Meta's ads tools started switching out top-performing ads with AI-generated ones
businessinsider.com
businessinsider.com
I think the current UX of the ad manager will make Meta the target of a class action lawsuit, and there is nothing they can do to avoid that now.
Why: many aspects of the ad manager UI will activate settings that had previously been disabled. The details vary over time, but right now three specific examples come to mind:
1. Promo codes 2. Site links 3. Related media
I won't explain these here (you can ask a media buyer and/or an llm). But these are features of Meta's ad system that are useful in certain situations, but for many types of ads, it is better to disable them.
The problem: If you disable them, and then edit the ad creative (i.e. change the image or video), in many contexts they are silently re-enabled.
This is not noticeable unless you navigate through the complex web interface to check, and disable them again. I now have a detailed checklist, but before that, I would often find I had activated ads with these accidentally active.
The outcome is to increase the cost of the intended result of the ad campaign. In other words, it makes the ads more expensive.
It has certainly caused many media buyers to spend significantly more than they otherwise would to get the same results from their ad campaigns.
These three specific examples have been happening for many months, maybe all of 2025. If they disabled the auto-enable right now, that is still a potentially massive amount of ad spend which has been wasted by many companies around the world.
That is why I say a class action lawsuit is inevitable at this point. There is simply too much money on the table for that not to happen.
Why did this happen? My best guess is poorly thought out internal incentives. I.e., someone in some layer of management has their compensation tied to the percentage of running ads with site links activated, for example. So that person(s) is forcing the design/engineering teams to implement a UX that inflates those metrics. That is the best explanation I can imagine for what I am seeing.
its rare to find a technically proficient media buyer ;/
(I am not a FB employee or a lawyer.. ) I will send you a DM on twitter
All in all, these ad platforms are tremendously complex software systems, and as someone who has been a fulltime software engineer I have a lot of sympathy. But with so much money is on the line, the standards are high.
These platforms are quite complex, but I feel they are more complex than they need to be, using them, they really feel like they were built out of hybrid consulting discovery to enterprise, with a result that doesn't translate down well to SMB.
Class actions bundle those costs for 'all plaintiffs who are similarly situated' and the judgements are also for all plaintiffs at once, so class actions are where large companies can be properly stung.
This is also why so many companies put clauses in their contracts that you agree to forego any possibility of participating in a class action.
So, if you are subject to a systematic malfeasance by a company, the best route is a class action; they've already got it setup that you'll almost certainly fail trying an individual action, unless you have very deep pockets and close to a decade of free time.
It therefore mostly affects case valuation
Of course attorneys can take on individual cases on contingency and make viable a case where the plaintiff lacks the spare six-figures of costs to even start the case.
That does NOT mean there is no effect beyond "case valuation".
Attorneys cannot simply take every case on contingency, and when the [potential reward]/[cost] ratio is not sufficient, the attorney must pass, and no suit will be filed.
Class Action literally makes it POSSIBLE
This is especially true where small-dollar harms are being done, but at scale of millions, where ripping off consumers is systematic, or where harms such as pollution affected many.
All of these particular things seem exactly like the job of a state AG, or other form of regulator, vs private lawyers.
Political dysfunction aside, of course.
I'd personally rather the state AG and various consumer-friendly regulators of, say, california, have the billions of dollars going to the class action attorneys in that state.
Remember that class actions were not created to enable any of the things you cite. They were judiciary-created as a means of simple judicial efficiency (and requiring all affected plaintiffs to be grouped together). As such, outside of "they were there", it's not obvious why they are a particularly good way to solve the problems you give.
In case you think i'm particularly anti-consumer, i actually think LLC's should not exist and shareholders should be responsible for harms again. Which would likely obviate a lot of the practices class actions were suing over in the first place.
And there's the rub — most regulators and AGs will have some political leaning, and ALL of them have limited resources and will be unable to pursue every case, so many cases with great merit will go un-prosecuted.
For all of warts of class actions, that is an overwhelming benefit — a private class action, or latent threat thereof, can bring pressure where an AG or regulator will choose not to, or just lacks the budget and/or bandwidth to pursue.
And yes, making it easier to 'pierce the corporate veil' and create a stronger direct liability, including jail time, for officers, directors, and shareholders for intentional actions and omissions could do a lot to reduce harm of corporations.
Private litigators also have some political leaning, often as much or more as the AG, but ignoring that for a second, the limited resources part is very fixable.
Additionally, they are accountable to the people that vote for them (directly in some states, indirectly otherwise), ignorant or not, whereas private litigators are not. This is a feature and not a bug.
Instead we are optimizing or deoptimizing (depending on the state and viewpoint) for private litigation.
IE either they cap it or they uncap it, or ....
Also, as a general rule, if you have way too many cases with merit, the problem is probably not resources, but something else.
IE if you have tens of thousands of murders you can't prosecute due to lack of resources, you actually have a bigger, and different problem, than "we don't have the resources to prosecute all these murders". You won't actually get much of anywhere by having the resources to prosecute them all because you won't be solving the bigger, different problem causing you to have tens of thousands of prosecutable murders in the first place.
The same is true of most of these consumer class action cases. Infinite lawsuits have not caused lots of behavior change, all told. It is very hard for me to believe that 10x infinite lawsuits will somehow do it.
If people saw how things are done at Meta, you wouldn’t be surprised. A lot of the stuff is functionally broken due to a lack of care from the top level. Your VPs and above just do not give a shit about quality whatsoever. This thing fucking prints money like crazy. Also, preventing loss of revenue and/or customer satisfaction is not a top level priority.
I think people also don’t understand how much bigger companies spend. They absolutely dwarf all the smaller businesses out there and Meta doesn’t have a ton of interest in spending time on customers who are just as likely to go out of business next year as they are to increase their budget a tiny bit.
And the top businesses have a completely different flow. These guys are spending hundreds of millions to billions - not a 100k over several years lol.
These words have pretty specific meanings and this ain’t it.
Generally, media buyers/advertisers are clueless when it comes to ad fraud. The big platforms have made a lot of money by abusing this fact. (I have over 15 years of experience in online marketing, on the advertiser, publisher and ad-network side. )
Goodness, such uncharacteristic behavior for Facebook apps :-|
Not just in the sense of downgrading the software, but also when the publisher—sometimes under new management—decides to add things that invade your privacy or are straight-up malware.
I wonder if the ad market will start to drop out for other stuff like websites too. AI might cannibalize search engine traffic... if google can basically scrape your site and then front-run you in the search results with an AI summary, you might not be able to make some money off the content you produce with online ads. Some will say good riddance to the SEO spam type of websites that are stuffed with horrible ads, but there are also people making legitimately good or well intentioned content that live off ad spend. I know I personally enjoy reading certain web comics that seem to be largely funded with online ads. I certainly don't like ads, but sometimes I'd rather see something for free with an ad instead of paying for it.
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On a different note, I sometimes use Instagram and recently I have seen a ton of ads for a local tech event... but the event already passed a good while ago, so every time I see the ad it's completely pointless. Someone out there is getting screwed on their ad spend. I think a lot of companies are probably losing money on bad metrics reported for ad views, ads shown to the wrong audience, fake clicks, etc. I'm not saying ads are completely worthless or can't drive sales and conversions but I do think it's easy to get fooled into thinking they are doing more than they are.
When Intuit is scraping every browser tab, there is no way to link a podcast campaign with engagement, so the way they were paid for driving traffic is lost.
Basically Honey copied the Ashley Madison model, unconstrained addition with a pay for delete. Ashley Madison had no email verification fyi, any bot or angry neighbor could sign you up for an account, then they wanted payment to delete.
Honey would extract any promo code they could find, then try to make you pay to remove it.
- 10-20 companies focused on Direct to Customer (DTC) products seem to make up the majority of advertisers for a lot of podcasts: VPNs, mattresses, personal grooming products, discount code providers, online courses, etc. If their ad budgets are reduced in the current economic climate, podcast earnings will fall. It's also possible that they've collected enough data to know that ROI in this medium isn't great, and growth of podcast creation is slowing.
- A lot of top podcasts have been being acquired by Spotify and Apple as exclusives over the past few years, where a lot of this ad spending was concentrated . This reduces the total pool of advertising money available.
- Programmatic advertising (where ads are spliced into the downloaded file, varying by geographical location) has lowered the cost of advertising, so the money paid out to podcast owners is less.
Podcasts are much harder to get analytics on since the ecosystem is made up of a bunch of different podcast platforms and services, and I bet that plays into part of it. You might not be able to tell if people are downloading your podcast (a copy might be cached by a podcast provider), you might not know if people are listening or listening all the way through, if people are skipping over your ad, etc.
Ad marketers love statistics.
I get a lot of these for elections which already took place... in places I don't even live. It seems like these are mistakes on the part of the people placing the ads, it's hard to imagine they're seeing the view metrics from after the event and deciding to keep spending.
As someone who buys ads on IG: this is almost certainly because the advertiser has misconfigured their settings for that ad campaign.
This has happened to a bunch of youtubers I follow recently as well! They mentioned youtube funding all but dried up as advertising dollars moved to more short-form content. I've heard maybe 5-8 of them mention it.
There was an article going around a few years ago how if you just "optimized" without any constraints, you'd invariably iterate towards just selling porn.
This feels kind of like that.
Ah, the site formerly known as ftp.warez.org.
The owner expressed surprise and frustration over it, because it kinda sucks that's what works.
Definitely not. I am being sincere.
There is a lot of individual variation in susceptibility to a vice. For example, I never had any significant amount of trouble avoiding any food I believed was bad for me. It just never required much willpower, but it is so easy for me to fall into a habit of overconsumption of video entertainment that I haven't owned a television set in decades (and lichess.org is blocked 3 times in my /etc/hosts: near the top, again near the middle and again near the end of the file).
haha no worries, i may be insecure and seeing the flaws in my own argument there..
Similar in some ways i've tried things in my 20's that should have got me hooked but never felt the urge to do or seek out those things. Can't watch TV either but computer games on the other hand... absolutely hooked.
anyway, the main theory of better ad performance from generated ads isn't about, being weird or whatever. it's that few ads on social media are matching with intent to buy, i.e., they are the opposite of google search ads. so there's a much higher diversity of creatives. like, "saturation", like you see the ad so much, you are psychologically going to choose whatever product it is hawking when it finally comes time for you to buy a thing in the category it belongs to. generative ads are merely delivering ad creative development work that SMBs (40% of Meta's revenue) are too unsophisticated to use.
But in its current form, I think that may happen mostly for very direct-response ads, while creating branding problems that would be expensive for many companies in the long run.
Also, some of the AI-generated creatives and copy that Meta has suggested to me actually misleads or flat-out lies about what is being advertised. Which makes me wonder if the American FTC will go after some companies for running misleading ads at some point, if they are not careful about what suggestions they accept (the ad manager UI currently makes it extremely easy to accidentally approve something you shouldn't).
for 2000 years we removed some hardship to improve everything but everything automated seems like an economic blackhole
The two are not the same. The connection between the two has seemingly been lost.
I know it's considered a dirty word in many circles nowadays, but by far the most effective means we know of disincentivizing a singleminded focus on the accumulation of wealth is to make that number something you can't keep pushing up after a certain point.
No human being will ever be genuinely discouraged from making a better product or making themselves better at doing something because they couldn't turn their (personal, not company) $30 million/year into $300 million/year. Because a) at those numbers, the only material difference is the number; your lifestyle won't change appreciably, and b) if you actually cared about making a better product or making yourself better at doing a thing in the first place, that kind of extra money (or lack thereof) wouldn't be important enough to change that.
I like GenAI, I use it, but even in the best case I don't want to publish stuff it made without checking the results for weirdness.
As an aside: I find the linked page reloading randomly as I read it, and eventually crashing (iOS, Safari). Anyone else getting this problem?
Yes, Business Insider and (if I recall) Bloomberg (both shared on HN on occasion) both do that to me.
I'm no fan of Google but at least Google didn't use your 2FA for ads https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16378888, or for example you can actually contact people via gmail https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4151433
It's why a CEO being on record as saying "dumb fucks" matters, joking or not. And I don't think he was joking or else "trying to make a point". He does not care about you. When people show you who they are believe them
But if you spent any time with the older generation over the holiday break, it’s immediately obvious why it makes no difference. They sit there and scroll Facebook and Instagram advertising slop for multiple hours literally every single day.
Facebook will keep hoovering up cash until at least that generation dies off (and possibly the one after that too).
Myspace was a hot mess but they got everyone that was there at the start of the internet where if I'm on it, you join, because you're on it Alice joins and Bob then follows
Facebook has rigged the game by forcing everyone there using very underhanded tactics and the internet is still young so they're able to succeed in doing so
I always wonder if people who watch regularly are just used to it as part of life, like some weird advertising Stockholm syndrome.
54% of people are creeped out by targeted ads, 79% of mobile and 73% of desktop users are "frustrated" by the current ad load, and 70% of customers across the board find digital advertising "annoying and unpleasant".
(I have a self-held theory that roughly 30% of people are... interesting to say the least.)
I'll put up with the switch if that's the only way to get DST.
The only defense is to have checklists and continually go over running campaigns to make sure everything is configured properly, which as you note is really hard to turn off. Very easy to miss a detail in ad manager's complex UI.
...not if the Republicans stay in office.
it makes sense why X is the worst performing but mystery as to what makes Meta so special.
My experience:
For most ad campaign types, YES, Meta works far better than any alternative.
In my view, this is because its underlying machine-learning algorithms are better. Not the generative AI mentioned in the article, but the core ML-based learning strategy that every modern ad platform has been based on for over a decade now, allowing it to learn to find buyers for whatever you are selling. Meta is just better at that than anyone else - far better. And has been for years.
Linkedin is quite interesting and can reach audiences no other ad platform can. The problem with LI is that it is tremendously expensive. Think $50-200 per qualified lead, so it only makes sense for very high ticket offers. I've never been able to make LI ads work for lowticket offers (i.e. under $500 gross margin per sale).
I have attempted to run ads on X/twitter several times in the past 5 years, and each time gave up because of how terribly it performed. Literally zero sales from the ad spend, using the exact same ads which worked great on Meta. X is kind of infamous among media buyers for how bad it is. But I haven't tried it in over 8 months, so maybe it has gotten better now. Grok/xAI is quite good, so I am not sure why they haven't made the X ad platform a priority. If they did, I bet they could eat Meta's lunch.
Google is really 3 ad platforms: Youtube, Google Display Network (GDN), and keyword search. These are all radically different in many dimensions; the only thing they have in common is that Google lets you set them all up through the same web interface.
Mostly I run ads selling mid to high-ticket stuff to sophisticated buyers, and I think most of those people have Youtube Premium, which makes YT ad-free. So I haven't tried running ads on Youtube much. My media buyer colleagues who are into it are mostly selling mass-market offers that most people on HN would consider kind of scummy. They tell me it can work well, but requires a lot of ad spend over weeks to start working. In contrast, I can often get a Meta ad campaign profitable within 48 hours.
Keyword search works great, but only for "bottom of funnel" buyers (i.e. people who are actively looking for a solution they can pay for right now). There are only so many of those, so generally you cannot scale up ad spend (and thus absolute profit) very high. In contrast, Meta can create new "top of funnel" buyers, which is a larger audience by many orders of magnitude, which allows you to ramp up some Meta campaigns to a very high level of profitable ad spend.
GDN has been tricky for me. I think it has a lot of potential, but it has a very different model, and so far I have not been able to make it profitable for my offers. It certainly seems easier to set up a successful campaign with Meta.
Short answer to your question: Yes, even with the things the article is justifiably griping about, Meta is just way, way better than any alternative right now.
Is it possible to start small with Meta and then ramp up? Any principles to adhere to increase probability of success?
It depends. What kind of offer are you selling?
Generally the learning curve is massive, long, stressful and expensive. I lost tens of thousands of dollars before I could consistently make ads which were profitable.
It's not like learning coding. Imagine if every time you saw a stack trace, $250 was deducted from your bank account. Learning media buying is kind of like that.
Another path is to get hired by an ad agency. They will train you and give you a budget to manage; if you lose that budget, the worst that can happen is they'll fire you (rather than losing all your stuff).
But that would be a switch in career path, which I do not think you are asking about.
what is the source for that uphill curve is that because its not clear what your user wants or optimizing ad copies ?
im definitely not looking to spend thousands of dollars, figured starting out small hmmm
getting hired by ad agency seems interesting reminds me of trading desks a bit
There is also the investment in learning, which would require 5-10 hours per week that whole time.
I say this because anything short of that is likely to lose money and accomplish little.
Not trying to gatekeep, so feel free to try it however you like. Maybe it is worth you trying to set up one ad just to see if you like the process enough to continue.
do you have any recommendation for an alternative? seems like for now i am going to defer the Meta ad experiment , was thinking of targeting TikTok videos
If are worried about the significant expense and high risk of paid ads, which is very reasonable, I recommend you do not do paid ads at all.
I think a better alternative for you is to learn to create organic content, e.g. videos for IG and tiktok, or text posts for platforms like X. And learn to stimulate sales of your app that way.
This also has a long learning curve, but dodges the financial risk of paid ads. Once your organic content is dialed in enough to make consistent profit, you'll be much better positioned to start with ads and be successful.
Good luck!
It was the last time I seriously considered Google Ads because loosing control over sensitive narratives is more than uninspiring; it kills most of the benefits of advertisement for an advertiser.
Seriously though, every bit of ad-tech news I've heard for the last decade explains why even my 70 year old mother knows what an ad-blocker is and uses it religiously. Meanwhile paywalls are popping up everywhere and you know... I prefer them to ads; they were always used as a bogeyman by ad-tech bros, but truly they're not bad at all. For one thing a paywall really helps you to stop and think how much you care about a site.