Facebook refuses to drive scammers off its platform because it generates billions of dolars per year in revenue from Deceptive Facebook Ads

 The title of this post is the response to this other article "Facebook does not worry about the online counterfeiting fraud".

Recently I became aware that Facebook (or Meta) has been served with a lawsuit accusing it of actively soliciting and assisting scammers for its own financial gain and to users detriment.  

The whole document is worth a read for pearls like below:

4. Facebook has done much more than passively create and maintain a platform on which scammers can brazenly target users with scams. According to internal Facebook documents, and current and former Facebook employees and contractors recently interviewed by various investigative journalists at prominent publications,4 Facebook actively solicits, encourages, and assists scammers in numerous ways. On the revenue side, according to these investigations, Facebook’s sales teams have presented at conferences heavily attended by known scammers, socialized with known scammers for business development purposes, and met revenue quotas by encouraging known scammers to continue buying Facebook ads. Facebook’s sales teams have also been aggressively soliciting ad sales in China and providing extensive training services and materials to China-based advertisers, despite an internal study showing that nearly thirty percent (30%) of the ads placed by China-based advertisers — estimated to account for $2.6 billion in 2020 ad sales alone — violated at least one of Facebook’s own ad policies. 

5. On the enforcement side, according to these investigations, Facebook has affirmatively directed employees and contractors tasked with monitoring Facebook’s platform for deceptive ads to (i) ignore ads placed by hacked Facebook accounts and pages, as long as Facebook gets paid for these ads, and (ii) ignore violations of Facebook’s Ad Policies, especially by Chinabased advertisers (since Facebook “want[s] China revenue”). 

6. In October 2020, the Federal Trade Commission (“FTC”) reported that about 94% of the complaints it collected concerning online shopping fraud on social media identified Facebook (or its Instagram site) as the source.5   

Let's see how this lawsuit ends up.