Blame who?

You see, we all like to blame the first party we see and the richer that person is, the more guilty he can be painted. That was the setting I saw in the Reuters story (at https://www.reuters.com/investigations/meta-is-earning-fortune-deluge-fraudulent-ads-documents-show-2025-11-06/) where we are given ‘Meta is earning a fortune on a deluge of fraudulent ads, documents show’ and the underlying text “Meta projected 10% of its 2024 revenue would come from ads for scams and banned goods, documents seen by Reuters show. And the social media giant internally estimates that its platforms show users 15 billion scam ads a day. Among its responses to suspected rogue marketers: charging them a premium for ads – and issuing reports on ’Scammiest Scammers.’” Seems to lay the blame squarely in the lap of Sir Mark Anthony Zacharias of the Zacharians from the city of Rome (I need to introduce drama here) but is that correct? I am not claiming he is innocent, but is it completely there? Or is there another side to this. You see, Meta, Facebook and legions others are in that same setting. What brings out the stage of Meta is the numbers of ‘willing to be fooled fish’ in that batter. And when we are given “A cache of previously unreported documents reviewed by Reuters also shows that the social-media giant for at least three years failed to identify and stop an avalanche of ads that exposed Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp’s billions of users to fraudulent e-commerce and investment schemes, illegal online casinos, and the sale of banned medical products.” We see the blame and the blame at the top of the hill is a youthful young sprout (41) called Mark Zuckerberg with his $251,000 million in his wallet (I am willing to wager that this amount does not fit in his wallet) and there is a reason for my approach here. You see, everyone is so happy that there is a setting for advertisements and that ball is thrown all over the place and as I personally see it, I reckon that LinkedIn is in a similar place and there another setting exists. The scammers place an job ad in LinkedIn and from there they get their pool of optional gophers to dig into. In the last week I have had over half a dozen scam attempts and I believe the source to be LinkedIn. As such I have a different setting. I reckon it becomes a massive essential development to tackle the Advertisement settings of these settings. Better protection is required and larger systems are required to vet the advertisers. I know that all kinds of people will object for whatever reason, but that means that you do not get to whine if you are scammed. And what about the FTC? The FTC has primary responsibility for determining whether specific advertising is false or misleading, and for taking action against the sponsors of such material. You can report consumer fraud to the FTC. So what did they have to say? And that becomes interesting as the Article by Jeff Horwitz does not mention the FTC, not even once. So what did they have to say? Or was the win here to paint the guy with the big wallet? So how does that play out with LinkedIn, what about TikTok (I am not on TikTok, so I am clueless here), I also dropped Facebook over a year ago. 

But the setting is clear, the Reuters story is massively not-finished. And there is a bigger setting. We went with the old settings and applied them to social media, but there are different rules that need to be applied and a simple portal or over the phone advertisement sale will not be sufficient for the safety of the consumers getting scammed. So, basically I am merely on LinkedIn and as such (with the scammers to try me) there is every chance that they have a similar problem and in that setting there are several job sites that need thorough sanitation (my personal view) because they are in the setting that every advertiser is revenue in the bank and that is not always the case. 

So the short and sweet of it is that there is little doubt that Mark Zuckerberg holds some of the blame, some, not all. Because as I see it, the FTC has a much bigger problem. And where is the Federal Trade Commission in all of this? And when we see “A cache of previously unreported documents reviewed by Reuters also shows that the social-media giant for at least three years failed to identify and stop an avalanche of ads that exposed Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp’s billions of users to fraudulent e-commerce and investment schemes, illegal online casinos, and the sale of banned medical products.” As such the FTC remained dumb dumb for over three years? And Reuters never fave that any thought? Neither did many other players and the FTC never went to the media saying that the advertisements require a larger overhaul giving them a new setting of hunting down scammers. And as most of them are abroad, other settings need to be considered, but Reuters missed that part too.

Have a great day and if you get an email from a prince in Nigeria telling you that you inherited a million dollars, there is a chance that this is not on the up and up.