Thread by @CraigSilverman

NEW w/ @rmac18: Sources and exclusive documents reveal how Facebook’s $80 ad juggernaut has enabled a global economy of dishonesty where scammers, hackers, and disinformation peddlers rip off and manipulate people around the world. buzzfeednews.com/article/craigs…

FB has at times prioritized revenue over enforcement of policies designed to protect people who use its platforms. Example: A manager overseeing 45 ads contractors told them to ignore hacked accounts/violations as long as “Facebook gets paid” for ads via a valid payment method.

He framed it as a win-win when someone hacks a big page and uses their access to run ads: “Facebook gets paid, the bad actors get to run their ads to a larger market.”

He joined Facebook as a full-time risk investigations analyst in April.

Facebook said this team was focused on payment risk/fraud. It said other teams are responsible for investigating hacked accounts. @LauraEdelson2 of NYU's Online Political Ads Transparency Project called it “quite shocking.”

Also: In the weeks before the election, some ads contractors were pulled off their normal tasks. They were told to focus on approving requests by political advertisers to increase the amount they could spend per day, before FB’s self-imposed ban on new ads kicked in.

FB said the focus on increasing ad spend limits wasn’t about revenue — it was to ensure election advertisers could get their message out. But revenue concerns *are* a factor in political ad decisions, as described in this NYT story from today: nytimes.com/2020/12/10/opi…

The issues with FB's ads system echoes the lax approach to content moderation & enforcement that caused FB to become a fount of disinfo, foreign influence operations, hate speech, and harassment. Key difference: with bad ads, Facebook gets paid. And users often end up ripped off

$80 billion! Ugh........

Have a look at this ad for a Stihl chainsaw. Ads like this have been all over Facebook since July. But Stihl does not sell products on FB! The ads are from scammers who trick people into thinking they get a $200 chainsaw for a fraction of the price. It really works.

While Facebook gets paid for these ads and people get scammed, Stihl staff have spent months fielding customer complaints—without much help from Facebook. Stihl has to find and report the active ads. Only then will FB remove them, usually within a day or two.

We tracked a bunch of the ads back to a company in China, a country which is the focus of a big revenue push at Facebook. It moved ppl to Singapore to scale China ad $$. Chinese companies use FB ads to find global customers. China ads bring in well over $5 billion a year for FB.

But FB’s China push comes as it's aware of an epidemic of violative ads and scammers operating out of the country. A previous internal study of thousands of ads placed by Chinese clients found that nearly 30% violated at least one Facebook policy.

Facebook disputes that it profits from bad ads. It says it spends far more trying to stop them than the revenue it gets from them. It has stepped up efforts in the last two years or so, implementing spending limits on new ad accounts, filing lawsuits, investing in AI etc.

The company also said its internal data shows that low quality and deceptive ads reduce overall trust in all ads on its platforms. It cites this as evidence that it’s incentivized to stop them.

For me, this story started a year ago when I investigated a San Diego marketing agency that spent more than $50 million running scam ads on Facebook. If just *one* advertiser represented $50m in bad FB revenue in 2yrs, how much was FB taking in overall?
buzzfeednews.com/article/craigs…

We couldn't figure out how much “bad” revenue Facebook takes in per year, or over the years. The company can't or won't say. Nobody really knows. But like everything that has to do with Facebook, it's big. /end