Nineteen members of Congress are pushing Mark Zuckerberg to explain why Meta has allowed ads for cocaine, ecstasy and other drugs to be shown on Facebook and Instagram.
I got an ad once for a group selling stolen credit card numbers too. I must have reported it at least a dozen times but it was always kept up and the report said it didn't break any rules. It only got removed after I just skipped Facebook reports and reported to the police.
In my experience several years ago, Facebook was actually super fast to take down bad groups. I must've been reporting so many and with such reliability that they started coming down instantaneously after reporting them.
I strongly suspect that a much bigger fraction of the free volunteer labor moved here, than anyone has realized.
Zuck and Spez know how fucked they are, but they're motivated to downplay the damage to their platforms.
There's an unvirtuous cycle where their platforms have under-resourced moderation, which has allowed bot proliferation, which has made unpaid moderation work a shittier job, which causes moderators to leave, which allows more bot proliferation.
Folks here seem to be saying our moderation tools are objectively poor, but are getting better with each release. So it's the bot spammers whose life gets harder, over time, here.
Iâd be shocked if cops did anything with that. Local police are incompetent (and, to be fair, waaay under resourced) when it comes to cybercrimes. Who did you report it to?
You loval police force is probably the most well funded department of your city's budget. It's essentially a jobs program for your towns biggest assholes.
I guess the police at least are able to order Facebook to remove it (sounds like that's what happened) but then yeah, as you say, I expect they will have just escalated to the county/state police, if anything
Wake me up when the "Congress" actually decides to take actions not just ask "questions" after the damage is done and money is made.
Seems more like election season shenanigans where the government wants to make a last bit effort of making it seem like they're doing their job but then nothing happens after. Like clockwork.
Facebook is the drug. It's addictive, mind altering, exploits dopamine hits, isolates individuals in bad circles, makes you spend longer on the toilet etc. It's literally the blue pill.
Too little, too late, though, in classic Congress style
The Myanmar Rohingya genocide was nearly a decade ago now, and we're somehow still at the "asking Mark nicely to do a better job of moderation" step, somehow
Shit, this winter, for 3 days strait, i got ads with literal swinging dicks and full on penetration. Reported ads, and moved on. After day three, i deleted the app and only launched from a sandboxed browser with an ad blocker.
Now, i only open it for the marketplace. The place was cancer anyhow, but that was just too much.
I found out that in most apps that advertise, the act of hovering on an ad and blocking it greatly increases the chance of seeing the same or similar ads
Meta appears to have continued to shirk its social responsibility
Why would anyone assume Meta cares about any form of "social responsibility"? They're an ad company that wants to hoover up your data so they can maximize the profit from the ad space they sell. That's it. Anything they do that's "socially responsible" is to get people to use their platform so they can sell more ad space.
So the answer to this question is simple: it makes money. It's really that simple. As long as they don't sell drugs directly, they're not really breaking any laws, at least not any laws that can't be dismissed with plausible deniability.
And honestly, I don't have a problem with it. I think most drugs should be legal for recreational use, provided people get drugs through legal means. The problem then simplifies to ensuring drug distribution is done legally (i.e. harder drugs should only be used w/ supervision, limits on total amount sold to an individual, etc), and tax revenue can be used for rehab. I think that's a much better approach than bans, because we can now track users and bake remediation into the system.
I absolutely hate everything about Meta, but blocking ads for drugs isn't a real solution. I highly doubt people are using because they saw an ad on Facebook or Instagram, so the problem here isn't about the ads, but about distribution.