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.

Comments

Half baked

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Half baked

[Comrade Ogilvy]

It is an interesting suit, because at this point in time I think it is provable that FB has sufficient technology to comply with this request to not aid fraud at miniscule direct costs. Of course, the indirect costs are what FB worries about: the cost of losing a source of sleazy revenue, the precedent being set that they could significantly reduce some kinds of fraud easily but have avoided doing so.

Who's gonna pay for the "team"?

[140Mandak262Jamuna]

Facebook said: “We do not allow adverts which are misleading or false on Facebook and have explained to Martin Lewis that he should report any adverts that infringe his rights and they will be removed. “We are in direct contact with his team, offering to help and promptly investigating their requests, and only last week confirmed that several adverts and accounts that violated our advertising policies had been taken down.”

So Facebook serious expect everyone to maintain a "team"? And spend time and energy scouring the net?

He should just run fake ads in the name of politicians, and attach really inflammatory and outrageous statements to them. That will get their attention.

Re:Who's gonna pay for the "team"?

[duke_cheetah2003]

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?

Re:Who's gonna pay for the "team"?

[AmiMoJo]

They have advanced face recognition software, they have OCR software that can detect words embedded in images, and they have databases of blocked images that can recognize transformations like scaling or trivial editing. They use all those things for their own benefit, scanning user uploaded content.

All they have to do is turn that on for ads as well, but instead they expect every individual to police the use of their likeness and reputation on Facebook... Which is impossible unless you have a Facebook account.

Re:Who's gonna pay for the "team"?

[Mr_Silver]

Sounds like Facebook is expecting everyone else to do their job of filtering bad actors from the advertisement stream.

Which wouldn't be quite so bad if they actually let you.

I'm constantly bombarded with adverts for Raspberry Pi based retro controls which have no issue with clearly advertising the fact that they come fully loaded with thousands of games from various platforms (Nintendo, Sony and Sega included). Yet when I click on the "report" option the best I can do is tell them that I don't want to see it - there is no "this is blatantly illegal" option.

Similarly, after all the furor over fake news, you would have thought there was a way to report fake news for review and taking down. It turns out there isn't. Again, the best you can do is tell them that you don't want to see it.

Facebook claims that users can report problematic content and advertising, but they can't in a way that makes it extremely clear what the problem is.

Politicians will fix this if they need to

[Roger W Moore]

Facebook said: “We do not allow adverts which are misleading or false on Facebook and have explained to Martin Lewis that he should report any adverts that infringe his rights and they will be removed.

I don't think Facebook quite understand what "allow" means. Clearly, they are allowing these ads to be distributed - if they were not there would not be a problem. Simply having a policay which says that you do not allow it and then going ahead and ignoring it until someone points it out seems very unlikely to cut it because it would make it far too easy for all major media organizations to avoid all libel.

Even if they do win the case, the law will be rapidly changed to make it impossible to win a similar case again. Politicians simply cannot afford to have media getting away with libellous content like this. It might be a financial expert getting libelled today but come the next general election it will be politicians and they know it.

Re:Convenient Ad for facebook?

[duke_cheetah2003]

AI isn't going to solve this problem. Not even close. For as long as automated systems of any kind have existed, we humans have figured out how to game such systems into doing things they're not supposed to do. Depending on an AI to filter your advertisers sounds like folly AT BEST. You need real people, who can read between the lines and see the bullshit where it is. It's just too easy and will remain easy, to manipulate automated systems into an undesired result.

Seriously, how hard is it for Facebook to maintain a proper marketing team that interacts (with humans!) with advertisers, learning who they are, what they're trying to achieve, etc. The race for the bottom is not making any winners, except for those at the very top. Stop it. Pay some people to handle this stuff, humans are better than any AI, always will be.

Re: Win-win

[Archfeld]

It is actually better for the individual in the UK court vs an American court. The bar for libel and slander is lower in the UK. The degree in which the UK values individual reputation and the protection of such is higher in the UK than in the US. I wish the guy luck, and a special place in hell for those who continue to use his name without his permission. After warning Facebook, and having ads pulled, they should be on the look out for more fraud but as usual they will disavow and responsibility or any wrong doing.

Simular story happing now in Aus

[Kellamity]

Where the 'celebrity' was used for erectile disfunction ads.

Facebook don't give a shit about upholding standards, as long as people are clicking on stuff. Maybe a few lawsuits will get them to start caring.

Every day I see posts that violote the groups policy on not having completitions where people are asked to 'tag and share' which is not allowed, but there's no way to actually report it. And clearly, they don't bother inforcing it. People have the images stolen and used on clickpage pages, which no consequence whatsoever to the offenders. Maybe if it's cleaned a little I wouldn't hate being on there so much.

Re: Win-win

[Gaxx]

I think that you maybe missed the substantial reform of libel law that happened in the wake of the Simon Singh case (see http://www.libelreform.org/ and https://www.theguardian.com/la...).

The UK still has less of a legal emphasis on protecting free speech than the US does and that definitely tips things more in favour of the accuser than the accused (relative to the US) but the libel reform bill addressed that balance somewhat and brought libel cases into alignment with other UK law in forcing an innocent-until-proven-guilty assumption.

In short - things are pretty much closer to an even balance between accuser and accused now with more protections for uneven fights between individuals and corporate entities and special protections for scientific publications.

Re:Convenient Ad for facebook?

[drew_kime]

For as long as automated systems of any kind have existed, we humans have figured out how to game such systems into doing things they're not supposed to do.

For as long as human systems have existed we've been figuring out how to game them. Social engineering existed long before AI. It's just a different set of rules now, so there's different ways to exploit them.

Re: Win-win

[mjwx]

It is actually better for the individual in the UK court vs an American court. The bar for libel and slander is lower in the UK. The degree in which the UK values individual reputation and the protection of such is higher in the UK than in the US. I wish the guy luck, and a special place in hell for those who continue to use his name without his permission. After warning Facebook, and having ads pulled, they should be on the look out for more fraud but as usual they will disavow and responsibility or any wrong doing.

Beyond that... The loser pays the winners court costs. This prevents the Big Guy(TM) from threatening the Little Guys(TM) into submission by using high priced lawyers... because if you've got a solid case a high priced lawyer will do it on a no win/no fee basis. There are quite a few Barristers and Queens Councils (a very highly paid lawyers in the UK) who love doing cases like this, they make a killing and look good in the process.