{"id":269384,"date":"2025-11-07T18:55:08","date_gmt":"2025-11-07T18:55:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/269384\/"},"modified":"2025-11-07T18:55:08","modified_gmt":"2025-11-07T18:55:08","slug":"bombshell-report-exposes-how-meta-relied-on-scam-ad-profits-to-fund-ai","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/269384\/","title":{"rendered":"Bombshell report exposes how Meta relied on scam ad profits to fund AI"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Meta appeared to be less likely to ramp up enforcement from police requests. Documents showed that police in Singapore flagged \u201c146 examples of scams targeting that country\u2019s users last fall,\u201d Reuters reported. Only 23 percent violated Meta\u2019s policies, while the rest only \u201cviolate the spirit of the policy, but not the letter,\u201d a Meta presentation said.<\/p>\n<p>Scams that Meta failed to flag offered promotions like crypto scams, fake concert tickets, or deals \u201ctoo good to be true,\u201d like 80 percent off a desirable item from a high-fashion brand. Meta also looked past fake job ads that claimed to be hiring for Big Tech companies.<\/p>\n<p>Rob Leathern previously led Meta\u2019s business integrity unit that worked to prevent scam ads but left in 2020. He <a href=\"https:\/\/www.wired.com\/story\/scam-ads-are-flooding-social-media-these-former-meta-staffers-have-a-plan\/\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">told Wired<\/a> that it\u2019s hard to \u201cknow how bad it\u2019s gotten or what the current state is\u201d since Meta and other social media platforms don\u2019t provide outside researchers access to large random samples of ads.<\/p>\n<p>With such access, researchers like Leathern and Rob Goldman, Meta\u2019s former vice president of ads, could provide \u201cscorecards\u201d showing how well different platforms work to combat scams. Together, Leathern and Goldman launched a nonprofit called <a href=\"https:\/\/www.collectivemetrics.org\/\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">CollectiveMetrics.org<\/a> in hopes of \u201cbringing more transparency to digital advertising in order to fight deceptive ads,\u201d Wired reported.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cI want there to be more transparency. I want third parties, researchers, academics, nonprofits, whoever, to be able to actually assess how good of a job these platforms are doing at stopping scams and fraud,\u201d Leathern told Wired. \u201cWe\u2019d like to move to actual measurement of the problem and help foster an understanding.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Another meaningful step that Leathern thinks companies like Meta should take to protect users would be to notify users when Meta discovers that they clicked on a scam ad\u2014rather than targeting them with more scam ads, as Reuters suggested was Meta\u2019s practice.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cThese scammers aren\u2019t getting people\u2019s money on day one, typically. So there\u2019s a window to take action,\u201d he said, recommending that platforms donate ill-gotten gains from running scam ads to \u201cfund nonprofits to educate people about how to recognize these kinds of scams or problems.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>\u201cThere\u2019s lots that could be done with funds that come from these bad guys,\u201d Leathern said.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Meta appeared to be less likely to ramp up enforcement from police requests. Documents showed that police in&hellip;\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":269385,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[256,254,255,64,63,105],"class_list":["post-269384","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-artificial-intelligence","tag-ai","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-artificialintelligence","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-technology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/269384","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=269384"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/269384\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/269385"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=269384"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=269384"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=269384"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}