close
close

Scammy ads on Facebook and Instagram viewed 900 million times: report

Posted on by Pranco
Scammy ads on Facebook and Instagram viewed 900 million times: report

Facebook, an Internet machine that turns lies into money, is absolutely swimming in scammers buying ads with political messages, according to a new report from ProPublica. Obviously, the fact that Meta’s platforms like Facebook and Instagram contain scams shouldn’t be news to anyone. But this new article helps provide some perspective on the extent of Meta’s problem and the company’s inability to police content at scale. A surprising fact from the article? ProPublica has identified scam networks that ran ads seen “900 million times on Facebook and Instagram.”

The new report is part of a study by the Tow Center for Digital Journalism at Columbia Journalism School and the Technical Transparency Projecta non-profit organization that researches Big Tech companies. And ProPublica notes that most of the scam networks identified in the report are part of lead generation companies that collect and sell personal information. The ads are often crafted to appear to be promoting deals endorsed by federal politicians like Donald Trump and Joe Biden, while others are more local, such as an ad identified by ProPublica featuring Illinois Governor JB Pritzker.

One ad quoted in the piece features a photo of Governor Pritzker, saying, “The state recently approved that Illinois residents under the age of 89 can now qualify for funeral expenses insurance of up to $35,000 to cover all final of- living costs!” You can see how this would specifically target vulnerable seniors in Illinois, appeal to people in their 70s or 80s, and promise a good deal on funeral insurance.

Other ads are more specifically tied to partisan anger, such as an account selling Trump merchandise that reads: “Liberal activists tear Trump-Vance yard signs off the ground, sparking a wave of controversy across the country.” ProPublica spoke to a Trump supporter who didn’t realize he was signing up for a recurring subscription when he bought one Trump coins.

There were also numerous advertisements targeting decent people with claims to free government health insurance. One set of ads mentioned in the new report referred Facebook users to “unethical insurance agents who changed their existing ACA plan information or signed up for plans for which they were not eligible.” Why would the scammers do this? Just to get a commission.

Another shocking fact from the article, which is really worth it read completelyis that even when scammer ads are identified, accounts in the same network can continue to function.

From ProPublica:

Meta removed some ads after initially approving them, the investigation found, but failed to catch thousands of others with similar or even identical content. In many cases, even after the offending ads were removed, the associated Facebook pages and accounts were able to continue functioning, allowing the parent networks to spawn new pages and ads.

Gizmodo reached out to Meta on Thursday for comment, specifically to ask how the scam networks can continue to operate after their content has been flagged as fraudulent. The company did not respond to our inquiry, but instead sent the same statement to ProPublica, emphasizing that it was continuously updating its enforcement systems.

“We welcome ProPublica’s investigation into this scam activity, which includes misleading advertisements promoting Affordable Care Act tax breaks and government-funded housing subsidies. The ads, some of which were years old, were all available for public review in Meta’s Ad Library, where ads are retained for seven years,” a Meta spokesperson’s statement said.

“Our investigation revealed that, as part of our ongoing work against scams, impersonation and spam, our enforcement systems had already detected and disabled a large proportion of the pages – and we have reviewed and taken action on the remainder of these pages taken due to various policy violations. This is a high-hostility environment and we continue to update our enforcement systems to respond to the changing behavior of scammers.”

There is of course some irony in the fact that Meta is dabbling in artificial intelligence when she is so bad at identifying scam ads on her own platform. Spotting scams and ensuring that the accounts associated with them cannot buy ads seems like a perfect job for AI. Or at least it would be a perfect job for AI if it was more than a plagiarism machine.

Facebook is of course not the only platform involved in scams. Every network of Truth social Unpleasant Grindr has scammers trying to take money from people illegally. But with its global reach and billions of users, Meta is uniquely positioned to find itself inundated with waste. The only question that remains is why people voluntarily submit to the dump every day.