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Comment by yazaddaruvala | Hacker News Reader

Please join my protest:

If you see an ad on Facebook messenger or WhatsApp, don’t hide it, instead Report It.

Report it as sexual content, report it as a scam, report it for whatever reason.

Guidelines, try to use different reasons and try to make it a realistic reason.

Facebook likes to gather our data for their ML, so let’s weaponize it. If we feed their platform garbage data, the ML will block the ads automatically, driving advertisers away or making report handling prohibitively expensive.

We likely only need 0.01% of users to feed garbage data to trigger their ML decisions. They’ll eventually be forced to find a better alternative.

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No offence but this is hilariously stupid.

All you're doing is following the same blackhat strategy that has been tried and prevented years ago. You know the one where you keep flagging your competitor's ads as abusive in the hope of getting them taken down. It's basically the same as click fraud.

In your case it's even more stupid since I assume you're doing so with a logged in account and without using proxy services so your IP will be static.

I guarantee that your reports has changed nothing other than make it more likely that your account is going to banned for abusing their terms of service.

Or just added to the bozo-file, meaning all your reports will be deleted unseen automatically, but it looks like everything works on your end.

Shh, don't tell anyone, but it seems like I've been put on a blacklist from seeing ads altogether :)

Honestly, I assumed the same. That I would be put on a shadow-ban list for reporting. However, the lifecycle looked something more like:

1. Reports went through without getting any response from FB. Definitely influencing their ML models.

2. A few months later, I started getting emails from FB acknowledging the report was investigated. I imagine that means manual effort.

3. Its been atleast 2 weeks since I've seen a ad in the FB Messenger iOS app.

It's trivial for them to auto-ignore such reports when they are coming from an account with abnormally high report rates. The effect of your protest will be, effectively, null.

Only if you don’t join :)

This is interesting, but I have a feeling I'd face less resistance with friends and family if I just tried to switch them over to Signal and be done with the whole problem

I've been helping family and closest friends to ditch WhatsApp for Signal, without much success, so decided to come up with a deadline, announced to everyone and will be deleting WhatsApp then.

More friends have joined Signal the week I told them I was living by the deadline than in the previous years, where I was mostly ignored.

So you will make individual ads less effective, therefore lowering their value, therefore lowering their cost, therefore in order to secure revenue facebook will need to show you more ads?

No, he is just making reports less effective.

I click on all ads that my adblocker doesnt filter. Charges them the PPC price while still beeing worthless. If enough people do that it will stop beeing worth it to the advertiser

It's not like there are dozens of Facebook out there. There's one. And nobody has targeting capabilities like they do. So if your product/company is suited to this marketing channel then you're going to stay with Facebook irrespective of whether the PPC price goes up by 1c. Which is probably the maximum effect you could ever hope to achieve.

And that's if their analysis of the click to conversions funnel is really good.

Otherwise, the OP is wasting time and bandwidth sending a "this demographic loves our ads, let's buy more of them" message to the brand, and a "these individuals like to click on ads so we can probably stick a few more in their message stream" message to Facebook...

If you report too many ads, Facebook turns off your ability to report ads.

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