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Comment by madspindel | Hacker News Reader

"Meta estimates that ten percent of the company’s annual revenue comes from fraudulent ads on its services – amounting to a dizzying 16 billion dollars.

– Meta is earning billions from consumers being scammed. Even if the company gets fined – a process that takes years – the fines we have seen so far only amount to a fraction of these profits. In other words, Meta has no incentive to solve the problem. Meanwhile, the company doesn’t lift a finger to help its users, whether their profiles are misused in the scam ads, or they fall victim to the scams, Myrstad says. "

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It should be easy: 10% of revenue from fraudulent ads? Fines amounting to 15% of the total revenue. This way, Meta will be incentivized to invest ~5% of its revenue on getting rid of that 10%.

Yes but also include accountability in the boardroom. If illegal things happen, a human needs to see court, not a company. Let the "risk takers" actually take on risk.

The US Postal Service seems to derive upwards of 90% of their revenue (Or at least of the mail I receive) from similar scams. Are they going to have the same fines applied to them?

Common carrier vs. curated platform?

The US Postal Service doesn't serve the American people, by its own admission. I can find the quote from the Postmaster General if you like, but the gist of it was "the 400 direct mailers are our customers". They are a spam company that has outlived its usefulness, if ever it had any. Don't fine them, dissolve them.

And you can't escape. Facebook is less of a concern because you can just not go to the website and you're good. The US Postal Service is the basis of an entire huge industry devoted to finding you at your physical location to try to scam you.

How would you find a government entity? This is just moving money from one government budget to another.

The USPS is like this because of the persistent belief that it's not enough for government entities (think USPS, Amtrak, etc) to provide a good service for the citizens - they must also (try to) turn a profit.

If we as a society considered it acceptable for the USPS to spend money to ensure everyone in the US had mail access without selling out to corporations to turn a profit, they wouldn't need to have products like EDDM blasting spam to entire zip codes.

The whole governmental agencies should be profit seeking businesses needs to died ignobly in a ditch. The reason we pay taxes is so that we don't have to handle the logistics of running the thing we pay for.

You have a very different profile of junk mail than I do. While the services may be overpriced or of dubious quality, they are rarely outright scams the way FB marketplace frequently is.

If you think there is actual fraud going on via the US mail, report it. The Postal Service takes mail fraud very seriously.

But I suspect you mean to say 90% of what ends up in your mailbox is junk. If that's the case, there's a fix for that, too:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36131222

Is ought fallacy. Just because this is happening, doesn’t mean it should happen. Cannot derive morality from current situation. See Hume

Considering that 10% percent estimate seems to come from Meta themselves, if they were fined that amount what would stop them from just estimating lower next time?

Obviously you would have some estimation from government-authorized auditors. Yes there is the usual risk of bribes etc with the money at play here but then the risks for the corporation climb as well.

From the sources I have seen, that 10% was a projection for 2024, with goals to significantly reduce it in 2025 and 2026 onward. It also includes "banned" goods, which are not necessarily fraudulent nor illegal. I have not seen any data on whether or not Meta has achieved their goals of reducing fraud and banned goods advertising.

Considering the absolute deluge of politicians and celebrities allegedly promoting financial scams on norwegian Facebook my hunch is absolutely not.

And somehow they are allowed to continue operating, and we accept them saying "we couldn't possibly actually police all this content! There's just too much of it. We're too large for such concerns!"

I really wish the rest of us could turn around and say, to their faces "That sounds like a you problem"

It’s like fake products on Amazon. The numbers are jaw dropping, the punishment non existent.

If a real store had that much fake stock it would be shut overnight.

Where is that quote sourced?

https://www.forbrukerradet.no/news-in-english/digital-produc...

You can find the 10% from scam thing all over the place. ala-

https://www.reuters.com/investigations/meta-is-earning-fortu...

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