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Comment by asdefghyk | Hacker News Reader

I recall a articale I read "somewhere" that reported the Facebook makes big profit (Billions) from scams. So they have no ( or no strong motive) motive to shut such scams down

An example is courtcase against Meta for using a Australians mining billionares likeness to promote a crypo investment scam.

https://www.afr.com/technology/dad-it-s-a-fraud-call-that-sp...

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I'm surprised legitimate companies don't pressure Facebook on this though. There are enough scams on Facebook that I now refuse to believe anything there, even though some of the things look useful and probably are not scams (and also are things I didn't know existed without an ad - thus filling one of the legitimate values of advertisements: informing me of things that would make my life better but I don't know exist).

Anyone making a Kickstarter knows that within days if not hours all your images, pictures, renderings will be harvested and dozens of "copycat" sites will be "selling" your product now, regardless of whether its a real thing or not yet, and they'll be advertising it on FB and IG.

I say those words in quotes - they have no intention of shipping you anything, just skimming low-hanging fruit from someone's ideas.

This is actually illegal here in Sweden though. Lawsuits are ongoing.

I'm kind of surprised that there haven't been criminal cases.

even in the UK where we don't have "personality rights" it would almost certainly come under the common law offence of "passing off"

This is why Section 230 is fundamentally wrong. Because the core concept of it assumes reasonable behavior without monetary incentives. Which is great if you're legislating someone's personal forum about their hobby. But Section 230 applied to the ad industry is incredibly, incredibly broken, because advertising companies do not have any incentive to act in good faith.

As soon as a dollar of profit is involved in a content moderation decision, a business should be fully liable for the decisions around content on their platform. If I report an ad to Facebook and Facebook decides to keep it they should be accepting legal responsibility for that ad.

You want to stop scams online, you make the platforms liable and then grant them the ability to recover the losses by going after the advertisers.

Section 230 is fine but people keep misapplying it. It says Facebook didn't publish the ads, the ads publisher did. It doesn't say Facebook doesn't have to take them down. It doesn't say Facebook can't be ordered to reveal who the ad publisher is so they can go to jail.

Your first assertion is obviously untrue. And fake celebrity endorsements pre-date the existence of the Internet, let alone Meta. There were lawsuits back in the 1800s on this topic. This is hardly a new problem unique to Meta.

There's nothing obvious about it. Meta makes money on ads, period. Scams work and get clicks. Therefore, meta makes money on scams running rampant on their platform.

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