Congress asks Mark Zuckerberg to explain why drug dealers are advertising on Facebook and Instagram
Congress asks Mark Zuckerberg to explain why drug dealers are advertising on Facebook and Instagram
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.
We get posts here too, and on Reddit
The posts here get reported and removed very quickly, sometimes within minutes of the account being created or the first post.
I searched Reddit for the website they were linking and saw the spam posts on Reddit have been up for months.
Few possible differences:
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We have a better ratio of users/moderation, where the lower volume of posts means everything can go through human moderators
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Our users are more actively trying to keep the platform good by reporting spam
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The incentive here is to create a good online platform. The inventive there is profit. The priorities are different as a result
Great points.
I might add:
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.
It isn't just those factors. There's also the fact that instance owners would rather moderate than get on the wrong side of the law.
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I’d 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?
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
Same here when I got DM'd a telegram channel for hard drugs. The user was never taken down or warned.
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.
"well, because they want to sell their products. isn't that obvious?"
“If you guys stopped locking up my ketamine dealers, I wouldn’t have to turn to FB to buy drugs” - Zuck probably
Too soon?
Be this tru, for a so called "hacker," dude sucks at the internet
Came here to reply this. h/t
no
If the FBI showed up at his office with an arrest warrant you better believe that shit would get fixed in a hurry.
If the FBI showed up at his office with an arrest warrant you better believe that shit would get fixed in a hurry.
But then the FBI would never do anything like that to billionaires.
I'm unable to comment further.
Buuuuuuuut...
"Because we don't check the content as long as they pay"
God I wish he would just say the silent part out loud.
It's too much trouble, we would only make 10.1 zillion instead of 10.3 zillion dollars!
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.
Wake me up when the “Congress” actually decides to take actions not just ask “questions” after the damage is done and money is made.
Right. Into Cryo-Sleep you go, then!
Yes this is there way of looking like they’re doing something without having to actually fix it.
When they fix problems they don’t have ammo to rile up the idiots.
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.
This actually sounds like a reasonable question to ask.
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
If it were you or me they wouldn’t ask, they’d raid. Different Justice system for the rich
Stop making facebook sound cool
Money
Like he gives a fuck! He's just gonna tell them what they want to hear and then he's going back to making millions off of fakebook
If the answer isn't "to sell drugs" I'm going to be disappointed.
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
"Our ads are showing mouse hover metrics, increase the ad spend!"
Triggggerd ! Today's ads are targeted and way more sophisticated than years ago. Maybe watch less porn? 😆
Edit: Come on guys... You lost your sense of humor? Touch some grass, stop beeing so serious about everything... uuhhhg !
But why politicians spread propaganda on social networks? Drug dealers should ask them.
Because they need so sell their drugs?
I'm more concerned with the drug dealers advertising on TV.
Gotta go to where the customers are.
If Bayer can advertise on facebook, so should too, my neighbor be allowed.
Corporations are people except when they are doing literal crimes.
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.
Facebook was the real gateway drug this whole time.
Maybe friends are the drugs we took along the way.
Capitalistic free enterprise is the law of the land?
Only for rich people.
[raises hand] I know why. It's because Meta is a trash hole and lives to exploit people.
Zuck and his corporation are expectedly shit; C Corp with only one motive, enrichment. Fuck Zuck and all that, but...
Congress, on the other hand, are supposed to represent the people and instead whore themselves out to the highest corporate bidders.
"Why would you do such a thing?!?" Fox #1 incredulously asked Fox #2 of his raiding of the henhouse.
Unexpected factorial
Zuck should ask congress why they're violently maintaining prohibition despite it being an inherently murderous and racist failure.
Facebook coke and E. Ehhhh that's gotta be like asking for as much fentanyl cut in as possible.
Test kits, everybody. They’re legal and invaluable.
I also don’t mean to UM AKSHULLY but there almost zero reports of fent-laced MDMA or X…. Coke, definitely more.
Careful with pressies
Eh, it’s best to assume everything has fent nowadays