One of the MANY reasons that I deleted my FB account.
From 80,000 Hours.-
Meta’s own internal documents show the company was aware it was profiting from $16 billion a year in scam ads — and that its leadership chose not to act. If this is how a social media company behaves when the stakes are ad revenue, how much should we trust AI companies when the stakes are far higher?
Leaked documents from Meta reveal that 10% of the company’s total revenue — around $16 billion a year — came from ads for scams and goods Meta had itself banned. These likely enabled the theft of $50 billion dollars a year from Americans alone. But when an internal anti-fraud team developed a screening method that halved scam prevalence from China, the documents suggest it was shelved after Zuckerberg was briefed. The team was disbanded, the freeze on fraudulent Chinese ad agencies was lifted, and within months fraud had bounced back to near its previous level. Meta also developed a global playbook for “managing” regulators — including altering its own ad library so that scam ads were removed from results whenever regulators came looking.
Host Rob Wiblin breaks down what the documents show and what they reveal about the limits of voluntary corporate self-regulation — then turns to the bigger question: How much do you trust companies like this — ones willing to put a dollar value on acceptable harm — to handle AI systems capable of making decisions about your healthcare, your finances, and your government?
