Comment by notahacker
5 hours ago
tbf they generally don't even try with moderation. A few years back they made a multimillion pound settlement with a UK consumer finance guru who was sick his face being used to fake endorsements of scam products promoted mainly via Facebook ads
So you'd think that a sophisticated tech company that had paid that financial penalty would find it pretty easy to have a simple text filter for "Martin Lewis" and perhaps even an image filter for his very distinctive face which pushed those ads into a moderation queue, particularly if they both appear together in the scam-ridden investment opportunity category and the advertiser is a new one (that's probably not going to stick around under that name for very long). But no, they remained a common theme for years afterwards...
And, as the sibling ad points out, if you report stuff that's obvious scams you get told they've reviewed it and found it to be OK. Plus you get more of it promoted into your feed because hitting the report button is a form of interaction with it...
I actually had some sympathy for Facebook when they were condemned for not moderating fake news from Myanmar they have no real capacity to moderate, or condemned for daring to slap the gentlest of content warnings on antivax stuff in contexts they understand perfectly well... but when it comes to ads they get paid for, which is a much smaller fraction of Facebook content that is unambiguously not protected speech or a matter of opinion, their lack of effort is quite something to behold.
FB can't even be absolved for Myanmar, first off because they try to actively be a monopoly https://www.amazon.com/Careless-People-Cautionary-Power-Idea... they were told about it and nothing got done about it