In my mind having an in-house bot network and being totally ignorant that you're charging for bot traffic via ads amount to the same thing.
This is very, very bad.
This is very, very bad.
Yes, we dont need a conspiracy to explain stupidity. The stupidity is the conspiracy.
People arent ignorant, because they are handcapped or something. They are ignorant, because thats the behaviour and excuse we reward. Just be an idiot, dont put in the intellectual effort, and you will be allowed to speak lies and screw every one and every thing.
From a corporate point of view, its the golden ticket. Plausible deniability. We didnt know that our insurance helped finance weapon exports to dictators. We didnt know. We didnt know. Sorry this, sorry that. We're keeping the money though.
I dont think that provable intent should have legal meaning. Because all neglect is intentional, as is ignorance in a world, where every one has the choice to be well informed.
If I am writing a mechanism to charge for ads based on traffic, one of the first things to QA/write test cases for is fraudulent traffic.
The leap here is from facebook being remotely competent (which is likely), and willfully ignoring checks on certain types of traffic because it benefits them financially.
My assertion is that this is the same class of bad behavior as running your own bots. Note the distinction in 'willful' ignorance.