Meta created 'playbook' to fend off pressure to crack down on scammers

https://www.reuters.com/investigations/meta-created-playbook-fend-off-pressure-crack-down-scammers-documents-show-2025-12-31/

122•lossolo•2h ago

https://archive.ph/Phdes

Comments

PaulHoule•2h ago

What I can't get is that the platforms don't understand that the scam ads reduce trust in the good ads -- when I see something on YouTube that looks legit and like something I want I am very inclined to be skeptical because I just saw five obvious scams in a row. Accepting those scam ads is penny wise and pound foolish.

trueismywork•2h ago

What's the alternative? Orkut?

PaulHoule•53m ago

There's two markets here. (1) The market of advertisers buying ads and (2) the market of users who are attracted to these platforms and who might click on the ads and buy the product.

I'm not against advertising, in fact many times I have seen something advertised, thought "I want that!" and bought it and sometimes that thing became my new favorite.

If I am a platform user (2) and don't like the ads I can "exit" the platform as a whole or I can "exit" by being unresponsive to ads and when it comes to ads on YouTube and Meta platforms at least, I'm not buying it!

People in market (1) are going to invest in advertising up to the point where it is profitable, and the less responsive market (2) people are the smaller the pool. Many advertisers are also sensitive to brand safety and part of that is the content you are against but another part is the other ads on the platform.

xp84•25m ago

I think the adtech-industrial complex has thrown in the towel on wanting quality ads and customers who trust those ads. It's easier to just welcome in the scammers and accept that the top 80% "savviest" people all know their ads are mostly scams. There will always still be enough marks that the scammers, who have excellent margins to play with, will come to feed at the trough of the ignorant and naïve by buying the ads. If needed, the platform can adjust the ad:content ratio to near 100%. Their 'competition' is all doing the same thing anyway, so they won't lose eyeballs in the aggregate.

benoau•1h ago

I think it's just not adversely impacting "big tech", their profits and margins are soaring while they've spent years and years selling counterfeit goods, scam apps, scam videos, scam ads. They have no liability for it (section 230 immunity) and seem to have zero incentive to do better.

braiamp•1h ago

Yeah, for them, it doesn't matter. As long as they get paid and nobody important complains, it will stay business as usual.

Qem•1h ago

They built a meta-scam, on top of other scams.

kfarr•1h ago

It’s a scam made of scams!

fullshark•1h ago

There's a sweet spot they want to hit, where their internal scam ad reduction efforts do enough to make sure people don't leave in droves, and they are totally fine with the scam ads that make it through bringing in revenue.

The last thing they want is regulators forcing them to spend at least $X in resources to limit scam ads to some target and have it hurt their margins.

thayne•1h ago

> regulators forcing them to spend at least $X in resources

Even if X is 0, it would mean lost revenue from the scammers as well.

einr•1h ago

They simply do not care about trust or anything else you think they should care about. The scam ads get probably get clicked ten or a hundred times more than legit ads. This makes money, therefore it is good and should be encouraged. They do not care how much worse the platform gets or how many people get scammed.

chopete3•1h ago

Money changes psychology. The brains of the people that work in these departments operate differently. They believe in protection and growth of the revenue - not pay attention to ethics.

They have to work hard to shut out critics as long as possible.

observationist•1h ago

It's about getting as much money from the platform for as long as possible, regardless of the externalized damage done along the way. Anything that negatively impacts the "number goes up" goal, year over year, gets suppressed, ignored, or redirected. They hire a sufficient number of people so as to diffuse responsibility and the sense of wrongdoing by any one person or group within the company, and different aspects of the overall abusive mechanics organically get compartmentalized, so that no one manager or employee or department ever recognizes the wrongs being done.

You end up with a few greedy asshats aware of the harms being done that just don't care, lots of money being made, and plausible deniability all around, with things never getting bad enough for an employee to feel like they have to take a stand or report wrongdoing.

serial_dev•1h ago

Even if we were to accept that people who see scam ads ona platform will be less likely to trust good ads on said platform (and honestly I doubt how impactful that is), it’s not a metric Facebook cares about.

You are not the customer. The customers are the people paying for the ads, and they will keep using it as long as they think it’s better than not using them.

safety1st•1h ago

The explanation is that the platform firms operate with a high level of market power, which is another way of saying that they benefit from monopoly or near-monopoly effects that make them relatively immune from things like what their customers want.

This is actually textbook monopoly stuff, well established in antitrust literature and well understood by regulators: when you see a firm institutionalizing how to defend criminal activity as a part of their business model, it's a big flag that said firm probably has some kind of immunity from how healthy, regulated markets operate. Why America has decided not to prosecute corporate criminals anymore (given that at various points in its history it was actually pretty good at this) is the really interesting question of our time.

nickff•1h ago

I suspect that your explanation is what people in those organizations think is happening, but I believe that what’s really going on is that they’re ‘spending’ (and depleting) their brand equity.

socialcommenter•1h ago

I'm not sure it stops there, either - I wonder if others feel the same. If every platform is doing this, then are they destroying the trust of online media (the internet?) in general? Facebook isn't exactly alone in its reputation of monetising people's attention and serving them dangerous content.

I'm eagerly waiting for the day when the elderly people in my family swear off the internet entirely.

tremon•35m ago

Being immune to the "depletion of their brand equity" is part of the near-monopoly effects the GP was referring to.

nickff•31m ago

I do not believe that those brands are immune.

conception•1h ago

The reason started in the 70’s - https://reclaimdemocracy.org/powell_memo_lewis/

thanksgiving•53m ago

Somehow I knew in my heart this was about Ronald Reagan even though you said the seventies.

PaulHoule•2m ago

We remember Reagan because he was a colorful character and vociferous advocate of markets, but the changes we associate with him (e.g. Ralph Nader getting shut out of Congress) started under Carter and were continued under Clinton.

SoftTalker•1h ago

Things go in cycles because people who get into power on a crusade against something are never satisfied that they've done enough to address that issue.

In the gilded age we had robber barons and trusts. That lead to trust-busting and anti-monopoly regulation. Eventually the history is forgotten and people see the current regulations as burdensome. Someone gets into power with a mandate to deregulate, and we eventually end up with monopolies again.

Private enterprise and free markets are good. Monopolies are not. It doesn't have to be one or the other but nobody can seem to take their hands off when we reach a happy middle ground.

zelphirkalt•1h ago

Which quartal number reflects this reduced trust? There is your answer. They never see that negative impact, because they can't see that, which does not happened.

sharkjacobs•1h ago

I think the same thing but maybe it’s you and me are wrong. Maybe it’s simply more profitable to run scams than it is to do “legit” business selling “real” products and services. Maybe the users who make ads valuable are the ones who are undiscriminating and naive and vulnerable to scams, and those users aren’t bothered by proliferation of scam ads.

Maybe it does hurt the value of “normal” ads to be shown next to scams, but the scam ads are so valuable that it actually works out as a long term net positive

I think that I used to assume that if scams became prominent enough they would produce a backlash, either regulatory or otherwise, but maybe that’s just not the case.

yieldcrv•26m ago

When billions are being collected in scams and those organizations are paying for more ads, it doesn't matter what you normally do, it matters what you do when you're emotional, or drunk, or what your parents do

oh_my_goodness•1m ago

Genuine clicks on useful ads are a tiny part of ad revenue. There’s no incentive to work on that slice of clicks.

lokimedes•1h ago

In some roundabout way, it’s really pathetic that the evil corporations of our times are merely dopamine peddling advertisers, and not something more sinister.

I guess we should count ourselves lucky..

mcphage•55m ago

Meta has been responsible for a lot worse than merely dopamine peddling.

Loughla•32m ago

Yeah back in the day evil companies used to kill people in 3rd world countries and give their workers horrible diseases and injuries. I guess this is better?

ThrowawayTestr•9m ago

Back in the day evil companies would overthrow governments and starve children.

axus•1h ago

If I'm reading this right, the playbook was... deleting scam ads ? And the implied problem is they only deleted searchable ads, and not trying harder to get rid of all of them.

It's interesting that Facebook was trying NOT to uncover identities, they're famous for insisting on real names.

goatsi•1h ago

All ads are searchable. They found the exact words and phrases that regulators used and then made sure those were clean.

>As a result, Meta decided to take the tactic global, performing similar analyses to assess “scam discoverability” in other countries. “We have built a vast keyword list by country that is meant to mimic what regulators may search for,” one document states. Another described the work as changing the “prevalence perception” of scams on Facebook and Instagram.

thayne•1h ago

> the implied problem is they only deleted searchable ads

Well, more just the ads that matched the specific queries the regulators were using. So yes, they removed some scam ads, but there are probably many more that people are still seeing just because those didn't match the search queries the regulators were searching for.

> It's interesting that Facebook was trying NOT to uncover identities, they're famous for insisting on real names.

It isn't really surprising. If they required real identities, they wouldn't be able to make money from scammers using throw-away accounts, or from entities subject to US sanctions, so there is a monetary incentive not to know the identity of the ad customers.

socialcommenter•57m ago

Precisely, completely agree.

If this method actually removed a significant percentage of scam ads, rather than just heading off scrutiny, then a) doing proper verification wouldn't cost them $2b a year like they claim it would, and b) their quarterly revenues would be taking a meaningful (single digits %) hit and the share price would suffer.

randycupertino•49m ago

They weren't even deleting the scam ads, that would decrease their revenue. They were just hiding the scam ads from regulators.

probably_wrong•4m ago

I believe that's incorrect - the article quotes Meta as saying "By cleaning those ads from search results, the company is also removing them from its systems overall".

The real problem as I understand it is that they didn't stop the ads from entering the system, but rather identified the words used by regulators and only deleted those ads (after an unspecified amount of time online) from the system.

SilverElfin•1h ago

I imagine something like this is what happens at all those companies that send spam texts and calls like bandwidth.com or Sinch or others - a strategy to make money supporting criminals

jackhuman•57m ago

I searched for a used steamdeck in my area and got 100% fraud sellers. My elders in my family fall for fraud via meta’s platforms. Its caused me lots of stress and pain.

The only thing I can do is delete all my Meta accounts. One of the riches companies in the world with some very smart people and its ruined by toxic leadership.

If this was my product, I’d feel ashamed by how trash it is. I really hope governments force stricter regulations on meta and ads in general. Meta should be liable if a user is scammed by an ad on their platform. Plane and simple.

stackghost•32m ago

>One of the riches companies in the world with some very smart people and its ruined by toxic leadership.

The rank and file are complicit. There are people commenting on HN every day who are paid handsomely to work at Meta and to act willfully blind to the awful ethics their company has displayed for two decades.

dboreham•53m ago

What underlies this is that the USA is a fundamentally scammy country. I mean no disrespect: I'm a US citizen and have lived here for 30 years and made plenty of money from the US economy. But nevertheless it's a scam culture. And sure enough when I read the article, it says "Facebook battling Japanese regulators". Of course there wouldn't be a regulator in the USA telling Facebook to not host scam ads.

Consider the TV industry in the USA: it makes huge amounts of money from political ads, which are for the most part scams. The same people who make money from those scam ads also control the news. So guess what? No pressure to not scam the population with false advertising.

Perhaps it helps to have not grown up in the US. If you've been here your entire life there's a frog boiling syndrome where none of the weirdness seems weird. This is why JD and co witter on about how terrible Europe is -- they need to keep up the delusion that scammers should get to scam and there's no hope to stop them. The recent moves to sanction European campaigners against big tech disinformation is really: the scammers got the root password to the country and are using it to fight back.

yoyohello13•43m ago

No I've lived in the US my whole life and I agree with you. Ever since I bought my house I feel like I'm constantly bombarded by people trying to scam me out of my money. I'm sure it was always like that but it seems like getting a mortgage put me on some "financially stable guy" list that attracts the vultures. Medical, home repair, finance services. Without constant vigilance it's so easy to get grifted.

xp84•21m ago

Seriously. I actually want a bunch of renovation work done to my house, and door-to-door salesmen come by all the time to try to sell me that type of service. After one horrible experience that started with such a salesman, never again. I assume everyone out there is a freaking scammer because too many are.

And even the companies and industries that used to be pretty benign have realized that all the growth is in scams, so they've added whole divisions of their business to try to get you onto recurring payments for stuff you probably don't want, which can all be signed up for with like 1 click, but cancelling needs a phone call during Eastern Time business hours and a 25 minute wait on hold.

neilv•35m ago

You know how Facebook became a popular employer among new CS grads, by paying more than anyone else?

You know that book/movie, "The Firm", in which the new law school graduate gets a surprisingly lucrative job offer? (spoilers) It turns out that the reason is Crime.

hrimfaxi•7m ago

What point are you trying to make? Any company offering above market compensation is engaging in illegal activity?

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