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Congress asks Mark Zuckerberg to explain why drug dealers are advertising on Facebook and Instagram

https://www.engadget.com/social-media/congress-asks-mark-zuckerberg-to-explain-why-drug-dealers-are-advertising-on-facebook-and-instagram-200541467.html

Nineteen members of Congress are pushing Mark Zuckerberg to explain why Meta has allowed ads for cocaine, ecstasy and other drugs to be shown on Facebook and Instagram.

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ThePrivacyPolicy

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I got an ad once for a group selling stolen credit card numbers too. I must have reported it at least a dozen times but it was always kept up and the report said it didn't break any rules. It only got removed after I just skipped Facebook reports and reported to the police.

otter

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We get posts here too, and on Reddit

The posts here get reported and removed very quickly, sometimes within minutes of the account being created or the first post.

I searched Reddit for the website they were linking and saw the spam posts on Reddit have been up for months.

Few possible differences:

We have a better ratio of users/moderation, where the lower volume of posts means everything can go through human moderators
Our users are more actively trying to keep the platform good by reporting spam
The incentive here is to create a good online platform. The inventive there is profit. The priorities are different as a result

MajorHavoc

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Great points.

I might add:

I strongly suspect that a much bigger fraction of the free volunteer labor moved here, than anyone has realized.

Zuck and Spez know how fucked they are, but they're motivated to downplay the damage to their platforms.

There's an unvirtuous cycle where their platforms have under-resourced moderation, which has allowed bot proliferation, which has made unpaid moderation work a shittier job, which causes moderators to leave, which allows more bot proliferation.

Folks here seem to be saying our moderation tools are objectively poor, but are getting better with each release. So it's the bot spammers whose life gets harder, over time, here.

atrielienz

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It isn't just those factors. There's also the fact that instance owners would rather moderate than get on the wrong side of the law.

jeffw

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I’d be shocked if cops did anything with that. Local police are incompetent (and, to be fair, waaay under resourced) when it comes to cybercrimes. Who did you report it to?

BakerBagel

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You loval police force is probably the most well funded department of your city's budget. It's essentially a jobs program for your towns biggest assholes.

sugar_in_your_tea

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Sure, but they're under-resourced for cybercrimes. They have a lot of beat cops out giving tickets and beating up black people, but probably nobody who knows anything about credit card scams.

Local police need a readjustment of priorities and tiers of staff. Ideally we'd have:

no force authorization and no weapons, can only issue citations - these would be your beat cops pulling people over, directing traffic, and responding to minor disputes
detectives - no force authorization, but can investigate crimes - these show up after the crime to collect evidence
armed enforcers - can arrest and use lethal force, and only show up if the first two groups can't handle it; this is what we have today, but ideally would be a much smaller group than 1

The cybercrime division would fall under group 2, and would probably be just one or two people trained on that type of detective work.

Each tier should have a different uniform, so the public knows exactly who they're dealing with, and each tier would be required to have body cam footage live-streamed to HQ. The first group makes up the biggest part of your force, and which is bigger between 2 and 3 depends on the types of crime that are prevalent in your area.

BakerBagel

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It's not a funding issue, it's a priorities issue

sugar_in_your_tea

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Right, and nobody is claiming they need more funding. It's a resource issue, they don't have the resources (i.e. people) to handle cybercrimes, so they hand it off to an org that does (e.g. FBI). They could get the resources by adjusting how they hire (e.g. in my proposal, 1 would be paid less and make up the bulk of the force, leaving more money for 2 and 3), but that's not how they operate, so they don't have the resources they need to investigate certain types of crimes.

PriorityMotif

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They also bring in the most revenue

xor

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I guess the police at least are able to order Facebook to remove it (sounds like that's what happened) but then yeah, as you say, I expect they will have just escalated to the county/state police, if anything

ThePrivacyPolicy

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I probably don't live in your country 😉

snausagesinablanket

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Same here when I got DM'd a telegram channel for hard drugs. The user was never taken down or warned.

MediaSensationalism

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In my experience several years ago, Facebook was actually super fast to take down bad groups. I must've been reporting so many and with such reliability that they started coming down instantaneously after reporting them.