I've bought shirts I've seen through Facebook ads before. Ads can work, but Facebook is propped up with so many scams these days you have to wonder at what point do they get investigated over it? Amazon has had a similar problem, I've seen loads of threads here over it. I have been fortunate enough that most things I've bought off amazon have been legit.

Yes, it often works. Ads are basically the only way for small business discovery.

While I suppose I haven't technically seen a recent scam ad pretending to be a major brand, I have seen use of copyrighted art (Disney or anime characters), and Elon Musk's face, to imply they represented a major brand.

I took an IEC power cable that came with a no-name broken printer my folks bought off Amazon. It was rated for the usual North American 120V/15A, but the conductors on the inside were hardly suitable. Measuring with cheap calipers, I reckoned they were good for about 1/10th of that. Similarly dangerous products with any of the generic electronics currently selling on Amazon/Temu/eBay/et al. Poor isolation, poor grounding, underrated wires, incorrect fuses, knock-off ICs, lord knows what kind of chemical treatments and/or lead content; It's as if regulations no longer exist, since there's no longer any fixed target that can be sued to enforce them. Something will need to be done directly to Amazon that will cause them to put a check on these products, but that seems laughably naive in the current political contexts.

the covid censorship stuff is still an underdiscussed scar on humanity, even on this platform!

> seriously? i can't see posts chronologically without an account? on TWITTER???

From twitter's POV, that's a feature, not a bug. It's intentional.

You don't have to socially engineer someone who already doesn't care ;)

What's your mother's maiden name? (Humor)

My username is a dumb old name, but it's the one I have.

is it really that difficult to conclude support quality is tied to overall advertiser spend?

So basically the suckers stayed?

is this still really the case? I feel like Facebook Marketplace has been significantly more dead than even last year. and it definitely seems completely dead for things like rental listings.

You're right. But there's a generational aspect to this too.

Younger generations won't touch Facebook. It's seen as a platform for "old" people. So Facebook is on a modest decline. (Enter Instagram and Tiktok and all that to fill the void...)

It doesn't sound silly and Facebook is definitely not as relevant as it was 10 years ago.

I think, if someone refuses to interact with you unless it's over their preferred corporate advertising-delivery platform, then they really aren't your friend. Real friends are willing to put in effort and at least agree on a least common denominator communication channel!

My friends know I am not on Facebook. If they really want me to invite me to an event, they know how to reach me, and they do. Anything being communicated out only on Facebook, I just don't go to, and I probably wouldn't want to go to it anyway.

I've been off of Facebook for so long, I don't even remember when I quit. At least 10 years ago, probably 15. And I never joined Instagram, TikTok, or any of these other ad-delivery platforms. I don't feel that I am any more lonely or more detached from society because of it.

it is how it is, but nothing's stopping any of us from reaching out or calling a friend or sending a calendar invite. I used Facebook for a local animal shelter I was volunteering at, but from the infinite scroll filled with infinite ads, very little local things in the middle using "FB Purity" firefox addon to hide all the garbage you see how much garbage is actually there. it feels like I pulled away from a dark matrix of things designed to keep us hooked, then I look around and see everybody else hooked, commenting with bots, sharing facebook encouraging memes/new age spirituality posts and fb doing all it could to hook everybody's attention, getting riled up against political opinions, bots.

is the loneliness worth it? probably not. is the freedom? yes.

> where I decided to grit my teeth and accept the data hoarding companies and dark patterns as a tradeoff for being able to interact with people who couldn't care less about the technicalities.

I know, right? that infinite scroll/showing all the good things on the timelines isn't their real life, they're filling a void within themselves surfing short videos and voicing opinions on nearly everything.

even Zuckerberg said Facebook isn't for making/interacting with friends anymore, it's other things, and not good things.

you're not alone, and you're not detached from society, you're just unplugged from the matrix. of course I say this while browsing subreddits and hn, but hobbies and activities where we meet people, these are always going to be the best thing available to us. in the digital world there's plenty of people who'd be down for a LAN, a hangout, an event like going hiking, and I've met some cool people outside of social media but there's many days where it was me, 4 walls, a book/finding things to occupy my time.

trust me you did yourself a solid.

They globally reset the privacy settings for pretty entertaining reasons. Every few years a post goes around saying crazy privacy things that gives you instructions to change your privacy settings to only “share with yourself”. If you’re dumb enough to do it, you basically shadow-ban yourself. If enough people do it, they have to change the settings back because also those same people will complain about their aunt/neighbor/dad/sister whatever not being able to see their posts and have no idea why.

Liability is the answer to a lot of problems or lack of liability is the cause. Online BS can be solved if platforms were liable. Corporate BS can be solved if the humans at the top are liable.

> “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.

Needs verification on the normal user side of the experience. Like noted, unclear whether the ads are completely deleted, or just deleted from what regulators would return in search results.

Later part makes it sounds like the ads were at least deleted from the Japanese / Taiwan results areas completely, and then just redistributed to other geographic areas.

  "If an unverified advertiser is blocked from showing ads in Taiwan, for example, Meta will show those ads more frequently to users elsewhere, creating a whack-a-mole dynamic in which scam ads prohibited in one jurisdiction pop up in another."

Notably, from a different article about fake accounts, and how much they cost, Japan's regulation seems to be working (at least somewhat). [1] Fake Accounts for Facebook Available (US, 157,401, @$0.13/account; Japan, 16, @$3.00/account, Dec 31st, 2025 data)

[1] https://cotsi.org/platforms?view=map&platform=fb

If there are multiple ads (and why would there not be multiple ads?), deleting the one advertised using keyword X does nothing to the one advertised using keyword Y.

What does this have to do with them being American? You do realize nothing much happened to VW in Europe, I hope.

A prepaid card doesn't prevent you from being liable for a bill. This is like how leaving your wallet at home when you visit a resteraunt doesn't entitle you to free food because they don't charge you up front.

I'm not sure, but starting with the ads that appear with most popular searches isn't a bad idea per se. It's a bit like sending law enforcement to protect popular areas.

>Restaurant seen throwing waste in dumpster after removing it from food inspector's plate. Insists there's no other waste on other plates, apparently without checking.

That seems... kinda reasonable?

Health inspector: "hey it looks like your ice machine is dirty, and you're not keeping foods at a hot enough temperature"

Restaurant: "ok we'll clean our ice machines more carefully and install thermometers to monitor the temperature of our hot trays"

Journalist: "Restaurant made health violations harder to find instead of removing them!"

Would it be better if the restaurant was proactively fixing issues before the health inspector brought it up? Yes. Does it make sense to imply that the restaurant was acting maliciously by making health violations "harder to find"? No.