U.S. is investigating Meta for role in drug sales
wsj.com
wsj.com
I’ve reported them each time and each and every time the same response: “No violation found.”
If anyone is working for the DOJ and wants evidence of their willful ignorance and collaboration with drug dealers, contact me and I can provide screenshots and usernames of the accounts and reports I’ve made.
And for the most part the people making the videos know this. The platforms don't work if they have to police everything. Proper moderation results in an increase in false positives which paints an overzealous image and will draw the ire of users while driving them elsewhere.
What do you reasonably expect?
Why is OK with "Company is too large to police, nothing to see, move on"?
Maybe the platforms shouldn't work, in that case. And where is elsewhere, exactly? They are welcome to register their own domain and web site if they want to.
Why is it OK for Meta to make money on not policing their platform? We as a society are expected to pick up the tab.
If I open a large mall in the physical world where drug vendors roam free and I give them cover to hide, because I like the money they pay on ads, that's OK too? When someone complains, I just say "I have the right to change society, who are you to tell me I can't".
I'm unequivocally against any sort of drug prohibition, but this argument is pretty silly.
You know what other business model doesn't work if we enforce laws mandating anti-drug morality? Drug dealing.
If your business model doesn't work without doing unethical things, your business model should not work.
However if they use a shop as a platform to start selling drugs, that shop owner will be held liable by law, just like facebook.
The phones allow them to make trades much more effectively.
In addition, they probably use their hands, feet, voice, maybe these should be disabled for people since birth.
The argument being argued here is that it's not viable in practice for Facebook to police every single post, not that it shouldn't do it in principle. Your argument seems to be that Facebook shouldn't police messages at all, like phone companies don't monitor conversations. That's a completely different position that even Facebook wouldn't agree on.
> "If your business model doesn't work without doing unethical things, your business model should not work."
There's plenty of tools and business in real world where preventing the use of those tools for certain unethical acts is unfeasibly complex, impossible, costly or difficult.
In other words, it's understood that Facebook will police as much as they can (as they're already doing); one side is arguing that if they can't police everything they shouldn't exist, the other side is arguing that it's good enough that they police whatever is practical.
That's why your comparison with phone companies doesn't work: Facebook is already expected to monitor some content, the question is to what degree they should be held accountable.
And governments monitor people in the public, yet they are unable to prevent all crimes of happening. Should governments then not exist at all or the society in general? Should people not exist?
"If phone companies can't remove all death threats, they shouldn't exist (even though nobody expects them to try remove any death threats)"
is fundamentally different from
"If Facebook can't remove all death threats, they shouldn't exist (given that it's their policy to remove death threats)"
then I don't know what to tell you.
I'll try to make my argument on why your comparisons are not valid one last time as clearly as possible. We have two arguments:
(1) "If phone companies can't remove all death threats, they shouldn't exist (even though nobody expects them to try remove any death threats)" -- you can replace it with "If the government can't prevent all murders, it shouldn't exist (even though nobody realistically expects the government to prevent all murders)" for your latest message.
(2) "If Facebook can't remove all death threats, they shouldn't exist (given that it's their policy to remove death threats)"
I think most reasonable people would disagree with (1). People can reasonably agree or disagree with (2), as they're doing here in this thread.
You seem to disagree with both (which is fine) but refuse to understand that the arguments against (1) are not the same as the arguments against (2). Because of this, you keep trying to convince people who are against (1) but for (2) that they're the equivalent. They're not, so you won't convince anyone like that.
Facebook isn't one of those, though.
I'm pretty unconvinced that they should in principle be able to both engage in content moderation and retain safe harbor.
A shopping mall isn't liable (in most cases) for the products or services sold by the individual stores yet it can choose to not allow certain businesses (tobacco, gambling, 18+ stores).
Have you seen a completely unmoderated social media site? It's either ultra niche or riddled with spam, fraud, and other low-quality content.
It's really simplistic to only bring up social media when the larger topic is "should private control of common platforms, markets, and network effect relationships be allowed"? The real estate and many critical B2B industries are FAR more insular and controlled by arbitrary groups.
Should McDonalds Inc. be liable for franchises selling expired food and/or should they not be able to control a franchise at all? Franchise contracts are way more controlling than any social media ToS yet people pay to join them.
1. We can enforce the law on Facebook in ways we can't with completely agnostic, low-tech tools like pen and paper.
2. "Drug dealers can use those too" is very different from "Drug dealers are commonly using those too, to deal drugs". Drug dealers surely use pen and paper sometimes. But how often are they using them? And are they using them to advertise and sell drugs, or just using them? (Note this also addresses your food analogy).
3. Facebook inherently collects massive amounts of evidence that pen, paper, and food don't.
It's not that, it's a reductio ad absurdum, a legitimate debate technique.
Banning pens and paper isn't a consequence of forcing Facebook to not allow drug dealing.
Or in the contradiction sense, forcing Facebook to not allow drug dealing does not lead to an absurdity of everyone being forced to ban pens and paper.
This isn't reductio ad absurdum.
Modern capitalism doesn't seem to give two shits about that
Sometimes being ethical is profitable, but not always.
More fundamentally, sometimes providing any value at all is profitable, but not always.
Pedantically, the drug dealing business model definitely still definitely works, even if anti drug laws are enforced.
It just gets more expensive, risky, and often has to pick up either organized crime backing (e.g. gangs and liquor in prohibition, or gangs and cocaine/crack/h during the height of the war on drugs) or government backing (not in an IranContra sense, rather lobbying to make your drug legal, so long as the government gets a cut - e.g. liquor or marijuana).
Fair enough, you've got me there.
I guess what I meant was that drug dealing business model doesn't work legally.
Isn't a false positive by definition improper moderation, just like a false negative?
I would point to oldschool forums (and HN!), where the communities were just large enough to moderate themselves and stop nasty off topic junk like that from appearing.
One problem is modern social media has (mostly) yanked this self-moderation power from users. And, as you said, they are too big and too cheap to hire enough mods on payroll to replace them.
Another, that I have, is that they make money from the drug dealer posts! If Facebook has to leave it up, OK, but they sure as heck shouldn't display ads or collect metrics. That should be a far more zealous check.
the argument i hear quite a lot is: No real world business would be allowed to continue operation if it repeatedly did little or nothing to address—or worse allowed the patrons to flaunt—illegal activities on premises. If any business had solid and precise evidence that a specific person was committing crimes and they did nothing, it would likely lose its business license.
there are obviously good arguments to be made for and against this, but its not something that many want to interrogate.
I assume your intentions are positive, but you aren't helping anyone--you're harming people. Prisons in the U.S. are not rehabilitative: prisons are actively more harmful than unregulated drug use. They do absolutely nothing prevent drug use. However, they DO cause increases in violence including both violent crime and violence perpetrated by law enforcement. They also result in more single-parent children.
If you want to reduce the problems of drug addiction, the BEST thing you can do is donate to lobbying for legalization. We certainly need more research and funding for rehabilitation, but these things won't help if we don't put into action what we already know: prohibition doesn't work.
Glib responses about nuanced situations actively detract from the conversation. Stop doing that.
To me, it seems obvious that there's a middle ground between the stupidity of the "drug war" and the suffering factories we're allowing to grow in some of our cities. There's got to be a way to thread the needle and not have legalization imply mass lawlessness in certain parts of our cities. But none of the places that have tried legalization on a big scale have successfully threaded that needle as far as I can tell, and I think the effect of that is going to entail a lot more skepticism from the general population when further legalization initiatives come to a vote.
Is the frequent shitting in the streets actually the result of more human shit being created, or is it just surfacing a quantity of feces that already existed but was being routed into bathrooms or other private areas?
However, I don’t find this particularly convincing:
> Is the frequent shitting in the streets actually the result of more human shit being created, or is it just surfacing a quantity of feces that already existed but was being routed into bathrooms or other private areas?
In this hypothetical shituation (I’m very sorry - I couldn’t resist), it would be very useful to answer that research question as it would serve to reveal more about both the problem and the solution.
The point of the comment is to point out that putting human misery into people’s faces isn’t a value-neutral decision.
I don’t want to see trauma surgery or graphic sex on the way to the park with my kids either, though I am of course fine with both existing in the world.
That would be an arguable point, but you certainly didn't make that with your shit analogy. If you'd care to provide any evidence for that point whatsoever, I'd be happy to address that evidence, but you haven't provided any evidence for that point to even argue against.
The shit analogy isn't evidence because the problems of putting shit in the streets aren't cause by its visibility, they're caused (mostly) by bacteria.
> I don’t want to see trauma surgery or graphic sex on the way to the park with my kids either, though I am of course fine with both existing in the world.
Again with the argument from analogy being fallacious.
You likely won't see open air drug markets on the way to the park with your kids unless you already lived in a neighborhood where your children were already going to be exposed to drug use. These open air drug markets aren't opening in the Hamptons, they're opening in areas where the drug crisis was already pervasive.
The point is that open air drug markets full of human misery, and usually unsanitary and violent conditions, are bad, and we should not tolerate them as part of our society.
It’s a sort of obvious mainstream view that everyone most likely shares outside of this sort of bizzare too-online culture that has developed.
My comment is just pointing out that having them in places where people are trying to live normal lives and raise children is bad.
The fact that this kind of thing will exist anyways isn’t a counter-argument any more than the argument that porn will always exist and is legal means it has to be allowed on billboards.
> The point is that open air drug markets full of human misery, and usually unsanitary and violent conditions, are bad, and we should not tolerate them as part of our society.
Anywhere drug addiction is pervasive is full of human misery, unsanitary, and violent conditions.
"Not tolerating" isn't a solution.
The concrete solution you're actually proposing is prohibition, which not only doesn't solve the problem, but makes the problem worse. It makes it harder to provide sanitation solutions such as needle exchanges, and it makes it harder to provide solutions to violence such as security presence.
> My comment is just pointing out that having them in places where people are trying to live normal lives and raise children is bad.
And no one disagrees with that.
The problem is, prohibition just means that people trying to live normal lives and raise children now live in a neighborhood with more violence and more unsanitary conditions that is less visible and harder to avoid. Your "solution" is not solving the sanitation or violence problems in any way, it's making both worse.
If anything, concentrating drug sales into specific areas makes the problems more avoidable for parents, because they know exactly where the problems are and can avoid those areas.
And, if you're concerned about children, surely you'd support programs to help families with children move away from violent and unsanitary areas. I'd certainly support that. That seems like it would actually solve the problem, unlike anything you've proposed.
> The fact that this kind of thing will exist anyways isn’t a counter-argument any more than the argument that porn will always exist and is legal means it has to be allowed on billboards.
It's tiring to continuously explain to you the differences between the analogies you keep proposing and the discussion at hand. Analogies still aren't a valid argument. Please make an effort to talk about the actual situation we're talking about, instead of bringing in various unrelated situations.
The difference in this case is that removing porn from billboards doesn't make the problems of porn worse, while making drugs illegal does make the problems of drugs worse.
It's really not all that complicated. The only places I see people breathlessly explaining that it's impossible are a few specific cities on the west coast of the United States.
> It's really not all that complicated. The only places I see people breathlessly explaining that it's impossible are a few specific cities on the west coast of the United States.
You've certainly destroyed that straw man thoroughly! Now that we're agreed on the obvious that shooting up in parks and defecating in public should not be allowed, would you care to explain why you disagree with anything I've actually said?
I'm sure you can find some crazy person who believes that defecating in public should be legal, but there does not exist any significant movement of people who think that. If you think there is, that indicates a problem with your understanding of the situation.
The pretty obvious difference is that routing shit into a bathroom makes a real, negative difference in the suffering caused by shit.
Routing drug dealing into open air drug markets makes a real, positive difference, because you can police public markets to prevent violence in a way you can't police private areas, and you can provide services such as clean needles and rehab outreaches where they are most likely to reach people who need them. Such markets tend to arise in places where drug use was already rampant--i.e. they aren't creating new suffering.
The only similarity your analogy is addressing is the visibility of the problems. In your analogy, you're making the problem more visible by removing the solution, which obviously has negative effects that don't apply to drug legalization, because drug legalization is removing a big part of the problem rather than removing the solution.
Good luck with that. Pretty much all arguments are by analogy. That's how you determine if a generalized rule applies to a specific instance.
I've made at least half a dozen arguments in this thread and not a single argument I've made in this argument is by analogy.
In fact, the very argument you are making currently isn't by analogy.
> That's how you determine if a generalized rule applies to a specific instance.
That is an extraordinarily poor heuristic.
If you have enough information to make a rule for a specific instance, why not just make a rule to apply to that specific situation? Why even bother trying to apply a generalized rule?
I mean, you can say literally anything with analogies. Here, I'll offer my first argument by analogy:
Drug prohibition is like letting churches handle child abuse: it allows harm to children to continue by hiding the harm.
Why do you want to keep harming children?
/s
For example a rule that says do not walk on the lawn might govern a specific section of ground that has a mix of blades of grass, a pebble, one bottle cap, and some bare dirt, is analogous to "lawn" as a concept. Were it to change, at some point, it would be sufficiently devoid of grass, or the other things that make up the concept of "lawn" that it would, in fact, more analogous to something else.
That's how everything works. Are you familiar with our legal system and the concept of precedents? Basically a precedent is an analogy, and the common law is a massive collection of analogies that have been extensively discussed over time.
If you ever end up in litigation, you'll notice that basically the whole thing involves trying to figure out which analogy is more applicable to the specific set of facts in question. This is usually called the "theory of the case" and the side that more convincingly matches its favored analogy tends to prevail.
For example, we're talking about "drug prohibition" but that's not actually specific at all. Are you talking about caffeine or heroin? Both are drugs, but which analogy would you compare your policy solution for consumption of heroin with? Is it more like a coffee shop, or how we handle cocaine? If you believe in legalizing opium, do you by definition believe in legalizing Fentanyl? Or are the two sufficiently different that a different analogy applies?
And so on. It's analogies all the way down.
> For example a rule that says do not walk on the lawn might govern a specific section of ground that has a mix of blades of grass, a pebble, one bottle cap, and some bare dirt, is analogous to "lawn" as a concept. Were it to change, at some point, it would be sufficiently devoid of grass, or the other things that make up the concept of "lawn" that it would, in fact, more analogous to something else.
> That's how everything works. Are you familiar with our legal system and the concept of precedents? Basically a precedent is an analogy, and the common law is a massive collection of analogies that have been extensively discussed over time.
> If you ever end up in litigation, you'll notice that basically the whole thing involves trying to figure out which analogy is more applicable to the specific set of facts in question. This is usually called the "theory of the case" and the side that more convincingly matches its favored analogy tends to prevail.
Okay, that's mostly true, and would be relevant if we were trying a case in court.
But we aren't trying a case in court, we're disagreeing about the nature of reality. When I say "arguments from analogy are fallacious" I mean "analogies don't prove anything about the nature of reality".
> For example, we're talking about "drug prohibition" but that's not actually specific at all. Are you talking about caffeine or heroin?
You aren't confused about which of these drugs I'm talking about, and I'm not going to entertain a conversation where you pretend you are.
> Both are drugs, but which analogy would you compare your policy solution for consumption of heroin with?
I wouldn't compare my policy solution with an analogy, I would say which drugs I'm talking about.
> If you believe in legalizing opium, do you by definition believe in legalizing Fentanyl?
No, but not because of analogies, because they are two different things that exist in reality.
> Or are the two sufficiently different that a different analogy applies?
No analogies apply, ever, to determining the nature of reality.
Maybe not in your head. But as soon as you introduce language and shared meaning they do. You don’t even know if the color I call blue appears to me physically the same as it does to you. We can agree that it corresponds to a specific wavelength but we just have to guess if we’re both experiencing it in the same way.
But I digress. That doesn’t matter anyways because we aren’t talking about the nature of reality in this thread, we are talking about agreed upon normative judgments. Not just what is, but what should be.
And that always relies on analogy. How could it not?
You're posting random unrelated pop-sci at this point.
> That doesn’t matter anyways because we aren’t talking about the nature of reality in this thread, we are talking about agreed upon normative judgments. Not just what is, but what should be.
"Agreed-upon normative judgments" and "what should be" are not the same thing.
> And that always relies on analogy. How could it not?
Well, the way my arguments which don't rely on analogy exist is that I typed them into the text area and pressed "reply".
You're literally trying to argue that something can't happen, which is happening right in front of you.
It seems our only options are either extremes bans vs mass open drugs areas, because cities/courts treat anyone poor enough to be selling/using on the street as a specially protected class…even when such behaviour predictably explodes in scale at the detriment of local communities.
It's a bizarre regional affliction that somehow comes with willful blindness to how odd and atypical it actually is.
This isn't some random phenomenon. Warm weather is only a part of it. DC, Philly, and NYC are all seeing large amounts of it and the only major change is basic street enforcement and judicial consequences.
All 4 of your examples are notorious for not enforcing it at the local level and Seattle decided to blame simple drug possession again after it got out of control, but without heart by the city we'll see the same outcomes. It's more than what's written in the laws.
Sorry, what argument are you making exactly?
There's zero evidence I know of that any of the suffering visible in open-air drug markets wasn't already happening pre-decriminalization. The suffering likely existed before, i.e., decriminalization isn't causing the suffering, it's just allowing it to become more visible.
The root causes of the suffering you're seeing are almost entirely economic.
Part of my point also is that lack of enforcement of other laws worsens the issue - both for the users who hang out on these places and also for the perception of the voters who people in favor of saner drug policy are trying to sway.
Homelessness is probably even more difficult in this regard: homeless men are dirty, smelly, and scary, and that turns a lot of people off from wanting to help them, which is why almost every program for the homeless I know of is geared toward making them less visible, even if doing so actively harms the homeless.
The root causes for homelessness and drug abuse are in large part due to trauma and bad childhood. Soft White Underbelly has interviewed thousands of people from Skid Row, and invariably they suffered major abuses and instability as kids. I guess you could go full historical materialist and say that was caused by economics too, though historically most people were far more impoverished as subsistence farmers, yet still managed to maintain dignity and stability through culture and community.
It should also be noted that other countries with fewer homeless also have higher rates of involuntary hospitalization, e.g. Japan. De-institutionalization of the mentally ill has directly led to the rise in homelessness. Portugal is routinely cited as a success story of decriminalization, yet they force treatment upon addicts as an alternative to jail. Progressives use all carrot and no stick, which is not going to work with people who have become mentally ill addicts.
And? How is this an argument against legalization of drugs? This certainly isn't attributable to legalization.
> The root causes for homelessness and drug abuse are in large part due to trauma and bad childhood. Soft White Underbelly has interviewed thousands of people from Skid Row, and invariably they suffered major abuses and instability as kids.
Sure, and when you figure out a way to go back in time and undo those major abuses and instability, that will be a fixable problem.
The fixable causes are all economic. People don't have access to mental health care to recover from the abuses and stability because we prioritize rich people not having to pay taxes over providing healthcare. People don't have homes because we prioritize rich people not having to pay taxes over providing homes.
> I guess you could go full historical materialist and say that was caused by economics too, though historically most people were far more impoverished as subsistence farmers, yet still managed to maintain dignity and stability through culture and community.
Instead of talking about vague unprovables like dignity and stability, I'd suggest you talk in evidence. Your argument here is even more disingenuous because you chose vague unprovables over concrete issues which we were already talking about, such as drug use and homelessness (which you yourself brought up).
If we look at drug use: many fewer drugs were available and with the exception of alcohol, the popular drugs were less harmful. The plight of alcoholics was (and is) worse in subsistence farming societies because less help was (and is) available. So this is closer to an argument for my point than for yours.
If we look at homelessness: a lot of housing was provided by stronger family units, communities, and other social structures (i.e. a serf was provided housing by the lord who owned the land--literally where the word "landlord" comes from--but hopefully I don't have to argue against bringing back serfdom as a solution to homelessness). In the modern day, we arrest black and poor men, tearing apart families and communities, to the benefit of for-profit LEO and prison industries.
> De-institutionalization of the mentally ill has directly led to the rise in homelessness.
This is largely a categorization error. You're basically considering mental institutions to be homes.
1. Mental institutions aren't homes. They're at least shelter, but that's not all a home is.
2. The solution to homelessness is homes. The mental health problem is intertwined, but critically, mentally ill people in homes are just mentally ill, they aren't homeless.
3. Mental healthcare is ineffective when someone is experiencing the ongoing trauma of homelessness, so mental healthcare of any kind is not the solution to homelessness. Mental healthcare is also pretty ineffective when all of someone's freedoms are taken away, so forcible institutionalization isn't necessarily a great way to treat mental health issues either (though admittedly it is necessary in some cases). Forcible institutionalization is a tool of last resort for solving mental health issues, and it's not a solution to homelessness at all.
It sounds an awful lot like you aren't interested in helping homeless people, you're just interested in hiding them in mental institutions. This means you don't have to see the problem, but it's really just shifting a homelessness problem into an over-institutionalization problem. It's arguable whether it's better to be homeless or unnecessarily institutionalized, but if these are the options you're considering, you're not trying to help the people most affected by this problem.
It's possible to give people homes and mental healthcare without forcing them into institutions.
> Portugal is routinely cited as a success story of decriminalization, yet they force treatment upon addicts as an alternative to jail.
I'm against prison because it's not rehabilitative in any way. I'm not against forcing addicts into rehabs, although I would like forcible inpatient rehabs to be a tool of last resort, and I would also like it to be more humane than most forcible mental health facilities are in the U.S.
> Progressives use all carrot and no stick, which is not going to work with people who have become mentally ill addicts.
I'm not "progressives" and progressives aren't any one thing, so this generalization you're making is pretty much a straw man argument.
And it appears you view forcible mental health institutionalization as a "stick", which is genuinely horrific. Do you really intend to make the argument that the solution to mental health issues is to punish the mentally ill?
I'm actually seeing some evidence that there's no connection between legalization and the illegal farms at all.
For example, the first article says that most of the weed grown on illegal farms in Maine isn't being sold in Maine, it's being sold in Canada. I'm just not seeing how legalization in Maine would result in more marijuana being grown illegally and sold in Canada.
The second article says, "A big part of the problem is rooted in the legalization of industrial hemp, which looks and smells like marijuana but won’t get you high." I.e. the article you posted directly disagrees with your assertion that legalization of marijuana is the cause.
The next sentence says farm-scale hemp production was legalized in 2010. When the price of hemp collapsed in 2018, which was after weed had been legalized, hemp farms started being used as cover for illegal weed farms, because legalization had created such a huge market for weed.
> For example, the first article says that most of the weed grown on illegal farms in Maine isn't being sold in Maine, it's being sold in Canada. I'm just not seeing how legalization in Maine would result in more marijuana being grown illegally and sold in Canada.
That was the opinion of a single anonymous weed grower. These farms didn't exist prior to Maine legalizing sale of recreational weed in 2020, and the more lax laws about possessing weed mean it's harder to get a warrant to search these residential grow houses.
To be clear, you are saying that, not the article. I'm asking for evidence for your opinion.
> That was the opinion of a single anonymous weed grower.
Well, sure, I didn't say the evidence was strong either way, but it remains true that all the evidence you've presented contradicts your opinion that there's a causal relationship between legalization and illegal cartel farms.
> These farms didn't exist prior to Maine legalizing sale of recreational weed in 2020, and the more lax laws about possessing weed mean it's harder to get a warrant to search these residential grow houses.
The first claim is correlation, not causation.
Any citation for the latter claim? In the absence of evidence, one might equally argue that not prosecuting now-legal operations frees up resources to go after these larger illegal operations.
To be clear, I'm not arguing there isn't a connection; I don't know whether there is or not. But so far I'm hearing your claim that there is a connection with no evidence.
American drug enforcement is an extremely blunt instrument and is very good at generated collateral damage.
Someone selling "account recovery services"? That's totally allowed by FB!
https://www.economist.com/united-states/2023/11/30/the-supre... from The Economist
https://www.404media.co/lets-see-what-drugs-instagram-is-adv...
https://www.404media.co/instagram-throttles-404-media-invest...
Another example (bots presumably paid for by hedge funds): any post about GameStop on Twitter will trigger AMC and other ticker bots to spam the comments under that post/Tweet. Essentially disabling comments for any GameStop related Tweet.
Negative news/Tweets about presidential candidate get popular? Use spam bots to trigger Twitter algorithms to penalize popular negative Tweet.
Positive news/Tweets? No spambots.
That was like 10+ years ago.
This has not been my experience. I locked my account a month or so ago but up to then I was reliably getting two sexbot follows a day (and there's a pile of follow requests in my notifications), and there's an awful lot of accounts out there that want to tell me about something of theirs in their bio.
(And it's kind of interesting that they haven't done anything about those, but pulled out all the stops to protect the identity of that Texas fascist).
My experience has been that the problem has so obviously gotten worse it is surprising to me that anyone would say otherwise. I used to get bot interactions maybe once a month and now I get them multiple times per day. Every post I make gets random bot likes, I get bot follows constantly, and multiple times per week I get the big at tweet which is just a tweet full of mentions which is so obviously a bot I can’t believe that behavior doesn’t get fixed.
For me bots got way, way worse.
I also wonder if they are actually honeypots --- that could explain why they stay up.
I wonder if any law enforcement agency (or researchers with an agency's permission) would / has ever do(be) a study of trying to buy from a large enough number of ads to know what % are scams vs. real.
I'm from Europe, I don't have FB account, but I have (and use) Instagram one.
I didn't seen any viagra, drugs or weed/CBT advertisements once.
I see many legitimate advertisements, and lot of ads of fake outdoor and motorcycle gear (to good to be true, like undestroyable sneakers and tracking boots for 10 euro, suspicious outdoor pants for 5 euros, better-to-avoid motorcycle protective gear, etc). And I'm interested in outdoor and motorcycle gear and equipment, so this ads could be named "well targeted".
Also not-so-often there are ads of AliExpress (and in last year Temu too), of course, but they are not worse than "everything under 10 euros" brick-and-mortars shops, same cheap crap (I don't say all you could buy on Ali is cheap crap, I've bought a lot of good items here, including sometimes unique things which you could not buy locally at all, but ads use very low priced crap mostly). Again, I'm using AliExpress all the time, so these ads are not completely mis-targeted too.
Never any drugs, dietary supplements, etc.
And everybody in this thread say that they experience these obviously illegal ads.
> I'm from Europe, I don't have FB account, but I have (and use) Instagram one.
I’m the same as you, except in the US. I haven’t seen them either.
It’s likely a matter of scale. Meta has literally billions of users. You and I are never going to see every ad on the platform, obviously, but that doesn’t mean some people are slipping drug ads into the system.
I would guess that ad targeting also plays a big role. Maybe if someone started following a lot of marijuana themed accounts and posts tagged with obvious drug references, they’d be more likely to see them.
The scammiest ads I see day to day are on YouTube these days. Lots of get rich quick investments, too good to be true products, and people selling guides or courses on the pending collapse of society.
In my country FB was the largest marketplace for drugs for the past 10 years, but these days I think Telegram is more popular.. or it's at least 50/50
It will be strange to complain that you see drugs ads if you join private group to buy drugs.
I don't think publisher exemptions let you this far off the hook.
You can't even report YOUR OWN hacked account as a scam account or hacked account.
The only way to get someone a moderator to actually evaluate some piece of content is to report upon it in high-profile media. Then you'll get it removed and a fake apology and a promise they'll do better next time.
https://commission.europa.eu/strategy-and-policy/priorities-...
As someone who works on integrity for a small ad platform, I can tell you that there is no way to prevent 100% of the bad things from going through. We are tiny and still deal with highly motivated bad actors.
Fwiw, Google has also had a problem with this and has paid half a billion in fines.
https://www.businessinsider.com/google-loophole-buying-drugs...
That makes certain assumptions about technology and business model? If humans reviewed every ad, the way newspapers once reviewed classified ads, then you could detect near-100% of them.
Somehow tech companies have convinced everyone that they have a right to automation and an associated business model and profits, and that the right trumps even criminal activity.
Obviously, overwhelmingly - based on massive illegal sales (not just drugs, not just ads), propaganda, fraud, scams, horrific abuse of children [0] - that technology and business model have failed completely.
[0] https://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/interactive/20...
"We have investigated ourselves, and found we did nothing wrong." Obviously ignoring the CIA's involvement with drug trafficking, Big Pharma and politicians' friendships with them, lack of accountability in nearly every medical board...
Thus, preventing deaths is not an objective of theirs, obviously.
the body armor is legal. reporting the suppressors doesn't work because the kits aren't recognizable by the moderators, who don't know how a suppressor works. moderators have learned what certain kinds of autosears look like, due to rap-culture glamorization and media scares, but they're still widespread.
i think these advertising engines have a bigger hand in the political destabilization of america than anyone understands or is willing to admit. it doesn't matter if it's negligent or deliberate.
these days i see drone munition drop kits.
we may already be in the american years of lead
By contrast, the illicit drug trade uses WhatsApp (also owned by Meta), iMessage, and Signal.
Someone who isn't licensed selling either one would technically be committing the same crime.
I was flipping through IG and was shown Aaron Bushnell’s full video. I reported it through the app and a little while later my case was updated. It said the video meets community guidelines and was left up.
I can imagine the same reporting system not legitimately taking down posts of drug sales, prostitution, and anything else illegal. I have a hunch they use some sort of automated process of scanning videos or pictures and go off of that.
I’ll also add I’ve been shown videos of dead bodies in the trenches of Ukraine, reported those, and they say that the videos don’t violate their guidelines.
A bit different though, as those are legal. OP article is about illegal / Schedule I sales.
I don't think it's legal to sell prescription drugs without a prescription...
Article is about illegal sale of legal prescription drugs - Adderal and opioid painkillers etc.
I also get targeted with semaglutide drugs (e.g. Ozempic, Wegovy) except the ads aren't brand name. They use compound pharmacies I think to avoid using specific brands and avoid FDA approval. I'm kind of surprised it's possible to get these drugs without getting brand name given patents, etc, but I don't know the whole history of GLP drugs or whether the compound pharmacy is a loophole of some kind.
Most of the ads I see seem legitimate and aren't obviously illegal. But maybe getting stuff like Testosterone from an online virtual doc visit shouldn't be something you get targeted ads for every day.
It depends on how each pharmacy examines your health, I can definitely imagine that some of them just send you some Viagra without asking too many questions, but with us, Hims, etc you go through a rigorous (and sometimes fairly lengthy, as with testosterone) clinical process to determine your eligibility and risks.
E.g. I’m not overweight by any means, but I’m also not 5% body fat. Could wegovy help me get ripped abs? According to these ads, yes! I have actually considered trying it just for the hell of it (and out of curiosity for how it works). But it’s definitely not medically necessary (or recommended) for someone like me, but these companies will advertise and prescribe it to me anyway.
Honestly I don’t think open access to these drugs is necessarily a terrible thing, but the advertising aspect I disagree with. I’m fine with anyone using Adderall for example if they seek it out on their own, but it makes me uneasy to think people are getting prescriptions because of the ads rather than because they were seeking it out on their own.
I get your point, I don't like advertising medications either, but there are some specific cases (like testosterone deficiency!) where someone might be tired all the time, irritable, gaining weight, etc and not realize that these symptoms have a common cause. I agree that these cases are few, though.
A few years ago now, but with Hims, that was absolutely not the case for me.
It was about a dozen yes/no questions, and then a <5 min text chat conversation with a doctor who told me that 2 of my answers didn't fit for prescription. "If you were to tell me you also had X symptom, then that would be applicable', and effectively allowed me to "change my answer" in the text chat.
The skeptic in me says that companies like this who employ physicians in this manner (there's no insurance/office visit fee, etc.) don't make money by telling people they "don't need" this drug.
Legally wsj nyt twitter vogue and instagram are completely different despite clearly being the same product.
It’s insane these platforms aren’t the same.
If you don’t believe this compatible free speech on the internet, post content you don’t think belongs on the internet here and see how quickly the community gets rid of you.
No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider.
Those words make sense and indeed worked well when "information content providers" remained more or less neutral with regards to what content they provided beyond some common-sense rules.
The problems really started when algorithmic feeds appeared, where the provider now assumes an editorial role and is able to tailor the content to each user individually, with no oversight nor accountability.
A news outlet understands that there’s tons of stories daily they could report on, and they have to selectively choose those based on their target markets. I don’t see how social media sites are any different other than being able to be _more_ specific.
People like to disparage social media platforms they don’t use, but forget that the sites they do use are playing under the same laws.
> If you don’t believe this compatible free speech on the internet, post content you don’t think belongs on the internet here and see how quickly the community gets rid of you.
You’re missing the point. The moderators and/or community getting rid of someone after they posted the content is too late. It would have been up and available for a while. The content would have already been “published” and the liability already triggered in a world where no Section 230 like protections existed.
If you like being able to post things online on websites you don’t own, you need protections like this to exist.
The people who rail against Section 230 and "censorship" have it exactly backwards, if they got their way and 230 went away, instead of having specific content removed they wouldn't be able to post anything at all.
Maybe federated social media? You’d only want to host people you actually trust, but maybe that isn’t so bad.
Edit: I think it is not that surprising that people misunderstand 230, specifically 230c2. We have:
* A constitution that prohibits restrictions by the government on free speech
* Provides “decency” restrictions on speech in some cases
* An exception for sites that act more like communication service providers, as long as they don’t editorialize, which considers the content they host not their speech
* A Good Samaritan exception for sites to do moderation, so their edits and redactions are not interpreted as editorializing
An exception to an exception to an exception is easy to misunderstand.
https://cc.bingj.com/cache.aspx?d=915334415082&w=wpBU6M1nmBA...
Its very easy for these companies to identify and remove such content but for obivious reasons they dont do sadly
At least in the USA, as long as they take down content as soon as it is identified, safe harbor should have them covered. Or maybe AI will make it super easy to tell teasing from an explicit offer to exchange sex for money.
Prostitution is legal in parts of the United States, too (Nevada), omg, what's happening. A complete shattering of the worldview.
There needs to be an understanding that having millions of customers doesn't mean you're immune to the law and can just happily ignore all the obvious scams and crimes being committed on your platforms.