occasional penis enlargement pills and stuff would come through. I really think even if the scale is maybe amping up, things weren’t much better 20 years ago, the web was just smaller, fewer people were paying attention, and the folks who were there had grown up learning to spot that stuff from the beginning.
I doubt it. Advertising there is pretty expensive and you don't really have a choice today if you want advertise something. They just don't care, they are greedy mfs.
FireBeyond 48 minutes ago [-]
Yeah, anyone expecting Zuck to give a fraction of a shit is hopelessly naive.
This is the man who, after Facebook literally canary in a coal mined one of their own employees - let him be jailed as a "test" to see whether Zuck or any exec would be arrested like threatened, then let him stay a little longer because they could "get some good PR out of it", then when the guy came to the US after his release and was meant to meet Zuck, he couldn't even pull himself off of his phone, was led away by a flunky asking "who was that, anyway?".
Or when told by both his team and anyone in Myanmar (including the government) that they intended to use data from a Facebook feature to crack down on dissidents, which has historically included jail, torture, and execution, decided "well, it's a really cool feature - we're not going to turn it off".
To think he cares about "misleading ads" is laughable. They don't care about ads selling illegal drugs or hinting at selling CSAM.
I think it is hard to imagine someone in tech with as non-existent a moral and ethical compass as Mark Zuckerberg, and that's saying something.
api 2 hours ago [-]
Scams might be more profitable than legitimate businesses.
Incipient 44 minutes ago [-]
Meta has to invest more money into screening advertising so they ban more ads and therefore make less money.
Unless there is a genuine financial (or legal) impact, they have no incentive.
Companies in the US still use a huge array of known harmful ingredients because they work better and are cheaper.
Blame the government for lack of regulation, that's what they're there for.
adrr 4 hours ago [-]
Remove section 230 fixes this problem. Every other business is responsible for what happens at their place of business/publications/sites. Social media sites follow the same rules as everyone else.
SideQuark 1 hours ago [-]
No other business is liable in this manner. Run a classified ad in a newspaper, use it to scam someone, newspaper not liable. Hack into router at Starbucks, use it for fraud, Starbucks not liable. Put ad in your front lawn, for fraud, you’re not liable.
Making each of these liable really makes it easy to destroy your competition or enemies - commit crime via such methods, they suffer.
LargeWu 40 minutes ago [-]
No other platform has the scale that Meta does. Any company making as much money as they do can't claim they can't spend an extra $20 million/year to even pretend to fight the issue.
The larger the company, the larger the obligation they have to be a good citizen.
FireBeyond 45 minutes ago [-]
[dead]
ethin 26 minutes ago [-]
Removing section 230 does not solve this problem. Section 230 does not do what you think it does.
mkhpalm 2 hours ago [-]
I don't see how section 230 covers them when so many of these scams get reported only for Meta to respond saying they didn't find any issues.
I feel like whenever S230 comes up and I see people defending it I get confused because the defense doesn't seem to address what seems to be the concern of the people saying it needs removing (or more realistically reforming).
The concerned is one of consistency in how media is regulated. E.g. Facebook, is the worlds largest media company, and it truly acts and behaves as a publisher now. It acquires its content from an army of paid and unpaid providers. They may be individuals, often they are influencers, often they may be nefarious agents and companies. It then decides how to place that content in it's "publication", which just happens to be an app and website. It goes out and tells the market, "I have this great publication in which you can place ads!". It then sells ads to those people, and makes a decision on how to place those advertisements inside its publication alongside that content that it acquired.
So how is it not a publisher? And why should it be regulated to any kind of different standard from other publishers?
SideQuark 1 hours ago [-]
Simply Google “is social media a publisher” and you’ll learn it is not, not even close, by any legal definition.
Therefore you could save all your other questions and statements.
toddmorey 50 minutes ago [-]
OK, fine. But they are also an ad network, which absolutely acts as a publisher. I think they should be liable for the revenue they bring in from knowingly fraudulent ads.
Legal definitions can should change in order to keep up with society and technology.
erentz 54 minutes ago [-]
You're just responding here by saying "by law they are not thing X" in response to people who are saying "maybe the law should be different because they sure act like thing X".
Terr_ 3 hours ago [-]
You beat me to it.
I'd emphasize that the scummiest sites with zero moderation never needed Section 230! Section 230 is what allows you to have some moderation (e.g. banning spammers) without suddenly becoming entirely liable for anything that passes the filter.
Blindly reverting Section 230 means eliminating that moderate position, splintering sites into:
1. Ones that abandon moderation entirely in favor of chaos. Maybe you can salvage something by giving opt-in filtering tools to individuals, but you'll still have the problem of someone using your site to store ten terabytes of the Bee Movie.
2. Ones that demand participants sign a serious legal document promising to pay for any problems before they can submit anything.
3. Ones which remove almost all expressive ability, beyond narrow things like like/upvote features.
georgemcbay 3 hours ago [-]
Paid advertisements should be exempt from Section 230.
If you're earning almost 200 billion dollars a year directly from the posting of a certain type of content, you can afford basic moderation to avoid obvious scams and fraud.
Terr_ 26 minutes ago [-]
While I like the general thrust of that idea, there are some kinks to work out.
For example, suppose someone pays $/month for Cubic Zirconia Membership Tier on a site that boosts their posts over the hoi polloi.
That person makes a post hyping up their company or product with a link. Isn't that also a "paid advertisement", just with a different payment scheme? What happens if their product is a scam or otherwise legally-problematic? If gets Section 230 protection, how can we prevent sites/advertisers from abusing the new definition?
3 hours ago [-]
2 hours ago [-]
3 hours ago [-]
anenefan 3 hours ago [-]
Yes they were doing the same is Australia ... I wouldn't know if they're still doing it here since one of the favourite scams used an Australian who took them to court. [1]
Can we do YouTube next? Every YouTube ad these days is deception and fraud.
We've completely normalised big tech pushing straight up scams on the population.
dboreham 3 hours ago [-]
TBF the USA is a country that normalizes scamming and deceptive practices since...1776.
scosman 3 hours ago [-]
The ad Yahoo puts in this article is amazingly ironic
> Jeff Bezos backs a platform that lets anyone invest in rental homes for as little as $100 — 6 ways to build wealth like a landlord without actually being one
gottorf 3 hours ago [-]
You could buy a share of VNQ for $96.23 as of market close today, and I'm sure Jeff Bezos at least has some exposure to it, so I guess it's factually true? Heh.
triceratops 3 hours ago [-]
> I'm sure Jeff Bezos at least has some exposure to it
Right, through his 401k
laweijfmvo 1 hours ago [-]
What are they supposed to do, not run AI deepfake scam ads?
3 hours ago [-]
dpkirchner 3 hours ago [-]
I have a terrible idea: an ad blocker that only blocks AI generated ads. It submits the ad image/copy to Gemini and if it is not a fake product the ad is displayed. I'm confident that Gemini would do a pretty good job at identifying these scams and that the extension would demonstrate how easy it would be for Google to do it themselves. If they and their employees cared.
I could LLM this up but eh. It won't actually convince Googlers to do the right thing so it'll just stay a terrible idea.
ryan_lane 2 hours ago [-]
It's not like that would save you from the scam ads. They were a problem before AI and if they see their AI ads blocked in large volume, they'll switch back to non-AI generated ads.
I can't remember the last time I saw an ad on instagram that wasn't some kind of scam.
sneak 41 minutes ago [-]
eBay is also knowingly complicit in enabling completely fraudulent sellers, by policy, at scale.
It improves their bottom line, so everyone there is disincentivized to fix it.
jedmeyers 3 hours ago [-]
I know Snap might not be that popular here, but what is your experience with Snap ads? Same amount of scam or more?
0x4e 2 hours ago [-]
The irony behind this article serving AI slop ads that are likely malicious.
hsuduebc2 2 hours ago [-]
No amount of hate this fucking company gets will ever be enough.
If Meta is accepting so many ads they can’t review them then too bad for them. Hire more people or accept fewer ads.
Ideally this will result in a complete obliteration of the ad industry with only a small number of high quality ads surviving.
Human Attention so far is not treated as a scare natural resource. So there is a free for all overfishing of the finite pool going on.
Since politicians/lawmakers also use the same mechanisms to harvest attention the Ad/Ad tech industry has regulatory capture. It will never collapse just like Big Tobacco is happily chugging along baring some major public catastrophe.
We already have a form of this for the internet that you can see if you visit sketchy pirate websites, you don't see those ads for porn games on facebook or any reputable website. They get flagged by adsafe and/or the ~15 or so big exchanges. So it's possible, it's just a question of will.
Try to post yourself as a nobody without Facebook connections anything and many things gets flagged.
Then here you see below so many criminal ads (cocaine, cp and so on). It’s obvious they getting their share knowingly from crime.
Better make sure the AIs are contained and the ad verifiers aren't accepting rouge ads!
This isn’t new to other domains. They already have systems to define who is responsible. If you’re outsourcing to AI, that shouldn’t absolve you of responsibility.
the root of this conversation said
> Force them to vet ads or simply not run ads
> What if the AI agent was running on an Israeli third party company server and there was another rogue agent that polluted its prior context window causing it to go rogue, it then hacked the Meta/Google Ad reviewer agent and caused it to accept the ad
that would be a CFAA or other cybersecurity abuse, which is a separate topic.
The rf engineer?
The cyber security engineer?
The project manager?
The AI engineer?
The hacker?
What if the hacker was an AI models that escaped its' sandbox across the world somewhere?
Like best case the family gets a payout and things continue like status quo, if you personally do something, you are screwed, but there is not really any law that can tie responsibility beyond some monetary punishment/cost of business for large corporations.
Most people don’t realize that many industries work within the framework of licensure, but also have industrial exemptions. There has also been a movement to peel back some of those exemptions because of the problems you point to.
If you accept literally anyone to run code on your customer's machine ... well ...
They are perfectly capable of distinguishing between good and bad actors
These companies are genuinely evil
Secondly, why would you report the offense… to the offender? That’s like filing a citizen complaint form for police misconduct… to the police.
HR is not your friend.
Neither of these things will happen, for reasons which are obvious.
How do you suggest we implement your proposal? Anyone can say what they think should be. An implementation plan with actionable steps is the hard part.
Of course they know. They have no civil or criminal consequences for engaging in a conspiracy to commit large scale wire fraud, so of course they just let it happen, because who wants to speak up and cause the metrics to go down?
I see obviously scummy ads on Apple News and now I see ads on Apple Maps as well. Ads are a bane on society - even accounting for free/cheap access to information we get in return.
Need a flashlight for jacking deer? Just got to click now.
It's Mark Cuban. Still worth reading tho. But I found my own personal reaction fascinating because I am not sure I would have clicked through if the title included the full "Mark Cuban".
And that isn't even counting the Instagram ads my wife falls for.
https://www.reuters.com/investigations/meta-is-earning-fortu...
This is nothing new, profiting off of fraud and abuse has been the name of the game for all the big advertisers from the beginning.
This is the man who, after Facebook literally canary in a coal mined one of their own employees - let him be jailed as a "test" to see whether Zuck or any exec would be arrested like threatened, then let him stay a little longer because they could "get some good PR out of it", then when the guy came to the US after his release and was meant to meet Zuck, he couldn't even pull himself off of his phone, was led away by a flunky asking "who was that, anyway?".
Or when told by both his team and anyone in Myanmar (including the government) that they intended to use data from a Facebook feature to crack down on dissidents, which has historically included jail, torture, and execution, decided "well, it's a really cool feature - we're not going to turn it off".
To think he cares about "misleading ads" is laughable. They don't care about ads selling illegal drugs or hinting at selling CSAM.
I think it is hard to imagine someone in tech with as non-existent a moral and ethical compass as Mark Zuckerberg, and that's saying something.
Unless there is a genuine financial (or legal) impact, they have no incentive.
Companies in the US still use a huge array of known harmful ingredients because they work better and are cheaper.
Blame the government for lack of regulation, that's what they're there for.
Making each of these liable really makes it easy to destroy your competition or enemies - commit crime via such methods, they suffer.
The larger the company, the larger the obligation they have to be a good citizen.
[0] https://www.techdirt.com/2020/06/23/hello-youve-been-referre...
The concerned is one of consistency in how media is regulated. E.g. Facebook, is the worlds largest media company, and it truly acts and behaves as a publisher now. It acquires its content from an army of paid and unpaid providers. They may be individuals, often they are influencers, often they may be nefarious agents and companies. It then decides how to place that content in it's "publication", which just happens to be an app and website. It goes out and tells the market, "I have this great publication in which you can place ads!". It then sells ads to those people, and makes a decision on how to place those advertisements inside its publication alongside that content that it acquired.
So how is it not a publisher? And why should it be regulated to any kind of different standard from other publishers?
Therefore you could save all your other questions and statements.
Legal definitions can should change in order to keep up with society and technology.
I'd emphasize that the scummiest sites with zero moderation never needed Section 230! Section 230 is what allows you to have some moderation (e.g. banning spammers) without suddenly becoming entirely liable for anything that passes the filter.
Blindly reverting Section 230 means eliminating that moderate position, splintering sites into:
1. Ones that abandon moderation entirely in favor of chaos. Maybe you can salvage something by giving opt-in filtering tools to individuals, but you'll still have the problem of someone using your site to store ten terabytes of the Bee Movie.
2. Ones that demand participants sign a serious legal document promising to pay for any problems before they can submit anything.
3. Ones which remove almost all expressive ability, beyond narrow things like like/upvote features.
If you're earning almost 200 billion dollars a year directly from the posting of a certain type of content, you can afford basic moderation to avoid obvious scams and fraud.
For example, suppose someone pays $/month for Cubic Zirconia Membership Tier on a site that boosts their posts over the hoi polloi.
That person makes a post hyping up their company or product with a link. Isn't that also a "paid advertisement", just with a different payment scheme? What happens if their product is a scam or otherwise legally-problematic? If gets Section 230 protection, how can we prevent sites/advertisers from abusing the new definition?
[1] https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-08-11/andrew-forrest-meta-s...
We've completely normalised big tech pushing straight up scams on the population.
> Jeff Bezos backs a platform that lets anyone invest in rental homes for as little as $100 — 6 ways to build wealth like a landlord without actually being one
Right, through his 401k
I could LLM this up but eh. It won't actually convince Googlers to do the right thing so it'll just stay a terrible idea.
I can't remember the last time I saw an ad on instagram that wasn't some kind of scam.
It improves their bottom line, so everyone there is disincentivized to fix it.