Meta knowingly serves users 15 billion ads for scams every day and earns about 10% of is annual revenue from the scam ads, according to internal documents viewed by Reuters. The documents reveal that for at least three years, Meta failed to identify and stop ads that exposed Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp users to fraudulent e-commerce and investment schemes, illegal online casinos, and the sale of banned medical products, resulting in the company earning $7 billion each year from these scam ads.
Holy shit, can this company get any worse? Yes, they can. Keep reading…
The documents revealed that Meta only bans advertisers if its automated systems predict the marketers are at least 95% certain to be committing fraud. If their algorithms are less certain, but the advertiser is still flagged as a likely scammer, Meta simply charges higher ad rates as a penalty.
So basically if Meta has any plausible deniability that it's working with a scammer, rather than investigate the situation further, Meta instead gouges the scammers, who will likely pay the higher rates because they don't have many options of other platforms to advertise on (because those other platforms don't allow scams).
But wait, it gets EVEN WORSE!
At one point, Meta even placed restrictions on how much revenue it is willing to lose from acting against suspected scammers, stating that it wasn't willing to take actions that could cost the company more than 0.15% of the its total revenue, or about $135M.
Meta spokesperson Andy Stone said the documents seen by Reuters “present a selective view that distorts Meta's approach to fraud and scams.” He also said that the company's internal estimate that it would earn 10% of its 2024 revenue from scam ads was “rough and overly-inclusive” and that Meta later determined that the number was lower, but declined to provide an updated figure.
Stone also said that Meta has “reduced user reports of scam ads globally by 58%” during the past 18 months and “removed more than 134 million pieces of scam ad content” since the beginning of the year. (While probably hiking up the rates for the rest of the scammers on their platform to keep revenue the same. LOL)