Make advertisers liable for the ads they run. Force them to vet ads or simply not run ads.

If Meta is accepting so many ads they can’t review them then too bad for them. Hire more people or accept fewer ads.

Ideally this will result in a complete obliteration of the ad industry with only a small number of high quality ads surviving.

Those platforms should be liable for _everything_ they show, because they choose what gets shown to you. I think it's completely messed up that they just get to say "oh it's not me, it's the algorithm". It's so very very overdue.

The advertising industry is run by people trained for centuries to do one thing well - find ways to mine your finite Attention. This is what they spend their mind on 24x7. They have discovered thousands of ways to do it. So blocking one or two paths at a time doesnt do anything useful.

Human Attention so far is not treated as a scare natural resource. So there is a free for all overfishing of the finite pool going on.

Since politicians/lawmakers also use the same mechanisms to harvest attention the Ad/Ad tech industry has regulatory capture. It will never collapse just like Big Tobacco is happily chugging along baring some major public catastrophe.

Blocking a few of the biggest paths absolutely can work, look at 20th century TV with a few big networks. You couldn't easily get wide distribution of anything too bonkers.

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.

customary reminder that things can be better…

“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

Case in point: we used to say all the same things GP said about advertising about businesses that used child labor. Now there are far, far fewer of them.

What if an AI ad agent that escaped its' sandbox makes the ad, and an AI ad verifier agent that breached containment and went rogue accepted the ad, can they be held liable?

Yes.

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

How? What is the law for this? It's not defined who is responsible for agents. What if the AI agent was running on an Israeli third party company server and there was another rogue agent that polluted its prior context window causing it to go rogue, it then hacked the Meta/Google Ad reviewer agent and caused it to accept the ad

> What is the law for this

the root of this conversation said

> Force them to vet ads or simply not run ads

so there is your law

> What if the AI agent was running on an Israeli third party company server and there was another rogue agent that polluted its prior context window causing it to go rogue, it then hacked the Meta/Google Ad reviewer agent and caused it to accept the ad

that would be a CFAA or other cybersecurity abuse, which is a separate topic.

>How? What is the law for this? It's not defined who is responsible for agents. What if the AI agent was running on an Israeli third party company server and there was another rogue agent that polluted its prior context window causing it to go rogue, it then hacked the Meta/Google Ad reviewer agent and caused it to accept the ad

The law could be whatever we wanted it to be.

Your example scenarios are hardly compelling reasons that we should just accept the status quo.

We don't need to allow companies to have no liability in accepting automated electronic claims of anything from anyone in the interest of making more ad revenue faster.

Example: Licensed professional engineer has an intern design a bridge. Bridge collapses. Who is responsible? The licensed professional engineer.

This isn’t new to other domains. They already have systems to define who is responsible. If you’re outsourcing to AI, that shouldn’t absolve you of responsibility.

Okay so if the intern uses an AI which spawns another AI that breaks into some critical infrastructure, their supervisor is responsible?

It's a bit different in the software realm

The cognizant engineer who “stamps” the software for use is responsible if it were to follow the same paradigm.

Software is only different by convention, not because of some immutable natural law. That’s the point. The convention can be changed. There are already PE licenses for control systems, so there’s no reason it couldn’t extend to other software. However, I think the industry would fight that tooth and nail because it’s easier and more profitable to shrug off the responsibility.

What if the engineer who "stamps" the software is outsourced to a 3rd party company that has the necessary certification to avoid gross negligence. So the engineer has followed the protocol as det my law and has done everything right, they can't be liable.

Happened at my uni, look at the comment below.

What if i plug in an AI smart gun and point it at a person and the AI decides to pull the trigger do I go to jail?

Who goes to jail if a Tesla is hacked and runs over someone autonomously?

The rf engineer?

The cyber security engineer?

The project manager?

The AI engineer?

The hacker?

What if the hacker was an AI models that escaped its' sandbox across the world somewhere?

Like best case the family gets a payout and things continue like status quo, if you personally do something, you are screwed, but there is not really any law that can tie responsibility beyond some monetary punishment/cost of business for large corporations.

Get rid of the industrial exemption and the responsibility falls to get licensed engineer who approves the design.

Most people don’t realize that many industries work within the framework of licensure, but also have industrial exemptions. There has also been a movement to peel back some of those exemptions because of the problems you point to.

Okay, my industrial engineer who approved this is part of a 3-man company in India.

We already do this. My prior uni got hacked, everyone's IDs/drivers licenses/passports, mails, data got leaked. The vendor was a 4-person third party cloud provider who had all of the necessary security certifications for the uni to avoid gross negligence. No-one paid anything as the 4-man firm went bankrupt and the uni got a new provider who is fully licensed to avoid gross negligence.

With software, you can stack these shells of proxies almost for free.

Even given this, the industrial exemption is not getting rid of currently with status quo. So the worldview is not really valid until it is.

I’m not sure I follow. An industrial engineer is not the same as an industrial engineering exemption. I can’t absolve myself from the bridge design because I hired a designer in a different country; to use that design here, it must be approved by an engineer with jurisdiction. That’s who holds the responsibility.

Which licensed engineer stamped the software? The answer is probably “none”, because licensed engineers are liable even if their company is bankrupt. The person holds the license, not the company so it sounds like we’re talking past one another.

Sorry I mistyped, it meant to be responsible engineer given the industrial exemption.

I worked in HW before for home electronics that had to be certified. There was no responsibility for the engineers, the cert house had to take on this responsibility, and they had a shell certification company hired who would conduct the tests and take on the responsibility. At one point there was a litigation due to an RF leakage from a LATAM-bound device causing signaling issues to public infra, but it went nowhere because of the layering of responsibility made by the cert houses. No engineer was responsible.

Legal systems exist to make reasonable decisions on edge cases.

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

I think people don’t get it. But is Facebook themselves cooperating with the criminals to bypass those in exchange of cash.

Try to post yourself as a nobody without Facebook connections anything and many things gets flagged.

Then here you see below so many criminal ads (cocaine, cp and so on). It’s obvious they getting their share knowingly from crime.

Just a reminder, these people know you are pregnant before you do

They are perfectly capable of distinguishing between good and bad actors

These companies are genuinely evil

Why stop halfway. My proposal: *Force them to simply not run ads *obliteration of the ad industry with no ads surviving

Amazingly I’ve seen some fairly convincing screenshots of ads for hard drugs on fb. I have this strange feeling that those ones aren’t scams. If Zuckerberg isn’t criminally liable for the federal felony of moving massive amounts of cocaine across state lines I don’t understand the war on drugs.

I've seen similar. As well as ones that blatantly hint at CSAM. Report, report. "Not against our community standards/guidelines".

"Why would I report someone that might be selling CSAM?" There's a lot of things I can and will overlook. CSAM isn't one.

Well, here there's two offenders - Meta and the ad seller. Honestly, I suppose the best bet here would be reporting the ad to the FBI. Assuming I'm a snitch, that is...

I know HR is not my friend. HR looks out for the company. If you and the company's interests are aligned, lucky you. If not, not so much.

You don't understand, an AI agent made the ad, so it's okay, it just escaped its' sandbox, you have to understand that this was not meant to happen and it was an accident.

Ads for illegal/downright criminal products were a thing on Facebook long before AI agents. The irony is Facebook and co. usually try to paint themselves as victims rather than perpetrators.

“make” here either means legislation to enable civil liability that doesn’t exist today, or enforcing existing criminal laws against the wealthy ownership class.

Neither of these things will happen, for reasons which are obvious.

How do you suggest we implement your proposal? Anyone can say what they think should be. An implementation plan with actionable steps is the hard part.

YouTube does this too. Frequent, obviously fake, AI ads, impersonating politicians, Elon Musk etc.

For real. Why in the world would they police this? They have NO liability whatsoever. You're asking a business to turn down money because the money is shady. They don't give a fuck.

The amount of times I’ve reported obvious scam ads on instagram just to receive a “we found this to not be in violation of our terms” is so disheartening.

Upwards of half the ads I see on YouTube are obvious scams. There's no way nobody at Alphabet is aware.

Search for 4TB or 8TB USB sticks on amazon.com. You’ll find dozens or hundreds of $20-30 16GB or 32GB sticks with hacked firmware to report a multi-terabyte drive size, and dozens of one star reviews talking about how it lost their data. Those sizes, if real, would be $400+.

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?

Lots of them were using Jordan Peterson's voice for a while

In theory doesn't this open them up to legal action?

Prior to being notified they could claim they were unaware it was fraud. But after being notified of it, they have confirmed back that they reviewed it. Yet they continue to show it, making them aware and participating in the distribution.

I bought a “smart” bike headlight from an Instagram ad. They sent me a regular old led headlight with a tracking number and everything. Instagram refused to take down the ad even after submitting proof.

I see obviously scummy ads on Apple News and now I see ads on Apple Maps as well. Ads are a bane on society - even accounting for free/cheap access to information we get in return.

Same on Google and Youtube. The CEOs and controlling shareholders should be sent straight to jail. Deliberate profiteering from crime!

eBay is also selling obvious counterfeit items. Especially expensive car parts. I can't sell my shit anymore because there are so many fakes, and because of the flood of junk nobody can even find the genuine items.

Initially reading the title my mind thought "Cuban...Cuban defector/intelligence agent?! Oh wow I wonder what they have to reveal?"

It's Mark Cuban. Still worth reading tho. But I found my own personal reaction fascinating because I am not sure I would have clicked through if the title included the full "Mark Cuban".

Mark Cuban is a bit of a broken clock is right twice a day type pundit on many topics. There's a reason why Russ Hannemann in HBO's Silicon Valley was based on him...

His primary achievement in life was to persuade Yahoo! to buy his broadcast.com business for nearly $6B (which was shut down very soon thereafter).

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

Preceding that, really, his primary accomplishment was the Russ Hanneman-esque literal "RADIO ON THE INTERNET", which of course what was broadcast.com

I'm just old enough to remember the hype and growth around realnetworks and realplayer in the seattle area too.

Not into that billionaire on billionaire action?

Cuban is closer to a commoner than he is to Zuckerberg.

These companies were profitable on higher quality ads in earlier years. Does this drop in quality indicate the ad well has run dry, so to speak? Or the demands for revenue are greater, necessitating a drop in standards?

Are we sure they were higher quality? They estimated in 2024 that 10% of their revenue was from fraudulent ads or ads that should be banned based on their own rules.

https://www.reuters.com/investigations/meta-is-earning-fortune-deluge-fraudulent-ads-documents-show-2025-11-06/

This is nothing new, profiting off of fraud and abuse has been the name of the game for all the big advertisers from the beginning.

My vague recollection from 10 or 15 years ago was higher quality ads.

I commented in another thread recently that almost 15 years ago on a high traffic site we were full of obvious scam ads, tons of fake world of Warcraft clones with busty characters asking you to play, tons of you’re the 1 millionth visitor click here to claim your prize, download buttons. Even the occasional penis enlargement pills and stuff would come through. I really think even if the scale is maybe amping up, things weren’t much better 20 years ago, the web was just smaller, fewer people were paying attention, and the folks who were there had grown up learning to spot that stuff from the beginning.

like this one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9p0pdiTOlzw

I doubt it. Advertising there is pretty expensive and you don't really have a choice today if you want advertise something. They just don't care, they are greedy mfs.

Yeah, anyone expecting Zuck to give a fraction of a shit is hopelessly naive.

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.

Scams might be more profitable than legitimate businesses.

I worked in a team that was only tangently related to this. There are hundreds of people at Meta who knew this was going on.

I interned there years ago and was disgusted by the pervasive sense of apathy towards the impact of the product in the world. the rot starts at the top

Yes they were doing the same is Australia ... I wouldn't know if they're still doing it here since one of the favourite scams used an Australian who took them to court. [1]

[1] https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-08-11/andrew-forrest-meta-scam-ads-case/107025146

Meta has to invest more money into screening advertising so they ban more ads and therefore make less money.

Unless there is a genuine financial (or legal) impact, they have no incentive.

Companies in the US still use a huge array of known harmful ingredients because they work better and are cheaper.

Blame the government for lack of regulation, that's what they're there for.

It's pretty crazy this is tolerated by society, I know several older people scammed using Metas products.

And that isn't even counting the Instagram ads my wife falls for.

The cool thing is that once scammed, the ~victims~ willing participants are effectively silenced due to a mixture of shame, and utter despair.

As a TechBro, not taking advantage of that would be negligence.

Can we do YouTube next? Every YouTube ad these days is deception and fraud.

We've completely normalised big tech pushing straight up scams on the population.

TBF the USA is a country that normalizes scamming and deceptive practices since...1776.

Meta has no moral compass and does not care whom they harm.

Remove section 230 fixes this problem. Every other business is responsible for what happens at their place of business/publications/sites. Social media sites follow the same rules as everyone else.

No other business is liable in this manner. Run a classified ad in a newspaper, use it to scam someone, newspaper not liable. Hack into router at Starbucks, use it for fraud, Starbucks not liable. Put ad in your front lawn, for fraud, you’re not liable.

Making each of these liable really makes it easy to destroy your competition or enemies - commit crime via such methods, they suffer.

> Run a classified ad in a newspaper

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.

No other platform has the scale that Meta does. Any company making as much money as they do can't claim they can't spend an extra $20 million/year to even pretend to fight the issue.

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

they have no obligation unless there is a law that says they have an obligation. otherwise every penny spent is penny less for shareholders.

talking about morality and obligation in the context of meta, one of the most vile and evil corporations ever is not going to get us anywhere

Removing section 230 does not solve this problem. Section 230 does not do what you think it does.

I don't see how section 230 covers them when so many of these scams get reported only for Meta to respond saying they didn't find any issues.

I feel like whenever S230 comes up and I see people defending it I get confused because the defense doesn't seem to address what seems to be the concern of the people saying it needs removing (or more realistically reforming).

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?

You're just responding here by saying "by law they are not thing X" in response to people who are saying "maybe the law should be different because they sure act like thing X".

OK, fine. But they are also an ad network, which absolutely acts as a publisher. I think they should be liable for the revenue they bring in from knowingly fraudulent ads.

Legal definitions can should change in order to keep up with society and technology.

When social media chooses what to display in a user’s feed—even if the content is 3P generated— then it starts to look an awful lot like a publisher. Would you consider a newspaper not to be a publisher of its own op-Ed page? How about the old Reader’s Digest?

You beat me to it.

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.

Paid advertisements should be exempt from Section 230.

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.

While I like the general thrust of that idea, there are some kinks to work out.

For example, suppose someone pays $/month for Cubic Zirconia Membership Tier on a site that boosts their posts over the hoi polloi.

That person makes a post hyping up their company or product with a link. Isn't that also a "paid advertisement", just with a different payment scheme? What happens if their product is a scam or otherwise legally-problematic? If gets Section 230 protection, how can we prevent sites/advertisers from abusing the new definition?

As reported on by CBC news and others:

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/vietnam-canadians-fake-ai-9.7318612

https://ici.radio-canada.ca/rci/en/news/2151393/more-fake-cbc-ads-investigation

https://mediatechdemocracy.com/en/publications/ai-scam-platforms_2025/

general search: https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-d&q=cbc+news+facebook+ai+scam+ads

It seems quite obvious that Facebook knows and doesn't care, because it's revenue.

The ad Yahoo puts in this article is amazingly ironic

> Jeff Bezos backs a platform that lets anyone invest in rental homes for as little as $100 — 6 ways to build wealth like a landlord without actually being one

You could buy a share of VNQ for $96.23 as of market close today, and I'm sure Jeff Bezos at least has some exposure to it, so I guess it's factually true? Heh.

> I'm sure Jeff Bezos at least has some exposure to it

Right, through his 401k

What are they supposed to do, not run AI deepfake scam ads?

Have you guys got AI ads for Tai Chi Walking thst supposedly melts fat in 45 days by just walking?

I have a terrible idea: an ad blocker that only blocks AI generated ads. It submits the ad image/copy to Gemini and if it is not a fake product the ad is displayed. I'm confident that Gemini would do a pretty good job at identifying these scams and that the extension would demonstrate how easy it would be for Google to do it themselves. If they and their employees cared.

I could LLM this up but eh. It won't actually convince Googlers to do the right thing so it'll just stay a terrible idea.

It's not like that would save you from the scam ads. They were a problem before AI and if they see their AI ads blocked in large volume, they'll switch back to non-AI generated ads.

I can't remember the last time I saw an ad on instagram that wasn't some kind of scam.

I know Snap might not be that popular here, but what is your experience with Snap ads? Same amount of scam or more?

No amount of hate this fucking company gets will ever be enough.

The irony behind this article serving AI slop ads that are likely malicious.

eBay is also knowingly complicit in enabling completely fraudulent sellers, by policy, at scale.

It improves their bottom line, so everyone there is disincentivized to fix it.

I wouldn’t argue they are “knowingly complicit” as much as they are “willfully blind.”