Cuban: Facebook knowingly runs AI deepfake scam ads; docs say $16B fraud revenue

They've always been quite scummy with copyright but I almost feel Facebook can be blamed in general because they're the ones that juice the metrics so everyone feels they have to copy them

Edit: wording

Better make sure the AIs are contained and the ad verifiers aren't accepting rouge ads!

If you accept literally anyone to run code on your customer's machine ... well ...

If that sounds too risky, then don’t use one, or develop one they reasonably trust and accept the cost when it fails.

https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/us-department-justice-announc...

These guys did a pump and dump scheme. They used Facebook ads purporting to be from Warren Buffet or other financial people, which in turn referred people to WhatsApp groups led by a stolen identity of an actual financial advisor.

They ran hundreds of these groups and scammed thousands of people with a pump and dump scheme for a stock called CLEU.

We already have a form of this for the internet that you can see if you visit sketchy pirate websites, you don't see those ads for porn games on facebook or any reputable website. They get flagged by adsafe and/or the ~15 or so big exchanges. So it's possible, it's just a question of will.

“things are bad” is a good reason to align your work towards things that make life better

As hard as that may be, it’s where progress rather than backsliding comes from

We should champion every effort for improving the conditions rather than restate things are bad

you're basically suggesting the complete elimination of the entire advertising industry.

My (honestly hardliner) view for a while has been that ads shouldn't exist. If a product was really good (and was in demand) a consumer would seek it out. This would entail the consumer knowing first the problem they want to solve, and then secondarily what the solution might look like, and once having found a few different products that satisfy their solution, carefully analysing each and working out which one they want.

Your idea of a directory neatly aligns with the way I view the market. Nobody should be putting an advertisement in front of people, they should be sought out when a need has to be met.

Not to mention the amount of environmental problems, human time and labour we could spare if our world wasn't oriented around fashions, trends, and attention harvesting.

I'm sure such a setup would devastate the world economy, so obviously it'll never happen. We need everybody to be sat away designing, manufacturing, transporting and marketing junk to each other all the time, to keep the market ticking. Sometimes the current adtech-led / "gamblification" of the economy makes me imagine we're in the endgame, pretending that fad creams, supplements, gadgets and trinkets are somehow worth something, and therefore, so is all the advertising that is being used to sell it.

Of course they know. They have no civil or criminal consequences for engaging in a conspiracy to commit large scale wire fraud, so of course they just let it happen, because who wants to speak up and cause the metrics to go down?

The same is true of Paul Graham, too (viaweb). Yahoo! made a few lucky people a lot of money, while impoverishing Yahoo! itself.

This is the man who, after Facebook literally canary in a coal mined one of their own employees - let him be jailed as a "test" to see whether Zuck or any exec would be arrested like threatened, then let him stay a little longer because they could "get some good PR out of it", then when the guy came to the US after his release and was meant to meet Zuck, he couldn't even pull himself off of his phone, was led away by a flunky asking "who was that, anyway?".

Or when told by both his team and anyone in Myanmar (including the government) that they intended to use data from a Facebook feature to crack down on dissidents, which has historically included jail, torture, and execution, decided "well, it's a really cool feature - we're not going to turn it off".

To think he cares about "misleading ads" is laughable. They don't care about ads selling illegal drugs or hinting at selling CSAM.

I think it is hard to imagine someone in tech with as non-existent a moral and ethical compass as Mark Zuckerberg, and that's saying something.

Right, through his 401k

They know.

I’ve sent them high res well lit photo evidence of the fraud and they still left me to have to do a chargeback via my card issuer for receiving counterfeit merchandise. You know this has happened thousands of times.

If you're earning almost 200 billion dollars a year directly from the posting of a certain type of content, you can afford basic moderation to avoid obvious scams and fraud.

I'd emphasize that the scummiest sites with zero moderation never needed Section 230! Section 230 is what allows you to have some moderation (e.g. banning spammers) without suddenly becoming entirely liable for anything that passes the filter.

Blindly reverting Section 230 means eliminating that moderate position, splintering sites into:

1. Ones that abandon moderation entirely in favor of chaos. Maybe you can salvage something by giving opt-in filtering tools to individuals, but you'll still have the problem of someone using your site to store ten terabytes of the Bee Movie.

2. Ones that demand participants sign a serious legal document promising to pay for any problems before they can submit anything.

3. Ones which remove almost all expressive ability, beyond narrow things like like/upvote features.

The concerned is one of consistency in how media is regulated. E.g. Facebook, is the worlds largest media company, and it truly acts and behaves as a publisher now. It acquires its content from an army of paid and unpaid providers. They may be individuals, often they are influencers, often they may be nefarious agents and companies. It then decides how to place that content in it's "publication", which just happens to be an app and website. It goes out and tells the market, "I have this great publication in which you can place ads!". It then sells ads to those people, and makes a decision on how to place those advertisements inside its publication alongside that content that it acquired.

So how is it not a publisher? And why should it be regulated to any kind of different standard from other publishers?

The larger the company, the larger the obligation they have to be a good citizen.

This is not true in the case where the newspaper knows it is a scam, right? So as soon as Facebook says "we've reviewed this scam ad you notified us of, but found it complies with our terms and conditions", they're pretty clearly knowingly participating.