That is at times the setting, but it is not always clear. As I personally see it, it has nearly always been clear as glass, but the ‘powered that could be’ doesn’t want to hand over any of the greed it can get, and as a result people get scammed. So I have a few issues with the Reuters article (at https://www.reuters.com/investigations/meta-created-playbook-fend-off-pressure-crack-down-scammers-documents-show-2025-12-31/) and as we read its headline ‘Meta created ‘playbook’ to fend off pressure to crack down on scammers, documents show’ we might think that this giant (aka Meta) is the cause of it all, but that isn’t exactly true. To see this we need to look back the last half century, slightly before Meta (then known as Facebook) was born. So as we are given “As regulators press Meta to crack down on rogue advertisers on Facebook and Instagram, the social media giant has drafted a “playbook” to stall them. Internal documents seen by Reuters reveal its tactics, including efforts to make scam ads “not findable” when authorities search for them.” We are shown a half truth that I see as a near blatant lie. You see, in 1961 a man named Luther Simjian came up with the father and mother of the ATM. An experimental Bankograph (as they named it then) was installed in New York City in 1961 by the City Bank of New York, but removed after six months due to the lack of customer acceptance. But on 27 June 1967 it was reintroduced by the actor Reg Varney as a push to control people pressure at Barclay in London. Think of this as the starting point. As security was upgraded, most security was still set to older concepts, they were not bad, but it all comes from this point. And as the law was set to this setting, it fell behind fast. As such things like Two-Factor Authentication are still concepts to be implemented in banking and auto banking and beyond. So as Meta and others are trying to make the sale of advertising ‘easier’ scammers are really happy to bank in on such opportunity.
Consider three points, the advertiser, its payment and its location are three separate issues, whilst the initial setting is almost never confirmed as these players are set to ease of business and commerce instead of security of business and commerce.
And we see this in the article as “Meta, owner of the two social media platforms, feared Japan would soon force it to verify the identity of all its advertisers, internal documents reviewed by Reuters show. The step would likely reduce fraud but also cost the company revenue.” This is true, but the setting goes far beyond Meta and that is as far as I can tell not set either. So as Reuters gives us “Meta launched an enforcement blitz to reduce the volume of offending ads. But it also sought to make problematic ads less “discoverable” for Japanese regulators, the documents show.” Which bus likely true, but it is a larger field. If the EU, the Commonwealth and America keep shoulder to shoulder to “verify the identity of all its advertisers” we could actually get somewhere, but then the conversation goes into the direction of complication and such, the greed driven are ready to hand victory to the scammers. And as we are given “The documents are part of an internal cache of materials from the past four years in which Meta employees assessed the fast-growing level of fraudulent advertising across its platforms worldwide. Drawn from multiple sources and authored by employees in departments including finance, legal, public policy and safety, the documents also reveal ways that Meta, to protect billions of dollars in ad revenue, has resisted efforts by governments to crack down.” The setting that Japan is trying to overcome, the establishment of identity of advertisers become frightfully clear. And that costs Meta revenue, but it goes far beyond Meta, Amazon is likely to have similar settings and they accept that as the cost of doing business, but the people caught in-between are settled with the bill of BigTech doing business. So as Sandeep Abraham, a former fraud investigator at Meta gives us “Instead of telling me an accurate story about ads on Meta’s platforms, it now just tells me a story about Meta trying to give itself a good grade for regulators.” We are being told the picture that regulators are part of the problem. In stead of the cold hard question “How is the identity of the advertiser established” the people are told a different picture. It would be regarded as Artsy, but not the truth. So whilst the world is ready to accept “The tactic successfully removed some fraudulent advertising of the sort that regulators would want to weed out. But it also served to make the search results that Meta believed regulators were viewing appear cleaner than they otherwise would have. 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.”” The larger question on what happens when these fraudulent go getters get access to more finely trained DML/LLM solutions, to capture the wallets of millions more? That question remains in the background and soon it will be too late, because soon places like America will try nearly anything to keep their shareholders happy and that comes with additional cost of doing business. And that setting is given with “The playbook, as it’s referred to in some of the documents, lays out Meta’s strategy to stall regulators and put off advertiser verification unless new laws leave them no choice.” And again, the lawmakers are shunning their duty, not merely in America, but in Europe and partially the Commonwealth as well. And that is, as I see it, the gist of the setting and whilst we might want to blame Meta, the direct setting is that places like Apple, Google, Microsoft are at least equally guilty. So, as I see it, Microsoft could have done something years ago, but they were chasing Google, instead of becoming real innovators. They might have trailed, but at this point they could have taken a lead and as I see it, they did not.
So as we see Meta, no one is asking where Amazon and Apple were at that time. So how many scammy advertisements did they make way for? I don’t know the number and it will be less than Meta, but is it small enough? I fear not (a speculation on my side).
Oh, and before you think this was all new stuff, consider that I raised this issue in ‘Enabling Crime’ and article I wrote in 2017 (at https://lawlordtobe.com/2017/12/02/enabling-crime/) so this has been over 8 years in rotation, 8 years that BigTech and lawmakers did close to nothing and I was taught an issue like “Two-Factor Authentication” in University (aka UTS) in 2012. So it is over a decade where legal Impotency is shown. It was in the trend of non-repudiation where you and you alone could have set this in motion. The law seems uneasier to bind itself and tech doesn’t want to be bound by this. So as I showed close to 13 years of inability to do something about that setting we are given a slightly different setting, not an incorrect one, but one that is slightly larger than anticipated.
So I wish you all a good day and a lovely time enjoying coffee (I just had mine). Those lazy bastards in Vancouver are likely snoring the night away, it’s half past midnight this morning there.
Lawrence van Rijn - Law Lord to be 