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I reported some of those and got a response in return that I could block the item question but that it's basically green light by them, doesn't break their community standards or some wording like that. At this point I'm surprised there aren't more lawsuits coming up, this is egregious behavior that needs to be penalized fast.
This seems like the kind of thing that can be resolved by emailing a screenshot of that to zuck@fb.com with the head of the DEA on the CC list. I'm sure one of them will be happy to act.
Advertising networks get away with so much, it's quite ridiculous. The same company that will ban your account for posting about such content, will regularly run ads about such content. Worse, there's nothing you can do about it except run ad blockers (which they in turn will use various measures as punishment for you doing so).

Guess we didn't learn anything from Cambridge Analytica.

I'm trying to get more into self hosting and things like federation that can allow technical people to be admins of low-maintenance services for their friends and family.

It's a slow push but it's gonna happen. Microtransactions are stuck in deployment hell, advertisements are a deal with the devil, and this is the only third option I know of

I'm surprised that cops haven't started arresting people for receiving ads about contraband, which would imply (to a cop brain) that they must be creating the demand for such items.
They do? If I got the NYT to print an ad for crack what would happen to me and the NYT?
There are many ads on Instagram that makes me wonder how this is legal; for example, I saw a fake site that pretended to be Marine Layer where the clothes were suspiciously cheap. I reported the ad, but they dismissed it.

And don't get me started on all the "mushroom alternative", "caffeine alternative", drugs. And it's like everyone and their grandmother has their own Viagra or Hair Loss drug company now

Infomercials for millennials, I suppose.

It’s possible they’re not legal.

Google got hit for internet pharmacies and forfeited all the revenue they got.

I’m sure Google had no problem paying the same number of dollars in 2011 but really liked that money in their earlier days when there wasn’t as much big $ legit ad demand.

https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/google-forfeits-500-million-g...

I routinely see ads for scams on YouTube and report them and never hear back.

Stuff like "a 19 year old invented this that saves you a hundred bucks on your power bill but Big electricity is suppressing it"

Just the most bullshit claims over stock footage, things I saw debunked on Snopes 20 years ago as a literal child.

It's disappointing

Wow this is terrible! Are you saying someone could buy these drugs over the counter, with regular currency, not on the dark web?

Can someone share these ads with me so I could check them out? Just purely out of my own concern?

Thanks

I never ged ads for "real" drugs, just the normal OTC/prescription stuff and occasionally some legal analogues (non-psilocybin mushroom gummies come to mind). Very curious what they look like as well and what their sites say about the purchase process (what forms of payment do they accept, how do they ship, etc).
I find it really interesting Facebook collect money from someone to run these ads, and they can continue to do that without getting into legal trouble.

When I moved countries it took 6 months for Facebook to stop showing me ads for the old country which were very clearly only supposed to be shown to people in that country. Again, people are paying money to run these ads and Facebook are clearly showing them to the wrong people.

They still get the money in both cases. Why would they care?
YouTube has been hitting me up with "ads" which are Ethereum scams¹ recently. Of what I've reported, 60% are still up. Some of these were reported in March.

Recently I also got an "ad" for what was almost certainly Sovereign Citizen propaganda, which … wow, I didn't even know they ran YT ads?²

Today's ads (since I checked just to see for this comment) is all normal stuff.

¹they allege to have written an "arbitrage" trading bot with ChatGPT, usually, claiming it earns them passive income of varying amounts, but often on the order of $1M USD/y. As the saying goes, if it sounds too good to be true, it probably is. The code actually just steals your money.

²(not that I really think SCs are a formal collective of sorts, I just … don't really think that would be a thing I'd see.)

I've been seeing "AI" apps which offer to take a pic/vid you upload and make it a nude. These ads often have nudity in them, which is wild. Likewise, I saw some ads seriously offering drugs. I reported them and got a reply from Facebook: "We found this post does not go against our community guidelines"???
This is part of a larger pattern for Facebook and other "large scale" advertisers where it's clear they are breaking laws at some rate and are protected from paying a real consequence by the cost of discovering the exact rate of misbehavior. Facebook recently settled a lawsuit related to racially discriminating in housing ads (a federal crime)[1]. I suspect this will get added to the pile of illegal services Facebook provides but argues it shouldn't be held responsible for providing.

This is, I think, the real moral hazard you saw back in the 2007 financial crisis: companies can reach a scale where it's very costly to definitively assess who is to blame for crimes and can therefor commit any profitable crime up to a certain threshold. It both makes a mockery of the rule of law as a concept (along with many other things in the US legal system) and is an enormous competitive advantage for large companies. I'd include Uber's grey area stalking[2] and the eBay stalking campaign[3] in this category.

[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2022/06/21/doj-settles-with-facebook-ov...

[2] https://www.theverge.com/2016/7/10/12127638/uber-ergo-invest...

[3] https://www.cbsnews.com/news/feds-charge-ebay-stalking-scand...

Merely _hundreds_? At Facebook's scale that seems like a really low number, no? Like, even if they were doing manual review of every single ad (which they probably aren't) I'd expect at least a few to slip through merely due to laziness or incompetence on the part of the reviewers, wouldn't you?
As many others have stated, I've reported all kinds of sketchy drug sales to FaceBook and been told they won't do anything about it. I'd love to see them raked over the coals for this.
Most of what’s being discussed here is naturally subjective views on propriety. Not many years ago, God forbid should one see an ad for cannabis. Even what is and is not considered a scam is quite subjective, is it not? To what extent are these platforms themselves legalised scams? Or the oh-wow-look-what-we-found false editorial strategy that most rags market.
> “DMT,” a psychedelic drug.

I would argue that. It's probably the least offensive thing, compared to alcohol you can buy everywhere. DMT and other entheogens are far less harmful than alcoholic drinks available. It's confirmed by many academic papers, and DMT is not something people use for recreational purposes.

Moreover, some of these "psychedelic drugs" are used by people who have serious illness, wether it is life-threatening like cancer, or all kinds of PTSDs. It is very well known that these "drugs" help to prevent suicides, and very often it makes people's lives less miserable.

While I agree with the narrative, and totally against unregulated drug sale, I can't say WSJ put a lot of thought into the article posting a picture of DMT powder as the main evidence to make entire article look more scary. Average Trader Joe's with vodka looks many times scarier to me.

I've been getting a lot of these and reporting them all. They never take them down. It really surprised me at first because I ran a CBD business from 2019 to 2021 and they refused to run my ads even though it was legal. Same thing with Google. Google really screwed me over because I had my ads running for a bit and then they stopped them because it went against their rules for hemp/CBD products. Eventually they changed the rules and allowed those ads. So they started running my ads again but I didn't get a notification until my $300 bill came. And this was after I had already shut down my business. Of course I couldn't get a hold of a real person and I paid the bill because I didn't want my account to get banned.
Anecdotally, I get Instagram ads for "buy mdma online" all day, every day.
How does one get these ads anyways? Search history of “drug rehab” or “drug overdose”? If you are addicted to heroin, cocaine, or other opioids (fentanyl), these ads are a test of your resolve.

Also Facebook Ads are absolutely predatory.

I've seen a lot of responses saying prosecutors won't go after Meta because of a professional responsibility for winning at trial.

Well, what about cops+feds civil asset forfeiture-ing their servers and offices?

I'm into the federal investigation

I'm actually really glad that some companies like this are not really beholden to advertisers anymore. I don't like how that influences social norms per country outside of the legal system, based on what advertisers believe. I like that there is no collective voice possible that could get enough advertisers to leave Meta over disagreeing with a Meta practice.

I'm into lawsuits from private persons and the government. Just not social mobs.

https://archive.md/D4EnE

edit: hm, maybe this isn't working for the full articles on WSJ anymore...

What's worse is that Meta representatives stand up in front of lawmakers and supply information that is false.

I demonstrated the apparent untruthfulness in their claims about fraud here and then interviewed LLaMa about it :-)

https://blog.aviel.tech/Meta-s-LLaMa-AI-LLaMbasts-Meta-for-f...

My favorite Meta ad that I keep getting is a deepfake video of Elon Musk saying he will be handing out free money for “Neuralink AI” to the first people who will invest. They’re saying thousands of dollars PER WEEK are guaranteed! Nice!

And I just got the same exact scam on FB, but this time they used a deepfake video of my country’s president, saying they’re working with Elon Musk to give money to all citizens. Yay!

On hN user to claim that is impossible to forbid meta to spread these ads.

Its verboten in the EU https://commission.europa.eu/strategy-and-policy/priorities-...

You are welcome.

This is the reason I gave up on google ads for my android apps back in 2015. I turned off all 18+ content and it kept on showing sex and gambling ads to users. The advertisers probably categorized themselves as entertainment and didn't check the correct boxes and I couldn't be bothered hunting all of them.
There's just no excuse for this anymore – why don't they apply their own state-of-the-art LLMs to analyze these and flag the adds as pushing potentially illegal substances?

Because as it's painfully obvious now, Meta doesn't care, they're happy to take the money.

And counterfeit number plates, and no takedown as everything is OK apparently
That's amazing news! I love cocaïne, opioids and other drugs!
Why does Section 230 not apply to advertisements as it does to comments, videos, etc? The ads are user generated content.
I've seen many reels for either borderline illegal activity or outright illegal activity

-MLMs

-"faceless marketing"

-"digital marketing" courses

-business loan scams

-counterfeit luxury goods

-extortion

Anyone know if section 203 would cover this?
Is the garbage floating to the top / are the filters being relaxed because regular advertising is slipping?
Not a huge surprise considering their position on CP and the abusive conduct that occurs on their platforms.
The one time Meta does something good the Feds and WSJ get upset. I wish Meta had a back pages and was more like Craiglist circa 2005.

In the puritanical West, selling your private data to the government is good, buying drugs from a rando on Instagram is bad. Stifling.

Are drug ads bad because of the war on drugs? Are they bad because we won’t let tobacco make ads?

The only way this seems shockingly bad is that you can’t actually control what you see as a user of these ad-supported services or if you support the war on drugs.

The timing of these kind of stories should make people curious
did 404media do an expose story on this ? I swear Meta will allow anything for money
Is "hundreds" supposed to be a large amount? How many ads has Facebook run for Mountain Dew?
I hate this.

I used to run a business in Canada that sold grow equipment and our primary customer base was marijuana growers. When legalization came we started running advertisements for our shop on facebook. Got our hand slapped really hard, really fast and our advertising account banned.

A few months later I see advertisements for chocolates with psilocybin mushrooms in them. Mushrooms remain illegal in Canada. The ads continued for several months.

... and in the meantime Meta won't let me create an Instagram account from either my home or work computer. I have very little history w/ either since I deleted my Facebook account in 2016 but started a new one to use with an Oculus VR headset. Yes I have run a webcrawler at home but never against Meta properties and I don't believe I've ever made trouble of any kind for Meta.

I badly want to support a friend's social media marketing efforts and it's just ridiculous that I'll probably have to create an account with false information despite me sending multiple emails to Facebook asking if they can clear whatever flag is on my account and/or IP addresses.