What has been happening to me is that, for the last decade or so, I only see ads in languages that I don’t speak or understand. I wrote about it—a lot. Nothing. A friend worked as the head of Analytics for that part of YouTube and he told me, “They don’t care.” I pointed out that it’s so common that Antonio Garcia Martinez wrote about it in his book _Chaos Monkeys_ (in 2012) and estimated that, at the time, it costs Facebook 4% of their ad revenue. I can confirm because I raised that point internally not once (in 2016 and it was fixed) but twice (the fix was overruled and I saw it again in 2020). In 2024, they are still wasting their time and energy, and 4% of Meta’s revenues isn’t chump change.
That’s not counting on pervasive ads for alcohol (illegal where I am), gambling (having an opt-out is mandatory in most jurisdictions), tax evading services (also illegal where I am), and specifically on Threads and Twitter, literal prostitution, and/or romance scams (I didn’t investigate which, tried to report, but was told that’s fine by their community guidelines).
I’m not a security researcher, and I refuse to investigate further than strictly necessary for my sanity (I expect deserved judgment from this community for that) however, in spite of that, I know ads are a constant vector for malware. Not much is done to address basic vectors, like not running any executable code in ads.
The only reason why enormous waste at scale, rampant illegal activity, and gaping security holes aren’t the only topics of conversation online is that everyone who can explain what’s happening has opted out. Forcing them back in isn’t the solution.