Scammy Ads on Facebook and Instagram Viewed 900 Million Times: Report

Facebook, an internet machine that turns lies into money, is absolutely swimming in scammers who buy ads with political messages, according to a new report from ProPublica. The fact that Meta’s platforms like Facebook and Instagram have scams shouldn’t be news to anyone, obviously. But this new article helps give some perspective on the scale of Meta’s problem and the company’s inability to police content at scale. One startling fact from the article? ProPublica has identified scam networks that have run ads seen “900 million times across Facebook and Instagram.”

The new report is part of an investigation by the Tow Center for Digital Journalism at Columbia Journalism School and the Tech Transparency Project, a nonprofit that researches Big Tech companies. And ProPublica notes that most of the scam networks identified in its report are part of lead-generation companies that gather and sell personal info. The ads are often made to look like they’re promoting deals endorsed by federal politicians like Donald Trump and Joe Biden, while others get more local, like an ad identified by ProPublica featuring Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker.

One ad quoted in the piece features a photo of Gov. Pritzker, reading, “The State has recently approved that Illinois residents under the age of 89 may now qualify for up to $35,000 of Funeral Expense Insurance to cover any and all end-of-life expenses!” You can see how this would specifically target vulnerable seniors in Illinois, appealing to people in their 70s or 80s and promising a good deal on funeral insurance.

Other ads are more specifically tied to partisan anger, like an account selling Trump merchandise that reads “liberal activists are ripping Trump-Vance yard signs from the ground, sparking a wave of controversy across the nation.” ProPublica talked with one Trump supporter who didn’t realize he was signing up for a recurring subscription when he bought some Trump coins.

Watch this video of an AI-generated news anchor hawking a “limited-edition Trump-Vance coin” and calling both candidates “handsome devils.”

The anchor warns that “left-wing radical groups” are “campaigning to ban the coin.”

Confused? Get the whole story in TTP’s report: https://t.co/QPFXPQp3Dp pic.twitter.com/ipvJn7Y01O

— Tech Transparency Project (@TTP_updates) October 31, 2024

There were also plenty of ads targeting decent people with claims of free government health insurance. One series of ads mentioned in the new report directed Facebook users to “unethical insurance agents who altered their existing ACA plan details or signed them up for plans they weren’t eligible for.” Why would the scammers do this? Simply to get a commission.

Another shocking fact from the article, which is really worth reading in full, is that even when ads from scammers are identified, accounts in the same network can continue to operate.

From ProPublica:

Meta removed some of the ads after initially approving them, the investigation found, but it failed to catch thousands of others with similar or even identical content. In many cases, even after removing the violating ads, it allowed the associated Facebook pages and accounts to continue operating, enabling the parent networks to spawn new pages and ads.

Gizmodo reached out to Meta on Thursday for comment, specifically to ask about how the scam networks are able to continue operating after their content has been flagged as fraudulent. The company didn’t address our question, instead sending the same statement it sent to ProPublica, insisting it was constantly working to update its enforcement systems.

“We welcome ProPublica’s investigation into this scam activity, which included deceptive ads promoting Affordable Care Act tax credits and government-funded rent subsidies. The ads, some of which were years old, were all available for public review in Meta’s Ad Library, where ads are maintained for seven years,” the statement from a Meta spokesperson reads.

“Our investigation showed that, as part of our ongoing work against scams, impersonation and spam, our enforcement systems had already detected and disabled a large portion of the Pages – and we reviewed and took action against the remainder of these Pages for various policy violations. This is a highly-adversarial space, and we continue to update our enforcement systems to respond to evolving scammer behavior.”

There’s some irony, of course, to the fact that Meta is pushing into artificial intelligence while being so bad at identifying scam ads on its own platform. Finding scams and making sure the accounts associated with those scams can’t buy advertising seems like a perfect job for AI. Or, at least it would be a perfect job for AI if it was anything more than a plagiarism machine.

Facebook isn’t the only platform dealing with scams, of course. Every network from Truth Social to Grindr has scam artists trying to extract money from people illegally. But with its global reach and billions of users, Meta is in a unique position to see itself awash in garbage. The only question that remains is why people willingly subject themselves to the garbage pit every single day.