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Posted by randycupertino 1 day ago

Cuban: Facebook knowingly runs AI deepfake scam ads; docs say $16B fraud revenue(finance.yahoo.com)
510 points | 228 commentspage 2
peterbecich 1 day ago|
These companies were profitable on higher quality ads in earlier years. Does this drop in quality indicate the ad well has run dry, so to speak? Or the demands for revenue are greater, necessitating a drop in standards?
mirashii 1 day ago||
Are we sure they were higher quality? They estimated in 2024 that 10% of their revenue was from fraudulent ads or ads that should be banned based on their own rules.

https://www.reuters.com/investigations/meta-is-earning-fortu...

This is nothing new, profiting off of fraud and abuse has been the name of the game for all the big advertisers from the beginning.

peterbecich 1 day ago||
My vague recollection from 10 or 15 years ago was higher quality ads.
mirashii 1 day ago|||
I commented in another thread recently that almost 15 years ago on a high traffic site we were full of obvious scam ads, tons of fake world of Warcraft clones with busty characters asking you to play, tons of you’re the 1 millionth visitor click here to claim your prize, download buttons. Even the occasional penis enlargement pills and stuff would come through. I really think even if the scale is maybe amping up, things weren’t much better 20 years ago, the web was just smaller, fewer people were paying attention, and the folks who were there had grown up learning to spot that stuff from the beginning.
rapist 1 day ago|||
like this one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9p0pdiTOlzw
hsuduebc2 1 day ago|||
I doubt it. Advertising there is pretty expensive and you don't really have a choice today if you want advertise something. They just don't care, they are greedy mfs.
FireBeyond 1 day ago||
Yeah, anyone expecting Zuck to give a fraction of a shit is hopelessly naive.

This is the man who, after Facebook literally canary in a coal mined one of their own employees - let him be jailed as a "test" to see whether Zuck or any exec would be arrested like threatened, then let him stay a little longer because they could "get some good PR out of it", then when the guy came to the US after his release and was meant to meet Zuck, he couldn't even pull himself off of his phone, was led away by a flunky asking "who was that, anyway?".

Or when told by both his team and anyone in Myanmar (including the government) that they intended to use data from a Facebook feature to crack down on dissidents, which has historically included jail, torture, and execution, decided "well, it's a really cool feature - we're not going to turn it off".

To think he cares about "misleading ads" is laughable. They don't care about ads selling illegal drugs or hinting at selling CSAM.

I think it is hard to imagine someone in tech with as non-existent a moral and ethical compass as Mark Zuckerberg, and that's saying something.

specialist 1 day ago||
Yup, Zuck is a moral cripple.
api 1 day ago||
Scams might be more profitable than legitimate businesses.
Incipient 1 day ago||
Meta has to invest more money into screening advertising so they ban more ads and therefore make less money.

Unless there is a genuine financial (or legal) impact, they have no incentive.

Companies in the US still use a huge array of known harmful ingredients because they work better and are cheaper.

Blame the government for lack of regulation, that's what they're there for.

balderdash 1 day ago||
Large advertising platforms need legislation akin to know your customer in banking. He advertiser needs to know their identity and make an assessment of their risk for fraud and suitability as a counterparty. 0
isolay 1 day ago||
The megacorps becoming criminal organizations is a logical and inevitable consequence of them being able to do whatever they want with impunity.
anenefan 1 day ago||
Yes they were doing the same is Australia ... I wouldn't know if they're still doing it here since one of the favourite scams used an Australian who took them to court. [1]

[1] https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-08-11/andrew-forrest-meta-s...

not-kinsale-joe 1 day ago||
Regulations are so strong on what a newspaper or magazine can print. It is a shame regulators are not set to enforce the same standards on social media.
siliconc0w 1 day ago||
It's pretty crazy this is tolerated by society, I know several older people scammed using Metas products.

And that isn't even counting the Instagram ads my wife falls for.

ares623 1 day ago|
The cool thing is that once scammed, the ~victims~ willing participants are effectively silenced due to a mixture of shame, and utter despair.

As a TechBro, not taking advantage of that would be negligence.

lr1970 1 day ago||
US Federal Trade Commission is supposed to uphold "Truth in Advertising" [0]. But its enforcement has been historically non-existent.

[0] https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/topics/truth-advertising

OsrsNeedsf2P 1 day ago||
I worked in a team that was only tangently related to this. There are hundreds of people at Meta who knew this was going on.
smokedetector1 1 day ago|
I interned there years ago and was disgusted by the pervasive sense of apathy towards the impact of the product in the world. the rot starts at the top
riffraff 1 day ago|
For a while there was a deepfake scam in Italian in FB which looked like a TV news with well known journalists announcing everyone would get money for free using some crypto thingy, followed by am interview with the prime minister saying they looked into this and it was safe.

The level of carelessness was astonishing to me.

elAhmo 1 day ago|
There was this one on Youtube as well with Musk.
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