Most of My Instagram Ads Are for Drugs, Stolen Credit Cards, Hacked Accounts, Counterfeit Money, and Weapons
Most of My Instagram Ads Are for Drugs, Stolen Credit Cards, Hacked Accounts, Counterfeit Money, and Weapons
The ads are a window into a blatantly illegal underground economy that Meta is not only failing to moderate, but is actively profiting from and injecting into users’ feeds.
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Sure, assuming that their job is filling beds in prison rather than actually reducing crime.
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But conceivably they could be enforcing the law by putting pressure on these companies to stop facilitating advertising of illegal services and thereby the flow of business. If they instead just don't bother with that so that they can use these ads to pick out and track down the juiciest, lowest effort prosecution targets, representing a small proportion of the total market, that's pure corruption with little to no social benefit.
To be clear I don't actually know if this is what is going on, but if it was it would be reprehensible.
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it’s astonishing
people still not blocking ads, use adblock!
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I use an alternative side-loaded Instagram app called Instander which blocks ads and comes with other nice features. I don't use the platform much anyhow, but when I do it makes the experience actually tolerable.
No, what people should start doing is demanding that governments actually enforce the law against Facebook for acting as an accomplice to the myriad crimes the article discusses. Facebook should be dissolved and executives should go to prison.
ReVanced says they support removing timeline ads from Instagram. I don't use Instagram, so I haven't tested it, though.
Pihole oughta do it.
PiHole doesn't work when ads and legitimate content are both served from same domain.
That is true, didn't think about that.
People use the app, have their info exploited and than complain this is the only way to use a service that is exploiting your clicks, and yet, you don't stop using it, really weird.
eh, I'm a photographer/videographer. sadly I more or less need to use it if I want anyone to find me...
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As opposed to when?
At what point in internet history do you think website advertising was tolerable? Because in my eyes, it's always been an aggressive obstacle to usability, since the dial-up era.
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Movie piracy can be both, and it's straight-up illegal. Hosting text is nothing in comparison. Images and video snippets are barely more than that. If all a website provides is bandwidth and storage, we all have that in spades, and if a website can't let us share it, then a website is the wrong model.
Running a glorified chat server and image board in the year two thousand and fifty gigabits should not be remarkable. You are currently on a service patched together by randos hosting servers for fun. It replaces a website which, despite strenuous effort, made fuck-all revenue from a highly constructive and ordered community of millions.
I fail to understand how people got into the mindset that every website needs to make money. Some worthwhile and widely-desired things simply lose money, and that's fine. Expecting to monetize your family would be gross. Expecting to monetize community is not much better, and equally fruitless. Squeezing any blood from that stone requires some fundamental betrayals of what those relationships mean and why people seek them.
Social media sites only turned a profit when they undermined democracy. Advertising is propaganda for sale. If you think capitalism prevents us from even talking to one another without being gouged for the privilege or subjected to destabilizing abuse, then torches and pitchforks are on your left.