Meta has run hundreds of ads for cocaine, opioids and other drugs
wsj.com
wsj.com
Guess we didn't learn anything from Cambridge Analytica.
It's a slow push but it's gonna happen. Microtransactions are stuck in deployment hell, advertisements are a deal with the devil, and this is the only third option I know of
It's a pure Rust server so it's extremely lightweight to self-host compared to things like Mastodon, plus it supports events (with iCal/Google Calendar export). I'm also happy to host an instance on my DigitalOcean Kubernetes cluster for anyone interested and integrate it into my CI/CD pipeline, which is an option on my GitHub sponsors page (and I'm working on a load balancer which should eventually bring the cost of this down as well).
apt-get install yourpackage
In the meantime, it is available pre-packaged as a Docker image for both x86-64 and ARM64: https://hub.docker.com/r/jonlatane/jonline
I reckon NYT might be a little more tuned into this due to still being a news org with print still going and likely having more restrictions on their web ads due to this, but other platforms you could get away with that no problem as noted from various sources like https://www.vice.com/en/article/g5p38b/ketamine-therapy-inst... and https://www.nytimes.com/2023/03/01/opinion/ketamine-ads-depr...
And don't get me started on all the "mushroom alternative", "caffeine alternative", drugs. And it's like everyone and their grandmother has their own Viagra or Hair Loss drug company now
Infomercials for millennials, I suppose.
Stuff like "a 19 year old invented this that saves you a hundred bucks on your power bill but Big electricity is suppressing it"
Just the most bullshit claims over stock footage, things I saw debunked on Snopes 20 years ago as a literal child.
It's disappointing
I had some of the booklets on that theme when I was a kid: https://archive.org/details/george-trinkaus-tesla-the-lost-i...
Given how cheap PV is these days, I'm surprised that particular scam is still a thing.
Google got hit for internet pharmacies and forfeited all the revenue they got.
I’m sure Google had no problem paying the same number of dollars in 2011 but really liked that money in their earlier days when there wasn’t as much big $ legit ad demand.
https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/google-forfeits-500-million-g...
Can someone share these ads with me so I could check them out? Just purely out of my own concern?
Thanks
When I moved countries it took 6 months for Facebook to stop showing me ads for the old country which were very clearly only supposed to be shown to people in that country. Again, people are paying money to run these ads and Facebook are clearly showing them to the wrong people.
Recently I also got an "ad" for what was almost certainly Sovereign Citizen propaganda, which … wow, I didn't even know they ran YT ads?²
Today's ads (since I checked just to see for this comment) is all normal stuff.
¹they allege to have written an "arbitrage" trading bot with ChatGPT, usually, claiming it earns them passive income of varying amounts, but often on the order of $1M USD/y. As the saying goes, if it sounds too good to be true, it probably is. The code actually just steals your money.
²(not that I really think SCs are a formal collective of sorts, I just … don't really think that would be a thing I'd see.)
Some stuff can always slip through but to have a result like this, there's a systemic lack of checks at Google.
What competition is there in the Ad space for internet advertising?
I was more referring to consumer products like email and office suites.
Regulation is very expensive because you have to enforce it. You can tax anything, though. Maybe that is a better route to promoting good behavior "voluntarily."
At some point Google must have some responsibility regarding this mess, they can't reasonably say that they do not know anymore.
Sure, why not?
I literally don't care if this causes them to go bankrupt. If your business doesn't work without breaking the law, your business doesn't work, and we're not obligated as a society to form our laws to make your business work.
I mean seriously, if your local convenience store was letting people sling cocaine out the back because they couldn't make a profit selling candy and sandwiches, would you be like "Oh that's okay."? Obviously not. I'm not even for drug prohibition, but applying the laws we have fairly seems even more fundamental.
That said, fears that this would cause them to go bankrupt are likely overblown.
> Even if YT/Google/Meta could do this at scale, do you want them to have that power?
They already have that power. They can put whatever conditions they want on doing business with advertisers.
Also, as an aside, all of these things are sort of scams even when they're not taking a weird conspiracy theory route. While it is true that they can get decent velocity through the nozzle, it's nowhere near what a real pressure washer does because fundamentally it's not adding any energy to the fluid.
That's just what the big corporations and congress want you to believe.
/s
> This item cannot be shipped to your selected delivery location. Please choose a different delivery location.
so there is an angle there – ship interstate and ignore California laws.
You see it and think it's ridiculous. Then you smoke enough crack and meth to develop scitzophrenia and you find yourself buying this shit every day from weird YouTube ads.
I get them, but only very rarely. What I'm getting recently are mainly ads for Old Spice, Walmart, Consumer Cellular, Verizon Visible, Exxon, a couple upcoming movies, Target, automobile insurance, and fundraising for the Harris campaign.
The one thing almost all the ads I have gotten on YT have in common is that they are useless. Some are useless because they are advertising something that I have no interest in. The ones that are advertising something that I am interested in are either for something I've already bought or for something that I've already evaluated and bought a competitor.
I did recently switch from T-Mobile Connect to Verizon Visible, and I learned about Visible from a YT ad, but I don't think the ad influenced my decision to switch.
The reason I left T-Mobile Connect is that I'm planning on replacing my replacing my Series 4 Apple Watch soon. I'm going to get a model with cellular this time and T-Mobile Connect does not support Apple Watch cellular so I had to look for a new carrier. That led me to a page at Apple that lists all US carriers that have watch plans [1]. Visible is on that list so I would have ended up looking at them even if I hadn't heard about them earlier from that YT ad.
[1] Appalachian Wireless, AT&T, C Spire, Cellcom Wisconsin, Consumer Cellular, Cricket Wireless, GCI, Nex-Tech Wireless, Spectrum Mobile, T-Mobile USA, UScellular, Verizon Wireless, Visible, and Xfinity Mobile.
I bet Andreessen Horowitz have funded this company. After all it’s web3 and has both user growth and revenue.
Just mobile signed into your primary gmail account you’ll see they’re night and day different from desktop/tv.
The old android device I use for streaming in the kitchen with an alternate gmail account? That’s where they really get good.
I mean, I could, but there's nothing in that for me except the work of doing it.
Even reporting them to YT is a charity I perform mostly on the off hope that they'll get taken down so that some other person isn't scammed, but as you can see, that is met with limited success.
Any favorites?
I reported it and YT said the ad wasn’t violating any TOS. Meanwhile I was getting this exact ad like 20% of the time.
When corporations are complicit with the spread of conspiracy theories, we’re headed for a dystopian and fascist future.
This is, I think, the real moral hazard you saw back in the 2007 financial crisis: companies can reach a scale where it's very costly to definitively assess who is to blame for crimes and can therefor commit any profitable crime up to a certain threshold. It both makes a mockery of the rule of law as a concept (along with many other things in the US legal system) and is an enormous competitive advantage for large companies. I'd include Uber's grey area stalking[2] and the eBay stalking campaign[3] in this category.
[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2022/06/21/doj-settles-with-facebook-ov...
[2] https://www.theverge.com/2016/7/10/12127638/uber-ergo-invest...
[3] https://www.cbsnews.com/news/feds-charge-ebay-stalking-scand...
e.g. YouTube, how much copyrighted content does G profit off from. And then the 100 variations that slip the 'copyright algo.'
I see stuff on there that as a UK TV license payer I've already paid for, and then have to suffer ads. They could not give a hoot.
So they're actually incentivized to have many creators struck, because struck media means ad impressions whose revenue they need not share.
Am I misunderstanding the landscape?
This revenue would go to the copyright claimer. EG if Warner bros struck you for showing their movie, the ad revenue from the video would go to Warner, not simply YouTube
1. Automatically, based almost entirely on sound, using ContentID - this is heavily weaponized, gamed, and generally over the top.
2. "Manually" (but really automatically) in response to requests from "verified" (sure) rights owners - this one is also heavily gamed, but seems to make up a much smaller fraction of takedowns.
Also Amazon just completely gives up on quality assurance and let people ship whatever.
Here's what happens if you make Facebook do it. They become aware of someone running an illegal ad and ban them. But the advertiser is a criminal and still wants to make money, so they make a new account or find some way to avoid detection, and the ad ends up back in the system, and the advertiser can do this forever because they're making a net profit by continuing to play the cat and mouse game.
Here's what happens if you have law enforcement responsible for enforcing the law. Someone runs an illegal ad on Facebook, law enforcement subpoenas Facebook to find out who it was, and the advertiser gets arrested. This provides an actual deterrent because there is a penalty in excess of a ban, so it exceeds the profits from the criminal activity, and criminals dumb enough to not be deterred go to jail where they can't run any more ads.
Why are we trying to do it the stupid way and expect a non-stupid result? Corporations are not law enforcement. Stop trying to make it otherwise.
Is it? Suppose that instead of Facebook we had a federated social media with ten thousand independent operators and ten thousand ad networks. Then there would be ten thousand ad agents (really automated websites) who compete on price and whose job it is to place your ad in the ten thousand ad networks.
Drug dealers would still try to run drug ads, wouldn't they? What would be any different? The internet has the scale that it does whether the service is centralized or not. Centralization/monopolies are the cause of many problems but not every problem.
In general, they should not impede investigations, and not intently help criminals.
• Both dick pills and boob surgery
• A lawyer specialising in renouncing a citizenship I don't have for people who have moved to a country I don't live in
• Local news for a city in Florida that I didn't know existed (and I'm not an American resident or citizen)
• A library fun run in a city 903 km away with an entire extra country between me and it
• An announcement, from a government of a country I don't live in, that a breed of dog I've never heard of, is to be banned (and I'm not a dog owner)
I think that the claim "Meta knows how to target ads" is itself in the set of scams. The contents of my email's junk folder is significantly less wrong than this.
If some users don't use an ad blocker then there is obviously someone other than Facebook who knows when an illegal ad is run and can report it to law enforcement.
Any decent journalism on this subject? NPR takes too much money from Facebook to preclude them from rooting around in their business, and they pretty much stopped covering Facebook, other than mentions and basic AP press releases. The same is probably true with other media interests as well.
Nonetheless, I doubt Facebook wants these people and it certainly threatens their business by overrunning it with creepy drug ads, so what we see is the tiny bit that manages to bubble up through the cracks. Everyone wants Facebook to magically seal all the cracks.
The miss is assuming any company would do something out of genuine concern for the law. Their shareholders don't reward them for morally upstanding behavior. They are concerned about money, and the law is only a concern insofar as it impacts their real concern. We've seen this story a million times people! It us what for-profit companies are. It is how they operate and that will never change.
What can change is government regulation and enforcement. That is the one and only answer to this problem.
> Someone runs an illegal ad on Facebook
The problem, to me, is that everything you said applies down stream too. You can't be sure the person purchasing the ad is trying to commit a crime either (perhaps they were hacked, perhaps they were dumb, etc). If you are promoting the "this is complex, actually" view - it's complex at every level.
The problem for society is that Facebook, as the company offering the service that occasionally breaks the law, is in a nice position. They get to profit off law breaking every once in a while and, as you say, it's hard to feel like it is possible to offer this service in such a way to perfectly avoid doing all crimes. So you get into this situation where Facebook (and everyone else at that scale) can do some crimes, but not so many that it's a big part of their business. It seems bad.
Simple solution: Upon their inability to abide by the law, downright outlaw them and shut them down at the second, known, provable count.-
Zuckbook is a known evil, making billions off of depressed vulnerable population's attention, and causing untold amounts of psychological damage.-
The least they could positively do is police their system, to the ninth percentile or better.-
Or be shut down.-
The next incumbent will figure it out, rather fast.-
Make Facebook liable and required to forfeit money earned from the criminal activity.
It isn't Facebook doing crimes, they're a company whose customers are doing crimes.
> The problem, to me, is that everything you said applies down stream too. You can't be sure the person purchasing the ad is trying to commit a crime either (perhaps they were hacked, perhaps they were dumb, etc).
Which is why we have investigators and courts, to sort this out. When the police execute the warrant and find the drugs, the person's claim that they were hacked is not going to hold a lot of water. Whereas if they find no drugs but seize the computer and find malware on it, then they can investigate the malware network and find the actual perpetrators.
This is law enforcement's job. To figure out who actually did the crime and charge them with it. Facebook can't do that and shouldn't be expected to.
> So you get into this situation where Facebook (and everyone else at that scale) can do some crimes, but not so many that it's a big part of their business. It seems bad.
Why is it bad? Why is it even expected to be bad? It's true of every business whatsoever. A major hardware store that sells duct tape will have as customers some number of kidnappers who use it to tape the mouths of their victims. The kidnappers will go to a gas station and buy gas. These companies are thereby profiting in some small way from crime. But so what? Go arrest the kidnappers, the hardware store is irrelevant.
Aiding and abetting is a thing.
> To convict as a principal of aiding and abetting the commission of a crime, a jury must find beyond a reasonable doubt that the defendant knowingly and intentionally aided and abetted the principal(s) in each essential element of the crime
https://www.justice.gov/archives/jm/criminal-resource-manual...
Okay, let's proceed with your cartoon example.
The bank robber goes to the ticket machine, puts in money, gets a subway ticket, swipes the ticket through the turnstile and rides the subway. If the subway operator posted guards at all the entrances to the subway they could see the guy, but they don't, because that would be crazy expensive when they're not the police and their concern is just to make sure people pay the fare, and they can do that by installing automated floor-to-ceiling turnstiles that block entry to the subway unless you pay the fare.
Why is it the subway operator's obligation to investigate this crime, instead of the police? The subway operator could investigate it, the crime is happening in public view, but so could anyone else. Moreover, we don't want random common carriers to be denying service to innocent people based on scant evidence just for CYA purposes. We want penalties to be handed out in court once the prosecution has met their burden of proving the crime beyond a reasonable doubt.
If someone is running an ad to sell drugs or violate some other law, the users will see the ad and can report it to law enforcement. Law enforcement then investigates to find out who placed the ad and goes to arrest them.
See, here’s the catch - this requires law enforcement to be a functional organization. Judging on how widespread drug abuse and drug dealers are, I don’t think this would be a winning approach.
Also, I wonder how newspapers dealt with this approach? Human vet everything?
Succinctly put. Just as LLCs function as a legal device to distributing and limiting financial risk (but strangely, not profits), they increasingly perform the same function for other kinds of legal liability. It's the worst of both worlds.
If a company is too big to be managed properly it shouldn't exist. We saw that in 2008 with "Too big to fail" banks. I also remember the AG back then stating that some companies are too big to prosecute which is also big problem. Seems health insurances also have reached that scale where they can screw with people without consequences.
Facebook has about 3 billion daily users. I expect each will see many ads - probably 10 or more. But if we assume it's just one, 100 displayed in a single day would give you 0.0000001%. The study didn't look at one day of course - the observation period was over 100 days.
It can be, and it can also be quite objective.
There are ads on there for ecommerce shops which clone the websites of known brands, with the exact logos and colours and names of those brands but which don't actually have anything to do with those brands.
These websites ask for your credit card number to purchase items which are advertised significantly below the retail price. I don't know what they do with the credit card number once they have it, but I can guess.
I would argue that. It's probably the least offensive thing, compared to alcohol you can buy everywhere. DMT and other entheogens are far less harmful than alcoholic drinks available. It's confirmed by many academic papers, and DMT is not something people use for recreational purposes.
Moreover, some of these "psychedelic drugs" are used by people who have serious illness, wether it is life-threatening like cancer, or all kinds of PTSDs. It is very well known that these "drugs" help to prevent suicides, and very often it makes people's lives less miserable.
While I agree with the narrative, and totally against unregulated drug sale, I can't say WSJ put a lot of thought into the article posting a picture of DMT powder as the main evidence to make entire article look more scary. Average Trader Joe's with vodka looks many times scarier to me.
That can fall under 'recreational'.
that's a legal and unscheduled substance.
> it would be considered akin to a Schedule I Controlled Substance under the Federal Analogue Act if sold for human consumption.
https://arstechnica.com/science/2024/07/diamond-shruumz-cand...
The brand’s website has dosing suggestions as well https://diamondshruumz.com/
That's not the get out jail free defense that idiots think that it is. Gummies aren't made and packaged and distributed for any other purpose than human consumption, judges aren't stupid.
> In its recall notice, the company reported that third-party lab testing of some of its candies identified higher than normal amounts of muscimol, a psychoactive compound found in hallucinogenic Amanita mushrooms, including the iconic toadstool A. muscaria.
> These mushrooms contain a combination of muscimol and the related ibotenic acid, both of which resemble neurotransmitters.
> Together, they could cause the symptoms seen in the cases so far, including seizures, central nervous system depression (loss of consciousness, confusion, sleepiness), agitation, abnormal heart rates, hyper/hypotension, nausea, and vomiting.
And in pharmaceutical manufacturing, diluting things is definitely a science. Gotta worry about demixing, adsorption, absorption, granulations, cracking or creaming of emulsions (if present), caking... lots of fun when you need to make something consistent at low concentrations.
Also Facebook Ads are absolutely predatory.
Well, what about cops+feds civil asset forfeiture-ing their servers and offices?
Meta's lawyers would have the forfeiture overturned by a judge before the cops have even finished their paperwork for the seizure.
Civil asset forfeiture is only really a weapon against convicted criminals and people who can't afford to defend themselves.
I know someone who has had actual drug money seized in California and it took them less than a month to get it back by court order because they knew a lawyer specializing in those cases. There are a lot of judges that don’t take kindly to asset forfeiture without a conviction and a legit corporation like Meta with a big legal team would have their stuff back by the weekend.
I'm actually really glad that some companies like this are not really beholden to advertisers anymore. I don't like how that influences social norms per country outside of the legal system, based on what advertisers believe. I like that there is no collective voice possible that could get enough advertisers to leave Meta over disagreeing with a Meta practice.
I'm into lawsuits from private persons and the government. Just not social mobs.
edit: hm, maybe this isn't working for the full articles on WSJ anymore...
I demonstrated the apparent untruthfulness in their claims about fraud here and then interviewed LLaMa about it :-)
https://blog.aviel.tech/Meta-s-LLaMa-AI-LLaMbasts-Meta-for-f...
And I just got the same exact scam on FB, but this time they used a deepfake video of my country’s president, saying they’re working with Elon Musk to give money to all citizens. Yay!
Its verboten in the EU https://commission.europa.eu/strategy-and-policy/priorities-...
You are welcome.
Because as it's painfully obvious now, Meta doesn't care, they're happy to take the money.
LLMs are backwards. Much like how Stable Diffusion is text-to-image, not image-to-text. You need to rework the neural network entirely to do what you're asking.
-------
Its a neat trick that you can train LLMs to perhaps, ingest "text" followed by a question (ex: "Is the previous paragraph spam?"), and then the text-generator generates a yes-or-no response that is somewhat pleasing.
But its not quite the same as what you're asking for.
But given that the problem seems to be in the "manual review" because users constantly report these and get brushed off, that "neat trick" you wrote about seems like it could really help explain to manual reviewers exactly why a particular ad violate's Meta's content guidelines.
Sounds like Word2Vec, which isn't necessarily an incompatible technique. I'm not exactly on the cutting edge of Language Models here.
I'm sure the information is sitting in the "hidden layer" somewhere. But LLMs have very many hidden layers. Its not something that a programmer can just "pluck" out of the network.
https://platform.openai.com/docs/guides/embeddings
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vVGTegRvXg8
I think you may be commenting "confidently" on technologies that you're not very familiar with. It is something that we all struggle with sometimes.
Your snarkiness aside, what I've said earlier I stand by.
LLMs are a network of neurons / self-learning units that point towards the "next" word to be predicted". This is fundamental to the architecture of this entire system.
I recognize that there's some kind of parsing and understanding from tokens -> hidden layers of the network. That's just how the math works.
Perhaps you should educate yourself upon neural networks and the fundamental math at play here before caustically criticizing everyone who contributes to a discussion.
I admit that I don't know what an embedding is but I know it's something that is created by a neural network's output layer (or the post-processing of the output layer). This is once again, fundamental to the math of the neural nets at play here. So anything I know about output layers applies to whatever an embedding is.
---------
Not everyone in this field is working off of just using the damn thing. Some of us have experience in the layout and underlying theory of neural nets. And I'm confident in what I've said.
> I admit that I don't know what an embedding is but I know it's something that is created by a neural network's output layer (or the post-processing of the output layer).
The embedding layer comprises the first layers of a transformer model, definitely not the “output layer”. It is typically trivially easy to isolate the output of the embedding layer because it generates the “actual” input to the LLM. The LLM has a certain number of input parameters (typically 784) and some length of text usually won’t fit precisely into 784 parameters (it will be longer or shorter than that). All the embedding layer does is map arbitrary length text to a single 784-dimension vector, which actually can be passed to the input of the transformer.
Ever since the paper “Attention is all you need”, the embedding layers have always been the first layers of a transformer to act on the text input. Most of the output is also sent back to the embedder, but this is only so that it can be used as input again to the “attention” layers.
But I assume this was before the release of that some time, but I don't have access to the article.
I feed it unstructured images of all kinds of things and it generally does a rather good job of describing them.
Just now, I found (what is allegedly) a screenshot of a Facebook ad about microdosing mushrooms. I fed the image to the bot and asked it to identify whether or not it was an ad, and the content of it, and to rate the legality of it on a scale of 1 to 50, with 1 being perfectly legal and 50 being criminally punishable.
It nailed all three questions and gave it a score of 45.
I then did the same thing with a screenshot of a Facebook ad for an Audi Q5, and it nailed all three questions and gave it a score of 1.
I followed this up with some human-made drawing of 4 horses that I found fairly randomly. It also nailed all three questions and gave it a score of 1.
Satisfied with the result, I then stopped. I don't get paid enough to make a study of this. I have little doubt that these results are reproducible.
(And is this an LLM trick or something else? Perhaps a combination of things? Is it AI, LLM, LMNOP, or some kid in a sweatshop overseas? I don't really know -- that distinction is also beyond my pay grade.)
That's the thing: The hidden layers that process the text _MUST_ have some kind of language structure getting figured out. Otherwise none of the behaviors of ChatGPT make sense.
Interpreting those layers and passing them to the user in some way should be the core focus IMO anyway.
On the other hand: there's also the problem of brute force. If they paid 50,000 cheap "Mechanical Turks" to manually teach an AI that the "top left" of an image is pixel coordinates (0,0), that's... trickery. Its no longer intelligence. Its disconnected and not innate to the model anymore.
The nature of the training set is what would determine how useful any of this actually is, and how well it generalizes to new tasks.
ChatGPT does better than this.
Image recognition too, of course (using Machine Learning). My point is that, all the stuff FB has spent billions on in the last few years, they have the ability to fix these issues in their sleep.
As others have said, the key is that regulators are absent.
The moment the regulator asks them to do something, the cost of running the classifier will instead be compared to legal expense and lobbying attempts.
-MLMs
-"faceless marketing"
-"digital marketing" courses
-business loan scams
-counterfeit luxury goods
-extortion
In the puritanical West, selling your private data to the government is good, buying drugs from a rando on Instagram is bad. Stifling.
no, selling drugs is illegal
The only way this seems shockingly bad is that you can’t actually control what you see as a user of these ad-supported services or if you support the war on drugs.
https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2022/09/myanmar-faceb...
I used to run a business in Canada that sold grow equipment and our primary customer base was marijuana growers. When legalization came we started running advertisements for our shop on facebook. Got our hand slapped really hard, really fast and our advertising account banned.
A few months later I see advertisements for chocolates with psilocybin mushrooms in them. Mushrooms remain illegal in Canada. The ads continued for several months.
Even those who don't care about justice or rationality must care that, in exchange for the billions of dollars spent and the extreme loss to personal liberty, drugs have only become more potent, more readily available and much cheaper.
I find myself developing an inability to respect people who believe we should stay the course despite the overwhelming evidence that the drug war is beyond lost, and always has been.
I badly want to support a friend's social media marketing efforts and it's just ridiculous that I'll probably have to create an account with false information despite me sending multiple emails to Facebook asking if they can clear whatever flag is on my account and/or IP addresses.
Pass a law requiring a human being to sign off in "writing" (can be eSigned through an internal moderation platform) on any ad that will be run that the platform will profit from and that will be pushed to users by choice of the platform as opposed to request by the user. This human serves as an agent who will be liable along with their firm if there are any illegal issues that should have been obvious to a "reasonable person" reviewing the ad. Require anyone doing this job to be supervised by a licensed attorney, who must document their hiring and supervision practices and can be disbarred for failing to run a reasonably tight ship.
Problem solved. Bam. So easy.
It is not fair that platforms get to pretend that being able to automate running ads means they have no responsibility for their choices. It's like saying you can't murder with a handgun, but if you set up an automated machine gun turret, now it's OK.
This is a great analogy. You can't actually afford to run this at scale legally? Too bad.
> 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.
Seems to me, that says if you have a problem with the advertisement, you need to go to the source, not the ad network. You're proposing an exception for advertisement, which is reasonable, but you've got to define advertisement. It's not just money for distribution; I'm not an advertiser just because I pay to use a forum, which is money for distribution.
Section 230 isn't some immutable force, so yes, political force is all that's needed, but it's been the norm since 1996, and has been enabling ad networks to show ads without regard to their content since 1997 [2].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Section_230 [2] https://www.eff.org/files/zeran-v-aol.pdf
If you use algorithms to selectively choose which content the user gets exposed to (in an objective to increase your profits obviously), this is literally the definition of a publisher.
We are way past the "we just provide a dumb pipe for content between publishers and users". The pipe is no longer dumb and hasn't been for over a decade.
This has a good chance of being the additional cracks in 203 that bring the whole thing down imho.
The cracks were created years ago when fb and ggle did a 180 on the sopa / pipa censorship.. I knew then that the cracks would only get bigger..
A fediverse will be more and more used in the future I feel, maybe not by the masses of grandmas but certainly as more is censored in main portals people will nose around elsewhere.
Exactly. Glad you agree. It's just an act of congress. We pass many every year, including far bigger ones.
> you've got to define advertisement.
I did in my post. I'll repeat myself for you:
(1) the platform is profiting from it
(2) the platform is pushing and selecting the content to the user at the platform's whim, not the user's request.
Seems reasonable to me but these details can be worked out if the political will for the big picture change ever actually appears.
My definition would allow the main thrust of Section 230 to remain intact. Section 230 was, in my view, most nobly intended for cases like ISPs hosting content, such as GeoCities or Cloudflare or Google Sites. This is content that the end user specifically seeks and requests. Ads as well as algorithmically recommended content don't meet this test. If I go to criminalhatespeech.com on purpose, that's on me. If TikTok advertises criminalhatespeech.com to me or puts it in my For You for whatever reason they think it'll engage me, that's on them. Simple, isn't it?
All we're doing is putting humans and robots on an even footing instead of priviliging robots over humans as the current law does (never thought I'd type that sentence someday, but it's basically true-- the platforms are getting away with doing things they could not get away with if the code was being "executed" by "hand" by humans with flow charts instead of automated with CPUs and network cards.)
The only algorithmic content that would be eliminated is that which is already illegal speech and/or that which is too valueless to be worth spending the approximately $2 of time it costs for someone to look over a 10 second video and sign off that it's OK.
Who pays that can be decided by the market, but probably the poster could pay it and if they choose not to, the platform will algorithmically decide which "free" content seems worth moderating at the platform's expense.
I'm literally just actually requiring a modicum of moderation, not banning anything.
Or is it that you believe that the vast majority of the content on the platforms today is ultra low value and/or illegal content? Frankly, if you do believe that, that's even more damning for the platforms, isn't it?
However, I don't actually believe that. Most content I see appears to be legal and appears to already have thousands of views before I see it. Algorithmic content is already mostly stuff that is popular enough that the tiny expense of vetting it wouldn't quash it.
As for how a newbie gets their foot in the door, this actually makes it easier for them. Yes, now you might have to pay $2 to post your first video if you want any shot of anyone besides your friends seeing it -- but now you're only competing with others who were willing to do the same. All the ultra low effort AI generated videos suddenly become totally unviable. In fact, this generally biases a platform towards higher production effort content. If I spent 2 minutes concieving of and making a low effort video, posting it 4 minutes after having thought of the idea, shot it in one take and immediately publish it -- then $2 seems like a lot. But if I spent two days planning, shooting, editing, then suddenly $2 is nothing.
This will make everything better and nothing worse except for bad actors who are parasites one our once wonderful internet ecosystem.
The problem is that's basically all user generated content. Who's going to spend $2 vetting this comment that I'm writing right now before approving it to be shown to users by the algorithm that ranks it based on upvotes?
Sure, there will still be some high-value content out that earns enough revenue to be worth the effort. But the vast, vast majority of user generated content doesn't fall under that category.
For example, I think I'd be OK with some sort of exemption for pure-text content. Most of the problematic content out there isn't pure text.
And/or maybe trivial to describe rules like upvotes, linear historical feeds, etc need to count as an algorithm-- If it's obvious to a "reasonable person" with a high school education exactly how the content is being selected, it does not need to count as the platform making publication choices.
Focus on the big picture and the details will follow. It in no way is a takedown of a big idea to point out that implementation will require some attention to detail. The big picture of social security is "If you're too sick or old to work, we should pay you" but the details fill volumes and volumes. This is nothing new; it's how laws work.
If a court is willing to call the moderation google and facebook do currently in advertising "good faith", that court is flat out wrong.
> (2) Civil liability > No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be held liable on account of— > (A) any action voluntarily taken in good faith to restrict access to or availability of material that the provider or user considers to be obscene, lewd, lascivious, filthy, excessively violent, harassing, or otherwise objectionable, whether or not such material is constitutionally protected; or > (B) any action taken to enable or make available to information content providers or others the technical means to restrict access to material described in paragraph (1).
Good faith is only required to limit civil liability in case of taking actions to restrict access.
There's no good faith requirement for 230 (c) (1) which is where platforms get immunity for content from users. I don't believe the platforms are being accused of advertising their own drugs for sale; they're passing through drug advertisements from users (advertisers).
Is it as important now? I'm not sure, but I wonder how essential it is for big companies like Google or Meta to have this sort of protection when they don't have as much competition to incentivize moderation and may have enough money to do better research on what content they're hosting.
What should happen is that a court should be able to drag responsible executives in front of a judge, issue massive fines for what has already happened, and order that Meta stop running ads until they can present an agreeable plan to prevent these kinds of ads from running.
Then they should be under a consent degree, and subject to regular government inspection, and if the agreed upon mitigation plan isn't being followed and these kinds of ads are running again, the same executives should be dragged back in front of court, Meta should be prohibited from running ads for months as a punishment, and to force them back to the drawing board to fix the issue permanently, and the responsible executives should be given significant personal fines, and a short jail sentence for violating court orders.
Rinse and repeat until either Meta is permanently barred from running ads, putting them out of business, and/or the responsible executives (including the CEO if applicable) have enough strikes that they get a decade or so in prison to make an example of what happens when you refuse to operate a business within the law and kill people with black market drugs.
Well that's not why they would raid Meta. They would raid them to preserve evidence and documents of Meta's complicity with the drug trafficking that does occur on their platforms.
When you're Mark Zuckerberg ($166B) "there isn't a substantial likelihood of conviction".
You're not wrong, but I wouldn't call maintaining a two-tier justice system a prosecutor's "professional responsibility".