The explanation is that the platform firms operate with a high level of market power, which is another way of saying that they benefit from monopoly or near-monopoly effects that make them relatively immune from things like what their customers want.

This is actually textbook monopoly stuff, well established in antitrust literature and well understood by regulators: when you see a firm institutionalizing how to defend criminal activity as a part of their business model, it's a big flag that said firm probably has some kind of immunity from how healthy, regulated markets operate. Why America has decided not to prosecute corporate criminals anymore (given that at various points in its history it was actually pretty good at this) is the really interesting question of our time.

I think it's just not adversely impacting "big tech", their profits and margins are soaring while they've spent years and years selling counterfeit goods, scam apps, scam videos, scam ads. They have no liability for it (section 230 immunity) and seem to have zero incentive to do better.

I think the same thing but maybe it’s you and me are wrong. Maybe it’s simply more profitable to run scams than it is to do “legit” business selling “real” products and services. Maybe the users who make ads valuable are the ones who are undiscriminating and naive and vulnerable to scams, and those users aren’t bothered by proliferation of scam ads.

Maybe it does hurt the value of “normal” ads to be shown next to scams, but the scam ads are so valuable that it actually works out as a long term net positive

I think that I used to assume that if scams became prominent enough they would produce a backlash, either regulatory or otherwise, but maybe that’s just not the case.

They simply do not care about trust or anything else you think they should care about. The scam ads get probably get clicked ten or a hundred times more than legit ads. This makes money, therefore it is good and should be encouraged. They do not care how much worse the platform gets or how many people get scammed.

Money changes psychology. The brains of the people that work in these departments operate differently. They believe in protection and growth of the revenue - not pay attention to ethics.

They have to work hard to shut out critics as long as possible.

Which quartal number reflects this reduced trust? There is your answer. They never see that negative impact, because they can't see that, which does not happened.

There's a sweet spot they want to hit, where their internal scam ad reduction efforts do enough to make sure people don't leave in droves, and they are totally fine with the scam ads that make it through bringing in revenue.

The last thing they want is regulators forcing them to spend at least $X in resources to limit scam ads to some target and have it hurt their margins.

Exactly. I never ever buy a product advertised on Facebook. Almost without a doubt, the ad turns out to be misleading.

If something looks cool, I will search it instead of clicking through. I have been seen malvertising campaigns on FB (some not even requiring a click).

If the product seems legit and fair priced, I will buy it. Rarely do I find both are true when I learn about it via Facebook. My default is: scam, or at least scamm-y.

Are most people less careful? I wonder.

Genuine clicks on useful ads are a tiny part of ad revenue. There’s no incentive for media to work on that slice of clicks.

Even if we were to accept that people who see scam ads ona platform will be less likely to trust good ads on said platform (and honestly I doubt how impactful that is), it’s not a metric Facebook cares about.

You are not the customer. The customers are the people paying for the ads, and they will keep using it as long as they think it’s better than not using them.

I don't think they care because I'm still on youtube, but I agree. I think of youtube as a very scamy place.

I have my history turned off so I get some really bottom of the barrel ads, questionable medical advice, gross out ads, borderline porn, weird conspiracy theory stuff (5G blocking hats), and straight scams "buy our product or AI will replace your job" and my recent favorite "if you're not buying our product people are manipulating you ... so give us your money so we can help you" (the irony is thick with those).

Youtube is scam / bad idea central when I turn it on.

What's the alternative? Orkut?

While I tend to agree with you, to the point that I've never willingly clicked on an ad, this isn't how most people that I've seen operate.

I actively skip over ads in search results, skip whenever possible in video, and pay to remove them completely if it's offered (subscribing to Kagi and YouTube Premium). If I do end up seeing an ad for something that looks interesting/useful, I don't click on it. I search for it separately. I treat ads the same way I would a random text claiming to be my bank. I don't click the link, I go there on my own so I know I'm in the right place free of any funny business. The side effect of this is the merchant loses context on how effective their ad was.

In contrast, when I see almost anyone else using Google, they actively look at the ads first. They treat the ads as if they were the top organic search results. If they search for "Microsoft" and Microsoft paid for a top ranked ad to their homepage, they will click on the ad link instead of the real organic result a few lines down. This makes these people very susceptible to advertisements posing at legitimate websites, yet their behavior never changes. I've said something to multiple people about skipping down to the actual results, and they claim to like the ads, or don't see a difference and just pick the first link that seems like what they want. Many of these people are otherwise tech savvy, some of whom spent decades working in the tech sector.

It seems we are the weird ones for avoiding the ads or losing trust. After watching MegaLag's 2 most recent videos on YouTube about Honey[0], I can start to see why the companies behind all this don't care. Policing these types of issues lowers their profits, which effectively incentivizes scams and fraud. The people hurt are the merchants and the consumers. You'd think they would be the only two who matter at the end of the day when it comes to advertising, but apparently not.

[0]

Part 1 (from 1 year ago): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vc4yL3YTwWk

Part 2: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wwB3FmbcC88

Part 2.1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qCGT_CKGgFE

When billions are being collected in scams and those organizations are paying for more ads, it doesn't matter what you normally do, it matters what you do when you're emotional, or drunk, or what your parents do

What point are you trying to make? Any company offering above market compensation is engaging in illegal activity?

It's a short leap from "the hacker company" to "the scammer company". A short and very, very, very profitable leap

>One of the riches companies in the world with some very smart people and its ruined by toxic leadership.

The rank and file are complicit. There are people commenting on HN every day who are paid handsomely to work at Meta and to act willfully blind to the awful ethics their company has displayed for two decades.

> One of the riches companies in the world with some very smart people and its ruined by toxic leadership.

Leadership can certainly be blamed, but I think it comes down to their hiring practices. When you prioritise leetcode-isk wrote memorisation and deprioritise intrinsics (like ethics, shocker), you end up with a company full of people who are willing to do anything to achieve their singular goal of making TC go up. Morality or product quality be damned.

> But why do we blame the government? It's completely a problem we create.

Yes but if the government is ineffective at solving the issue with the vast amounts of money we give them, we now have two problems.

Your point basically boils down to "regulators are ineffective, but that's okay because the original problem isn't their fault". Sorry, but I actually care about throwing my hard earned money into the void because it's "ok" that the regulators suck.

This is one of my key arguments AGAINST "libertarianism" - a proper functioning market has three things, consumers, producers, and regulators, and they each need to be well balanced.

If producers have too much power in the market we see distortion, eg. When monopolies exist.

If consumers have too much power in the market we see exploitation.

If regulators have too much power in the market we see stagflation.

Markets don't operate efficiently without all three components.

Twitter also seems to have considerable influence over the US Government. So much so that the US has imposed sanctions on a few people in the EU for suggesting that maybe Twitter should moderate hate speech.

https://townhall.com/tipsheet/dmitri-bolt/2025/12/24/five-eu...

Yeah back in the day evil companies used to kill people in 3rd world countries and give their workers horrible diseases and injuries. I guess this is better?

Meta has been responsible for a lot worse than merely dopamine peddling.

The scamming is pervasive in works of American fiction through the last century - Mark Twain’s works, The Jungle(more than just meat packing industry), Elmer Gantry and Steinbeck. Many of the described scams still take place on industrial scale.

No I've lived in the US my whole life and I agree with you. Ever since I bought my house I feel like I'm constantly bombarded by people trying to scam me out of my money. I'm sure it was always like that but it seems like getting a mortgage put me on some "financially stable guy" list that attracts the vultures. Medical, home repair, finance services. Without constant vigilance it's so easy to get grifted.

> Perhaps it helps to have not grown up in the US. If you've been here your entire life there's a frog boiling syndrome where none of the weirdness seems weird.

Eh - some other countries I've lived are way scammier. The difference in the US is the distinction between legal and illegal scams, and because of better enforcement, most of the "scams" in the US are legal. They can be more sophisticated because the bar is higher here.

All ads are searchable. They found the exact words and phrases that regulators used and then made sure those were clean.

>As a result, Meta decided to take the tactic global, performing similar analyses to assess “scam discoverability” in other countries. “We have built a vast keyword list by country that is meant to mimic what regulators may search for,” one document states. Another described the work as changing the “prevalence perception” of scams on Facebook and Instagram.

> the implied problem is they only deleted searchable ads

Well, more just the ads that matched the specific queries the regulators were using. So yes, they removed some scam ads, but there are probably many more that people are still seeing just because those didn't match the search queries the regulators were searching for.

> It's interesting that Facebook was trying NOT to uncover identities, they're famous for insisting on real names.

It isn't really surprising. If they required real identities, they wouldn't be able to make money from scammers using throw-away accounts, or from entities subject to US sanctions, so there is a monetary incentive not to know the identity of the ad customers.

This is the same tactics VW used. Find out about the test the regulator uses and focus on passing the tests instead of complying with the rules the regulator wants to enforce.

They weren't even deleting the scam ads, that would decrease their revenue. They were just hiding the scam ads from regulators.