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Comment by titzer | Hacker News Reader

Yesterday, on one of my increasingly rare Facebook peeks, I kept getting this ad which was a link to a controversy with Mayim Bialik where she apparently got into a big spat with a producer over her touting new CBD gummies that supposedly cure dementia, and then it exploded into a huge thing, with even Tucker Carlson from Fox News weighing in, blah blah blah. It was perfectly-crafted clickbait because I clicked through just to read how insane it was.

The whole thing never happened! Complete and total hoax. A pump and dump scheme that Snopes got wise to more than a week ago. And it showed up in my feed 4 times in scrolling five minutes. I reported every single one of them as a scam.

I swear, no one is at the helm over there.

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Back in the day, I saw on Facebook a page promoting a website claiming to be able to hack any social media account in exchange for payment, and plenty of fake comments praising its success.

The entire service was a scam and all the comments interacting with it were thus guaranteed to be fake.

I've reported both the page itself and a handful of comments - this should've been a jackpot for FB to be able to catch and ban all these fake accounts conveniently rounded up for them.

The response? That none of these violated their rules and were allowed to remain.

Hey FB, you know how DAU is your most important metric and basically the only thing keeping you afloat. What if you just... cut it in half?

Considering that FB stock price has dropped to about where it was at the beginning of 2017, just from a tiny recent decline in DAU...It now has 1.9 billion DAU vs 1.2 billion then. Wasn't it insanely overvalued back then? FB has been endlessly tripping forward, trying to justify its insanely overvalued stock price since its IPO. Its value reflects the market's speculative estimation of the platform's value...to advertisers, not users.

I say, in all brutal honesty, I give zero fucks about a company going from a $900 billion market cap to just a mere $600 billion. Cry us a river already.

Ordinarily, I would say that we can't expect Facebook to investigate the truth of every ad like this. But if Snopes had already debunked it, it makes me wonder how much effort Facebook is really putting into vetting this stuff.

Actually, Facebook heavily moderates anything making anything close to a medical claim in an ad.

Or, more accurately, Facebook has a lot of rules that they impose on the third parties and few first party ad reviewers, especially in the area of medical claims.

This leads to some weird ads where the ad mentions a drug (by it's clinical name) and _maybe_ also mentions a health condition but makes no claim correlating the two and that's it.

But make sure to ask your doctor about it!

I think one of the reasons these lies spread so quickly is that they’re often based on a tiny shred of truth to make them sound believable. Mayim Bialik, for example, did hawk snake oil called Neuriva and made some questionable claims as to its efficacy. For anyone familiar with that controversy I can see how it’s not a big leap to read the fake headline you saw and think “yea, okay, I guess that seems like something she would do.”

I wonder what the end goal is for whoever is running those ads? To get people worked up at Mayim Bialik hosting Jeopardy!? To sell CBD gummies? Or just to piss off people on both sides and stir up American pop-culture controversy?

>I wonder what the end goal is for whoever is running those ads?

To generate traffic which creates ad impressions.

Ahh so they’re buying one “ad” but selling several more for the landing page? That makes sense, I suppose. What a weird and wasteful segment of our economy.

Interesting. I saw the same one, also multiple times.

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