Comment by barishnamazov
6 hours ago
The original source is from Reuters article [0].
It is profoundly ironic that Meta is apparently using cloaking techniques against regulators. Cloaking is a black-hat technique where you show one version of a landing page to the ad review bot (e.g., a blog about health) and a different version to the actual user (e.g., a diet pill scam).
Meta has spent years building AI to detect when affiliates cloak their links. Now, according to this report, Meta is essentially cloaking the ads themselves from journalists and regulators by likely filtering based on user profiling, IP ranges, or behavioral signals. They are using the sophisticated targeting tools intended for advertisers to target the "absence" of scrutiny.
[0] https://www.reuters.com/investigations/meta-created-playbook...
"First, they identified the top keywords and celebrity names that Japanese Ad Library users employed to find the fraud ads. Then they ran identical searches repeatedly, deleting ads that appeared fraudulent from the library and Meta’s platforms."
That doesn't sound like cloaking. They really are deleting the ads. They're just concentrating on the ads that the regulators are most likely to see based on what they usually search for.
> The scrubbing, Meta teams explained in documents regarding their efforts to reduce scam discoverability, sought to make problematic content “not findable” for “regulators, investigators and journalists.”
This seems to be the "smoking gun"... but it's unclear from the article what the source or context of the quotations are.
> “not findable” for “regulators, investigators and journalists.”
> but it's unclear from the article what the source or context of the quotations are.
Good point, this quote could just be painting their actions in the poorest possible light.
Not quite. The ads themselves aren't deleted but only not displayed for a subset of keywords. If the ads were deleted no keyword would be able to show these.
So there's Dieselgate for Meta as there is Dieselgate for Honey
Both are American companies, not like VW, so not much will happen
What does this have to do with them being American? You do realize nothing much happened to VW in Europe, I hope.
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Not to mention Uber's little program to detect whether a rider was likely to be law/code enforcement in cities where there were restrictions on Uber operations.