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:
We have a better ratio of users/moderation, where the lower volume of posts means everything can go through human moderators
Our users are more actively trying to keep the platform good by reporting spam
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.
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?
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.
Sure, but they're under-resourced for cybercrimes. They have a lot of beat cops out giving tickets and beating up black people, but probably nobody who knows anything about credit card scams.
Local police need a readjustment of priorities and tiers of staff. Ideally we'd have:
The cybercrime division would fall under group 2, and would probably be just one or two people trained on that type of detective work.
Each tier should have a different uniform, so the public knows exactly who they're dealing with, and each tier would be required to have body cam footage live-streamed to HQ. The first group makes up the biggest part of your force, and which is bigger between 2 and 3 depends on the types of crime that are prevalent in your area.
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.
"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?
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.
"Because we don't check the content as long as they pay"
God I wish he would just say the silent part out loud.
"Senator, we run ads." —Mark Zuckerberg to Congress, 2018
...and also sell the information who clicks those ~~adds~~ ads.
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!
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
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!"
If the answer isn't "to sell drugs" I'm going to be disappointed.
Because they need so sell their drugs?
But why politicians spread propaganda on social networks? Drug dealers should ask them.
I'm more concerned with the drug dealers advertising on TV.
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.
Corporations are people except when they are doing literal crimes.
Gotta go to where the customers are.
If Bayer can advertise on facebook, so should too, my neighbor be allowed.
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 should ask congress why they're violently maintaining prohibition despite it being an inherently murderous and racist failure.
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.
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.
Eh, it’s best to assume everything has fent nowadays
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
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
