Meta developed an internal “playbook” aimed at deceiving government regulators who aimed to crack down on scam advertising on Facebook and Instagram, according to a new report by Reuters. The report shows that Meta adopted tactics that made it more difficult for regulators to find ads for scams on its platforms, instead of working to reduce the actual number of scam ads, so that it could continue to bring in billions of revenue.
Here's a brief timeline of what went down:
- Last year Japanese regulators were upset over the amount of ads for obvious scams that appeared on Facebook and Instagram.
- Meta feared that Japan would start requiring it to verify the identify of all it advertisers, which would reduce fraud but also cost the company revenue.
- Rather than make effort to reduce the number of actual scam ads, Meta instead took actions to make the problematic ads less discoverable for Japanese regulators.
- For example, when Meta realized that the regulators were using its Ad Library to test its effectiveness at tackling scams, the company identified the top keywords and celebrity names they used to find the fraud ads, and deleted the number of ads they'd find.
- Internal documents revealed that Meta directed staffers to make problematic content “not findable” for “regulators, investigators and journalists.”
- Their tricks worked! At one point, Japanese regulators publicly praised Meta for its reduction in fraudulent ads.
- Later, Japan decided not to mandate the verification and transparency rules that Meta feared, meaning Meta's bullshit prevailed.
- The search-cleanup in Japan was so successful that Meta added the tactic to their “general global playbook” which it deployed against regulatory scrutiny in other markets including the U.S., Europe, India, Australia, Brazil, and Thailand.
All I can really say is — wow! Just when you thought Meta couldn't get any worse… surprise! Well, it's not actually a surprise at all, especially after reading Careless People last year and learning about the extreme lengths the company took to bring Facebook to China, as well as its general disregard towards adhering to government rules.
Meta spokesperson Andy Stone told Reuters that there is nothing misleading about removing scam ads from the library because that means that Meta also removed the ads from its systems overall. He also noted that the company has seen a 50% decline in user reports of scams — which immediately makes me question whether Meta simultaneously took effort to make reporting scams more difficult and/or began classifying user reports differently.
The Reuters report goes on to describe Meta's aversion to advertiser verification and the efforts that the company took to stall and dismiss regulation for it in various jurisdictions, purely for financial reasons. Meta staffers estimated that the cost of implementing a verification system for all advertisers globally would cost the company around $2B (or roughly 1.2% of its $164.5B revenue last year), and that blocking unverified advertisers could cause the company to lose up to 4.8% of its total revenue.
At the same time, Meta has internally cited estimates that scam ads are responsible for $63B in annual damage to consumers worldwide.
So let's do the math…
If Meta spent $2B in implementation one time, and potentially lost $7.9B in revenue each year by blocking scam ads from its platforms, it could save consumers $63B in annual damages. That's an 800% return on ‘no scammer' ad spend!
At this point it's proven without a doubt that Meta doesn't give a fuck about its users or government regulation. Drastic measures — such as blocking Meta's services in countries or suing / fining Meta to the point that it becomes too expensive for them to continue serving scam ads — is the only thing that's going to make a dent in making its platforms less damaging to the world.