Posted by randycupertino 1 day ago
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.
These kinds of ads aside, I've also seen offers of free shit from amazon sellers in exchange for positive reviews, "legal"/unscheduled drug analogues, flavored nitrous (free shipping!), unrestricted gambling/prediction markets, and oddly enough cellular/wifi jammers where the ad was specifically targeting semi truck drivers (I do not drive a semi truck, gamble, or search for unscheduled drug analogues, nor do I have an active amazon account)
So obviously they have the power to filter and recognise this stuff properly
At a very smaller rate.
That one is about fighting back against employer surveillance, and it's not just limited to semi truck drivers any more, people are also really interested in fighting back against their car snitching on them to their insurance.
Yeah yeah yeah but what about those stranger and more fucked up things? They come from someplace like fingerprinting your browser, no? A genuine question, as a user of firefox + ublock I simply don't see them, not on desktop not on phone. The only ads I rarely see are some given server decides to host themselves.
“things are bad” is a good reason to align your work towards things that make life better
As hard as that may be, it’s where progress rather than backsliding comes from
We should champion every effort for improving the conditions rather than restate things are bad
Fight back. Organise. Get shit done in real life
Hence the best call of action is to push for industry regulation forcing a level market.
How to make that happen is the trillion $$$ question.
now, advertises on the other hand. there is no excuse why companies making obscene profits can't be liable for now vetting obvious scams.
That sort of algorithmic nonsense shouldn't be mandated by you and your opinions of harmful content or anyone else. Should be optional. Let me have a straight chronological feed, but let me set via parental controls something much stricter for my kids. For example.
Ethically it's not much different than knowingly selling goods someone else stole.
That's why they "automate" everything. So that they can claim no knowledge.
There is not one single legal definition of "knowingly" that applies to all laws and claims in the US.
Furthermore, even under this specific law, you need to prove the accused acted in "deliberate ignorance of the truth or falsity of the information", which has its own standard of evidence which is not exactly trivial.
Bottom line: companies like Meta build in plausible deniability because it's legally more effective versus the alternative, even if it's not bulletproof.
“I didn’t know my automated lawn mower was running over children!”
The business model of ad-tech destroys everything it touches. It is virtually impossible to find a game on Play Store which is actually designed to be fun, they are all designed to manipulate you into watching more ads (most being ads for other games manipulating you to watch more ads).
It is time to just outlaw this nonsense.
My (honestly hardliner) view for a while has been that ads shouldn't exist. If a product was really good (and was in demand) a consumer would seek it out. This would entail the consumer knowing first the problem they want to solve, and then secondarily what the solution might look like, and once having found a few different products that satisfy their solution, carefully analysing each and working out which one they want.
Your idea of a directory neatly aligns with the way I view the market. Nobody should be putting an advertisement in front of people, they should be sought out when a need has to be met.
Not to mention the amount of environmental problems, human time and labour we could spare if our world wasn't oriented around fashions, trends, and attention harvesting.
I'm sure such a setup would devastate the world economy, so obviously it'll never happen. We need everybody to be sat away designing, manufacturing, transporting and marketing junk to each other all the time, to keep the market ticking. Sometimes the current adtech-led / "gamblification" of the economy makes me imagine we're in the endgame, pretending that fad creams, supplements, gadgets and trinkets are somehow worth something, and therefore, so is all the advertising that is being used to sell it.
These are good effects, but they are not the only effects of an unregulated advertisement market optimizing for profit. In the current ad-tech market, the information is increasingly of the mis-information or dis-information type, and we have whole platforms whose central purpose is to attract the attention of people just to show them ads. None of that is good for anyone but the ad-tech companies, and this has to stop.
I know that a total ban is probably unrealistic, but we desperately need some kind of regulation which takes the advertisement distribution away from these companies and lets it be controlled by someone else, preferably non-profit organizations that actually optimize for maximizing the amount of useful and truthful information that is distributed to customers. Murdering Meta is a very happy side effect of that.
you're basically suggesting the complete elimination of the entire advertising industry.
If that sounds too risky, then don’t use one, or develop one they reasonably trust and accept the cost when it fails.
Better make sure the AIs are contained and the ad verifiers aren't accepting rouge ads!
The law could be whatever we wanted it to be.
Your example scenarios are hardly compelling reasons that we should just accept the status quo.
We don't need to allow companies to have no liability in accepting automated electronic claims of anything from anyone in the interest of making more ad revenue faster.
"I do not accept this" does nothing, look at the current power situation of the big data companies, look at the economical incentives, will you personally go out and do something in the coming weekend that will change anything regarding this question? Next weekend? Who is going to do this?
If you can't answer that, you have to go with the assumption of status quo because it doesn't seem like your world is happening.
You came to a discussion board, one about founding and building. You can disagree with people, but to act like the status quo is some immovable rock? I admit, it's difficult. But the world changes and can be changed.
This goes further than a simple aversion to regulation. It's a kind of defeatism on a scale I've never seen anywhere else, bar maybe very nihilist circles or angsty teenagers.
If I start talking about space unicorns arriving to earth and giving people UBI by thursting their horns up peoples asses, it does not move the conversation forward meaningfully to any insight.
I would love if there was engagement that was grounded in incentives, if you can see a way out of this mess by realistic action, that would be meaningful.
Making networks liable for fraudulent ads, or even placing a small duty of care on those who display ads would be politically popular in much of the developed world. I don’t see it as at all unrealistic that a populist of the left or right would not try and implement this in the next 10 years.
Now this was handed to the companies on a silver platter through litigation.
the root of this conversation said
> Force them to vet ads or simply not run ads
so there is your law
> 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.
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.
It's a bit different in the software realm
Software is only different by convention, not because of some immutable natural law. That’s the point. The convention can be changed. There are already PE licenses for control systems, so there’s no reason it couldn’t extend to other software. However, I think the industry would fight that tooth and nail because it’s easier and more profitable to shrug off the responsibility.
Happened at my uni, look at the comment below.
You can’t just outsource a design for a bridge to avoid responsibility. If that bridge is being built in California, an engineer who is licensed in California ultimately has to stamp the design, even if all the design work was done elsewhere.
The same rules can easily apply to software. There no fundamental reason it can’t, and the superficial “yeah but we’re different” excuse is just a rationalization.
Software can be regulated in a similar manner, we just choose not to in many instances.
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.
We already do this. My prior uni got hacked, everyone's IDs/drivers licenses/passports, mails, data got leaked. The vendor was a 4-person third party cloud provider who had all of the necessary security certifications for the uni to avoid gross negligence. No-one paid anything as the 4-man firm went bankrupt and the uni got a new provider who is fully licensed to avoid gross negligence.
With software, you can stack these shells of proxies almost for free.
Even given this, the industrial exemption is not getting rid of currently with status quo. So the worldview is not really valid until it is.
Which licensed engineer stamped the software? The answer is probably “none”, because licensed engineers are liable even if their company is bankrupt. The person holds the license, not the company so it sounds like we’re talking past one another.
I worked in HW before for home electronics that had to be certified. There was no responsibility for the engineers, the cert house had to take on this responsibility, and they had a shell certification company hired who would conduct the tests and take on the responsibility. At one point there was a litigation due to an RF leakage from a LATAM-bound device causing signaling issues to public infra and causing an accident, but it went nowhere because of the layering of responsibility made by the cert houses. No engineer was responsible.
Please let it be Elon...
Please let it be Elon...
If you accept literally anyone to run code on your customer's machine ... well ...
https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/us-department-justice-announc...
These guys did a pump and dump scheme. They used Facebook ads purporting to be from Warren Buffet or other financial people, which in turn referred people to WhatsApp groups led by a stolen identity of an actual financial advisor.
They ran hundreds of these groups and scammed thousands of people with a pump and dump scheme for a stock called CLEU.
They've always been quite scummy with copyright but I almost feel Facebook can be blamed in general because they're the ones that juice the metrics so everyone feels they have to copy them
Edit: wording
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.
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.
Well, here there's two offenders - Meta and the ad seller. Honestly, I suppose the best bet here would be reporting the ad to the FBI. Assuming I'm a snitch, that is...
I know HR is not my friend. HR looks out for the company. If you and the company's interests are aligned, lucky you. If not, not so much.
That's a question typical of criminal scum. Are you criminal scum?
They are perfectly capable of distinguishing between good and bad actors
These companies are genuinely evil
It's confusing how this doesn't apply to meta, google, etc..
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?
This also incidentally has the effect of making their business less profitable, so arguably it’s your moral duty if you can do this at no cost to yourself.
It really depends on the platform and your country’s consumer laws. Some platforms force a return which makes this whole exercise not worth it.
So it still works, in some ways :)
Prior to being notified they could claim they were unaware it was fraud. But after being notified of it, they have confirmed back that they reviewed it. Yet they continue to show it, making them aware and participating in the distribution.
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.
All I know is I refuse to make an IG account to get around their NEVER ENDING 'log in to view anything' popups. And the fact people loved IG and now hate it as Zuck makes more and more of the decisions
He's a bad person, full stop. He doesn't deserve to belong in the conversation of genuine internet pioneers
"inventive and revelatory reporting on Meta that detailed the technology company’s willingness to expose users, including children, to scams and AI manipulation"
The award was for a series of articles, one of which was published exactly a year ago: https://www.reuters.com/investigations/meta-is-earning-fortu...
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".
The same is true of Paul Graham, too (viaweb). Yahoo! made a few lucky people a lot of money, while impoverishing Yahoo! itself.
I'm just old enough to remember the hype and growth around realnetworks and realplayer in the seattle area too.
Regarding the fact that “Meta does not make money from Marketplace itself”, this could be true at face value, nonetheless there is a significant amount of users on Facebook only for this feature in particular. In turns this represents more customers to serve ads to and profit from them.
With respect to fully banning ads online, that would probably kill meta and force a major restructuring of Google. Probably hundreds of thousands of layoffs across the tech industry, so they unfortunately wouldn't do it.
> Meta internally projected that it would earn about 10% of its overall annual revenue – or $16 billion – from running advertising for scams and banned goods
> But the company only bans advertisers if its automated systems predict the marketers are at least 95% certain to be committing fraud, the documents show.
https://www.reuters.com/investigations/meta-is-earning-fortu...