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Comment by dylan604 | Hacker News Reader

The articles that 404Media did on the extremely obvious ads on Meta's platforms were pretty telling on Meta's lack of giving a shit. I'm one of those rare people that don't use any of Meta's products, so I was actually surprised at just how blatant the ads were. I'm actually shocked that someone is doing anything that remotely leans towards giving a shit.

https://www.404media.co/lets-see-what-drugs-instagram-is-adv...

https://www.404media.co/instagram-throttles-404-media-invest...

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This is crazy because I kept getting ads like this for MDMA (after checking the next IG story), I finally got tired of it and reported one, they actually manually reviewed it and DENIED the report, so I re-reported and they denied it again. Definitely enabling sales.

Similar story here. There was a crypto scam ad including "Libra" and AI produced Mark Zuckerberg video where he was pitching how he would distribute some of his wealth etc. Reported it, it got reviewed and it got denied. They kept the ad.

Money is hell of a drug, too.

It’s remarkable what can be done with interpreting and generating content, but things like advertising quality, Twitter bots and obvious scams are basically CAPTCHAs to their systems.

This is a common scenario with them if you report anything. This shows how taking care of the legality of the content is an expense they just save on as much as they can. It’s ironic that they actually give you an explanation that they didn’t check the content because they don’t have enough capacity to review every report. And then they report the earnings they do.

This is interesting because I have experienced something similar on Twitter. If you mention anything about drugs or psychedelics you quickly get bots replying telling you to message them or some other user to get drugs. I get annoyed at all auto-reply keyword bots but one might think that ones advertising illegal services might be stopped, and yet they persist.

Twitter was way worse with bots before Elon's takeover, but it's still terrible.

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.

It’s interesting to see them as a form of DDoS, like a distributed denial of engagement.

That's been done WAYYYY back https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pe%C3%B1abot

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.

> Twitter was way worse with bots before Elon's takeover,

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).

I still have to check twitter occasionally, and I noticed that I get followed by a new bot at least once a day.

> Twitter was way worse with bots before Elon's takeover

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.

You may want to look into Peñabots.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pe%C3%B1abot

I like how the "cloned cards" are categorised as "Business","Financial Service" while the drugs seem to show up under "Health/beauty", "Medical Service", and even "Musician"(?)

I also wonder if they are actually honeypots --- that could explain why they stay up.

My money is them being 99% scammers who don't have whatever they claim to sell and are just looking for idiots to send some money - and as with intentionally using spelling mistakes in scam mass-sent emails are intentionally used to help filter out people who might realise the Nigerian prince isn't real, it makes sense to look incompetent at doing the listings.

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.

meta is constipated

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