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Comment by ihuk | Hacker News Reader

Reported an obvious sexual ad the other day and got a very AI generated response that started with "Dear Username" stating that they reviewed the ad and found nothing wrong with it.

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Before I gave up on Facebook entirely, I reported an ad that was an explicit blow job and received a similar response and this was before AI was huge. I really don't think they've ever cared.

Facebook literally trolls you when you report criminal activity, rampant well-documented scams, on their site. They write back and tell you it's not violating their policy and ask if you want to support for your personal problem.

Absolutely. My uncle got taken by an “investment club” supposedly endorsed by Warren Buffet and run day to day by some real financial person.

All communications were via WhatsApp. They started with real stock tips (which were pretty good actually!) and then did a pump and dump.

See: https://www.cleuremissionfund.com/

I received a similar ad (mine was from the shark tank people), reported it and got a message similar to what you described. They were obviously stealing Mark Cuban’s likeness and peddling an obvious scam.

Section 230 should have never applied to ads. Ads are a commercial relationship. Facebook and YouTube gets paid by these scammers so why would they want to accurately police them? The incentives are broken. Newspapers had to invent all sorts of ways to make sure that they had clear markers between ads, editorial content, and sponsored editorial content. Such things were enforced by lawsuits and a couple of Ad Bureaus. All of those rules should have applied to Meta (Facebook, WhatsApp, Instagram) and Google (YouTube). Just as it was a sign that you were reading a bad/unreliable tabloid when you couldn't tell what was an ad and what was an article, Meta and Google should have that reputation already as vendors accepting payments for bad ads and whitewashing them as other sorts of content and it is still sometimes surprising to me that they don't.

Section 230 doesn't say the advertiser can't go to jail or Facebook doesn't have to tell the police who the advertiser is.

Who goes to jail for displaying the ad in a public place? If I ran say, a shop, and put CSAM up on my notice board (because I was paid to) that would see me in prison, surely.

The lack of accountability here is astounding.

In my case I wasn't even reporting ads. These are plain old Facebook accounts and groups using very obvious AI-generated slop images of pets for 'adoption' or 'rehoming', so Facebook isn't even making money on this directly. They are participating in the fraud purely out of the malice (more realistically, incompetence spiced with greed) in their own hearts.

It's been a very well known problem on Facebook for years[1][2], and the pathetic part is that its so obvious. It really tells you how bad Facebook is with AI, because even I as a regular 1x engineer could wire up some very cheap inference that would lay waste to this fraud pattern as a part-time weekend project.

[1] https://consumer.ftc.gov/consumer-alerts/2024/05/looking-buy...

[2] https://www.bbb.org/scamtracker/lookupscam/807274

My example was a comment that said "only a shame more [hard r n word]s didn't die. we need to get this place cleaned up" and told that was not in violation of community standards.

The Dead Internet Theory is real!

The AI is a gooner

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