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Facebook Sued Over Fake Ads (theguardian.com)
shilly writes: British finance expert Martin Lewis is suing Facebook for defamation, after a year of trying to persuade the company to stop accepting scam ads featuring his name and image. Facebook insists that he report to them every time he spots a scam; he wants them to check with him before they take money for an ad featuring his name or picture, so he can tell them if it's legit or not. "Lewis said he would not profit from any damages won, which he would donate to charities combating fraud, but that he hoped the action would prompt the site to stamp out scam adverts," reports The Guardian.
Facebook is profiting from no scrutiny on the ads becsude it lowers their costs. This has turned out to be a huge problem. They have facial recognition, they have analytics... They should fix this problem.
Sounds like Facebook is expecting everyone else to do their job of filtering bad actors from the advertisement stream.
That's pretty screwed up. Shouldn't that be Facebook's job, to vet the people buying advertisement on their platform?
Then I realized, if they vet their advertisers, they'd probably have to reject a majority of advertisement dollars cuz they actually bothered to look and can't claim ignorance like they've come to enjoy doing. Broken. Very broken.
While I'm usually of the camp that says leave people alone, if their site is retarded and broken, people will eventually learn that and stop using the site, this is such a scourge on the world, making it so insanely easy for anyone with a few bucks to spread mountains of misinformation.. yeah, something has to be done, this cannot be allowed. Social responsibility > Site freedom.
The really sad part of this all, is that social responsibility seems to be requiring laws and regulations to get these types of companies to be responsible. I mean, shouldn't that be like.. second nature? Don't be 100% a dick?