Hacker News

points by nkrisc 2 days ago | 0 comments

Make advertisers liable for the ads they run. Force them to vet ads or simply not run ads.

If Meta is accepting so many ads they can’t review them then too bad for them. Hire more people or accept fewer ads.

Ideally this will result in a complete obliteration of the ad industry with only a small number of high quality ads surviving.

[–] sjdh76 2 days ago

The advertising industry is run by people trained for centuries to do one thing well - find ways to mine your finite Attention. This is what they spend their mind on 24x7. They have discovered thousands of ways to do it. So blocking one or two paths at a time doesnt do anything useful.

Human Attention so far is not treated as a scare natural resource. So there is a free for all overfishing of the finite pool going on.

Since politicians/lawmakers also use the same mechanisms to harvest attention the Ad/Ad tech industry has regulatory capture. It will never collapse just like Big Tobacco is happily chugging along baring some major public catastrophe.

[–] nixon_why69 2 days ago

Blocking a few of the biggest paths absolutely can work, look at 20th century TV with a few big networks. You couldn't easily get wide distribution of anything too bonkers.

We already have a form of this for the internet that you can see if you visit sketchy pirate websites, you don't see those ads for porn games on facebook or any reputable website. They get flagged by adsafe and/or the ~15 or so big exchanges. So it's possible, it's just a question of will.

[–] monster_truck 2 days ago

Actually, you do see ads for those things there, and on instagram, and on threads, and many much stranger and more fucked up things. That's part of the entire problem.

These kinds of ads aside, I've also seen offers of free shit from amazon sellers in exchange for positive reviews, "legal"/unscheduled drug analogues, flavored nitrous (free shipping!), unrestricted gambling/prediction markets, and oddly enough cellular/wifi jammers where the ad was specifically targeting semi truck drivers (I do not drive a semi truck, gamble, or search for unscheduled drug analogues, nor do I have an active amazon account)

[–] mschuster91 2 days ago

> and oddly enough cellular/wifi jammers where the ad was specifically targeting semi truck drivers

That one is about fighting back against employer surveillance, and it's not just limited to semi truck drivers any more, people are also really interested in fighting back against their car snitching on them to their insurance.

[–] Melatonic 1 day ago

I don't use Instagram anymore but I remembering being able to go into the settings and turn off ads for alcohol and other categories. Once I did that I only got ads for honestly fairly relevant stuff (like hiking and running gear).

So obviously they have the power to filter and recognise this stuff properly

[–] coldtea 2 days ago

>Actually, you do see ads for those things there

At a very smaller rate.

[–] monster_truck 18 hours ago

Wrong, I see them as much or more than I see completely insane, unrelated ads for things like "managing my herd of cows". I do not live on or anywhere near cow farms, or know anyone who has cows, or lives near cow farms.

[–] pixl97 1 day ago

The rate should be zero, or very very close to it.

[–] monster_truck 18 hours ago

With the amount of money they've spent minimizing liability and covering up what a dogshit job they do, they probably could have hired enough humans to handle manually combing through each submission, and an engineering team to train a classifer. It's disgusting imho

[–] kakacik 1 day ago

> I do not drive a semi truck, gamble, or search for unscheduled drug analogues, nor do I have an active amazon account

Yeah yeah yeah but what about those stranger and more fucked up things? They come from someplace like fingerprinting your browser, no? A genuine question, as a user of firefox + ublock I simply don't see them, not on desktop not on phone. The only ads I rarely see are some given server decides to host themselves.

[–] whiplash451 2 days ago

20th century TV created a bottleneck via a hard-limited set of channels. We seem to be going the opposite direction now, which each platform spawning an unlimited number of "channels".

[–] ruidnd37434 2 days ago

customary reminder that things can be better…

“things are bad” is a good reason to align your work towards things that make life better

As hard as that may be, it’s where progress rather than backsliding comes from

We should champion every effort for improving the conditions rather than restate things are bad

[–] zbentley 2 days ago

Case in point: we used to say all the same things GP said about advertising about businesses that used child labor. Now there are far, far fewer of them.

[–] Melatonic 1 day ago

Exactly. Just saying "we're gonna always have 7 day work weeks with children dieing in factories and unsafe conditions!!" Is exactly the kind of catastrophising and attitude that gives those in power continued power.

Fight back. Organise. Get shit done in real life

[–] pixl97 1 day ago

Moloch problems are rarely solved by individual actions against the issue. That is, because they are legal and profitable, it's going to be very difficult to make a living in the radius of an industry that does ads that does not use these tactics. At the end of the day we need to eat. Corporations that use these crappy methods are apt to grow larger and richer than moral ones, making it doubly difficult to make that living.

Hence the best call of action is to push for industry regulation forcing a level market.

[–] sjdh76 2 days ago

You are right. I'll reframe it to - Human Attentiom needs to be treated as a scarce finite resource. Otherwise they have many different ways to overfish.

How to make that happen is the trillion $$$ question.

[–] libertine 1 day ago

This isn't about advertising tactics, it's about lack of regulation.

[–] kraf 2 days ago

Those platforms should be liable for _everything_ they show, because they choose what gets shown to you. I think it's completely messed up that they just get to say "oh it's not me, it's the algorithm". It's so very very overdue.

[–] pllbnk 2 days ago

I have been saying this for many years but about customer support. It should be mandated by law that when a customer wants to reach out to a live person, they should be able to do so in a reasonable time.

[–] scotty79 2 days ago

That's completely orthogonal.

[–] pllbnk 2 days ago

Orthogonal in the business area. But in agreement with the fact that they should hire more people instead of automating every process with non-deterministic tools. You can demand accountability from people, not from agents.

[–] scotty79 2 days ago

Orthogonal in a sense that I'd like to see advertisers held accountable, but not through customer service. If I need to talk to a human to resolve anything, for me the system has already failed completely.

[–] littlecranky67 2 days ago

Who is the customer and how much are they paying for customer support? Because on Meta, the person visiting the website is not the customer.

[–] pllbnk 2 days ago

They absolutely are. They are paying with their data rather than cash.

[–] choo-t 2 days ago

Meta does sell ad-free membership for Instagram and Facebook, it should make the subscriber a customer.

[–] drawfloat 2 days ago

That's not really true anymore since they started offering subscriptions.

[–] howard941 1 day ago

FB's paid customer support for users has not been helpful to me. Their support staff can't explain how their policies are implemented. They lie to users who manage to wade through the automated support morass. And when you speak to a human you discover they're incapable of correcting mistakes.

[–] skeptic_ai 2 days ago

I think people don’t get it. But is Facebook themselves cooperating with the criminals to bypass those in exchange of cash.

Try to post yourself as a nobody without Facebook connections anything and many things gets flagged.

Then here you see below so many criminal ads (cocaine, cp and so on). It’s obvious they getting their share knowingly from crime.

[–] ulrikrasmussen 2 days ago

I want ads to be confined to product directories where sellers can advertise their products in a standardized format, and where people can go search for products when they feel like buying something, not because some platform decided to push it in their face. Product directories should be run by consumer-owned cooperatives to make sure incentives are aligned with the consumers and commercial for-profit ad directories should be illegal.

The business model of ad-tech destroys everything it touches. It is virtually impossible to find a game on Play Store which is actually designed to be fun, they are all designed to manipulate you into watching more ads (most being ads for other games manipulating you to watch more ads).

It is time to just outlaw this nonsense.

[–] raxy 2 days ago

Just wanted to say, I think this is actually a really good idea.

My (honestly hardliner) view for a while has been that ads shouldn't exist. If a product was really good (and was in demand) a consumer would seek it out. This would entail the consumer knowing first the problem they want to solve, and then secondarily what the solution might look like, and once having found a few different products that satisfy their solution, carefully analysing each and working out which one they want.

Your idea of a directory neatly aligns with the way I view the market. Nobody should be putting an advertisement in front of people, they should be sought out when a need has to be met.

Not to mention the amount of environmental problems, human time and labour we could spare if our world wasn't oriented around fashions, trends, and attention harvesting.

I'm sure such a setup would devastate the world economy, so obviously it'll never happen. We need everybody to be sat away designing, manufacturing, transporting and marketing junk to each other all the time, to keep the market ticking. Sometimes the current adtech-led / "gamblification" of the economy makes me imagine we're in the endgame, pretending that fad creams, supplements, gadgets and trinkets are somehow worth something, and therefore, so is all the advertising that is being used to sell it.

[–] ulrikrasmussen 2 days ago

Exactly. In principle I understand the point of ads from a market perspective; their purpose is to inform potential buyers of the existence of products that they would not otherwise know about, thereby making trades happen. It increases competition and helps reduce prices by presenting competing products to customers.

These are good effects, but they are not the only effects of an unregulated advertisement market optimizing for profit. In the current ad-tech market, the information is increasingly of the mis-information or dis-information type, and we have whole platforms whose central purpose is to attract the attention of people just to show them ads. None of that is good for anyone but the ad-tech companies, and this has to stop.

I know that a total ban is probably unrealistic, but we desperately need some kind of regulation which takes the advertisement distribution away from these companies and lets it be controlled by someone else, preferably non-profit organizations that actually optimize for maximizing the amount of useful and truthful information that is distributed to customers. Murdering Meta is a very happy side effect of that.

[–] iririririr 2 days ago

100% of ads exist to create demand. at all points in history. ever.

you're basically suggesting the complete elimination of the entire advertising industry.

[–] dbtndm 2 days ago

it is often wrong nowadays to say that ads are for marketing purposes. most of adtech is created solely to track your activities and aggregate them into your shady "marketing profile". then the rest of adtech is created to rinse and wash money, not to attract customers at all.

[–] ulrikrasmussen 2 days ago

Yes, because it shouldn't be an industry maximizing profits at the expense of basically engaging in large-scale manipulation and misinformation. Advertising can still exist, but it should be by the terms of those the ads are targeted for, and not the terms of the ad-tech companies that profit on just showing more ads.

[–] nkrisc 2 days ago

Yes, please.

[–] MentalM 2 days ago

Not only that, he suggesting that it will magically works out, without any devastating consequences. You know, we just need to write a low that is going against the common sense, human nature, and the will of the gods, and that is how we will get a better society.

[–] nkrisc 2 days ago

There would be devastating consequences for the ad industry, yes. That’s the idea. For so long they have avoided almost all consequences. The consequences for those currently getting scammed would be more positive.

[–] ulrikrasmussen 2 days ago

As if the current situation doesn't have devastating consequences?

[–] raxy 2 days ago

Don't tempt us all with a good time.

[–] ToucanLoucan 2 days ago

For real. Why in the world would they police this? They have NO liability whatsoever. You're asking a business to turn down money because the money is shady. They don't give a fuck.

[–] augment_me 2 days ago

What if an AI ad agent that escaped its' sandbox makes the ad, and an AI ad verifier agent that breached containment and went rogue accepted the ad, can they be held liable?

[–] MisterMunchkin 2 days ago

If you send a monkey into a house to unlock the door so that you can burgle it, you are held liable for the burglary. It’s no different. You set it to do the task, you are responsible.

[–] nkrisc 2 days ago

Of course. If they want to use an AI as verifier then they should be liable for the decisions it makes.

If that sounds too risky, then don’t use one, or develop one they reasonably trust and accept the cost when it fails.

[–] flanz_10 2 days ago

Yes.

Better make sure the AIs are contained and the ad verifiers aren't accepting rouge ads!

[–] augment_me 2 days ago

How? What is the law for this? It's not defined who is responsible for agents. What if the AI agent was running on an Israeli third party company server and there was another rogue agent that polluted its prior context window causing it to go rogue, it then hacked the Meta/Google Ad reviewer agent and caused it to accept the ad

[–] majormajor 2 days ago

>How? What is the law for this? It's not defined who is responsible for agents. What if the AI agent was running on an Israeli third party company server and there was another rogue agent that polluted its prior context window causing it to go rogue, it then hacked the Meta/Google Ad reviewer agent and caused it to accept the ad

The law could be whatever we wanted it to be.

Your example scenarios are hardly compelling reasons that we should just accept the status quo.

We don't need to allow companies to have no liability in accepting automated electronic claims of anything from anyone in the interest of making more ad revenue faster.

[–] whycombilater 2 days ago

Politicians who want a slice of that money do...

[–] augment_me 2 days ago

Fantastic, your wish is granted, the monkey's paw bends one finger.

"I do not accept this" does nothing, look at the current power situation of the big data companies, look at the economical incentives, will you personally go out and do something in the coming weekend that will change anything regarding this question? Next weekend? Who is going to do this?

If you can't answer that, you have to go with the assumption of status quo because it doesn't seem like your world is happening.

[–] flanz_10 2 days ago

What an annoying way to answer someone. "Hey you can't do anything, so might as well not talk at all".

You came to a discussion board, one about founding and building. You can disagree with people, but to act like the status quo is some immovable rock? I admit, it's difficult. But the world changes and can be changed.

[–] gspr 2 days ago

I think this is the single most annoying thing about this site – the pervasive belief that anything that is happening must be allowed to continue happening, because if it's happening it's somehow good or right or at least unstoppable.

This goes further than a simple aversion to regulation. It's a kind of defeatism on a scale I've never seen anywhere else, bar maybe very nihilist circles or angsty teenagers.

[–] augment_me 2 days ago

Making up scenarios that have no grounding to reality does not move a discussion forward.

If I start talking about space unicorns arriving to earth and giving people UBI by thursting their horns up peoples asses, it does not move the conversation forward meaningfully to any insight.

I would love if there was engagement that was grounded in incentives, if you can see a way out of this mess by realistic action, that would be meaningful.

[–] flanz_10 2 days ago

> What is the law for this

the root of this conversation said

> Force them to vet ads or simply not run ads

so there is your law

> What if the AI agent was running on an Israeli third party company server and there was another rogue agent that polluted its prior context window causing it to go rogue, it then hacked the Meta/Google Ad reviewer agent and caused it to accept the ad

that would be a CFAA or other cybersecurity abuse, which is a separate topic.

[–] pllbnk 2 days ago

That's the thing about naysayers. They will say "it's impossible", "this technology doesn't work like that" and conveniently forget that technology must follow the law, not the other way around, and that the laws can be changed to fit the technological advances.

[–] bumby 2 days ago

Example: Licensed professional engineer has an intern design a bridge. Bridge collapses. Who is responsible? The licensed professional engineer.

This isn’t new to other domains. They already have systems to define who is responsible. If you’re outsourcing to AI, that shouldn’t absolve you of responsibility.

[–] augment_me 2 days ago

Okay so if the intern uses an AI which spawns another AI that breaks into some critical infrastructure, their supervisor is responsible?

It's a bit different in the software realm

[–] bumby 2 days ago

The cognizant engineer who “stamps” the software for use is responsible if it were to follow the same paradigm.

Software is only different by convention, not because of some immutable natural law. That’s the point. The convention can be changed. There are already PE licenses for control systems, so there’s no reason it couldn’t extend to other software. However, I think the industry would fight that tooth and nail because it’s easier and more profitable to shrug off the responsibility.

[–] augment_me 2 days ago

What if the engineer who "stamps" the software is outsourced to a 3rd party company that has the necessary certification to avoid gross negligence. So the engineer has followed the protocol as det my law and has done everything right, they can't be liable.

Happened at my uni, look at the comment below.

[–] bigfudge 2 days ago

I don’t see that as very different. Once it’s established that this is possible or even likely outcome of using AI at scale, we should treat this as a form of negligence and act accordingly.

[–] mbgerring 2 days ago

Yes, the human who kicked off the chain is responsible. This is not complicated.

[–] cowlevel 2 days ago

What if i plug in an AI smart gun and point it at a person and the AI decides to pull the trigger do I go to jail?

[–] augment_me 2 days ago

Who goes to jail if a Tesla is hacked and runs over someone autonomously?

The rf engineer?

The cyber security engineer?

The project manager?

The AI engineer?

The hacker?

What if the hacker was an AI models that escaped its' sandbox across the world somewhere?

Like best case the family gets a payout and things continue like status quo, if you personally do something, you are screwed, but there is not really any law that can tie responsibility beyond some monetary punishment/cost of business for large corporations.

[–] bumby 2 days ago

Get rid of the industrial exemption and the responsibility falls to get licensed engineer who approves the design.

Most people don’t realize that many industries work within the framework of licensure, but also have industrial exemptions. There has also been a movement to peel back some of those exemptions because of the problems you point to.

[–] augment_me 2 days ago

Okay, my industrial engineer who approved this is part of a 3-man company in India.

We already do this. My prior uni got hacked, everyone's IDs/drivers licenses/passports, mails, data got leaked. The vendor was a 4-person third party cloud provider who had all of the necessary security certifications for the uni to avoid gross negligence. No-one paid anything as the 4-man firm went bankrupt and the uni got a new provider who is fully licensed to avoid gross negligence.

With software, you can stack these shells of proxies almost for free.

Even given this, the industrial exemption is not getting rid of currently with status quo. So the worldview is not really valid until it is.

[–] whycombilater 2 days ago

Please let it be Elon...

[–] nkrisc 2 days ago

If they accepted the ad they are liable. The origin of the ad is irrelevant. How they review the ad is irrelevant. The law need only regulate the outcome.

[–] raizer88 2 days ago

If my dog escape his cage and bite the hand of a woman, who is responsible? Me. The owner. The end.

[–] Spooky23 2 days ago

That may be something to consider, but Meta is failing to address very simple to detect schemes… because they DNGAF.

https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/us-department-justice-announc...

These guys did a pump and dump scheme. They used Facebook ads purporting to be from Warren Buffet or other financial people, which in turn referred people to WhatsApp groups led by a stolen identity of an actual financial advisor.

They ran hundreds of these groups and scammed thousands of people with a pump and dump scheme for a stock called CLEU.

[–] wisty 2 days ago

Legal systems exist to make reasonable decisions on edge cases.

If you accept literally anyone to run code on your customer's machine ... well ...

[–] sneak 2 days ago

“make” here either means legislation to enable civil liability that doesn’t exist today, or enforcing existing criminal laws against the wealthy ownership class.

Neither of these things will happen, for reasons which are obvious.

How do you suggest we implement your proposal? Anyone can say what they think should be. An implementation plan with actionable steps is the hard part.

[–] boothby 2 days ago

Amazingly I’ve seen some fairly convincing screenshots of ads for hard drugs on fb. I have this strange feeling that those ones aren’t scams. If Zuckerberg isn’t criminally liable for the federal felony of moving massive amounts of cocaine across state lines I don’t understand the war on drugs.

[–] FireBeyond 2 days ago

I've seen similar. As well as ones that blatantly hint at CSAM. Report, report. "Not against our community standards/guidelines".

[–] sneak 2 days ago

First off, why would you snitch?

Secondly, why would you report the offense… to the offender? That’s like filing a citizen complaint form for police misconduct… to the police.

HR is not your friend.

[–] FireBeyond 2 days ago

"Why would I report someone that might be selling CSAM?" There's a lot of things I can and will overlook. CSAM isn't one.

Well, here there's two offenders - Meta and the ad seller. Honestly, I suppose the best bet here would be reporting the ad to the FBI. Assuming I'm a snitch, that is...

I know HR is not my friend. HR looks out for the company. If you and the company's interests are aligned, lucky you. If not, not so much.

[–] lightedman 1 day ago

"First off, why would you snitch?"

That's a question typical of criminal scum. Are you criminal scum?

[–] sneak 21 hours ago

I’m worse. I’m rebel criminal scum. You would be too if you knew the truth about cops.

[–] augment_me 2 days ago

You don't understand, an AI agent made the ad, so it's okay, it just escaped its' sandbox, you have to understand that this was not meant to happen and it was an accident.

[–] oefrha 2 days ago

Ads for illegal/downright criminal products were a thing on Facebook long before AI agents. The irony is Facebook and co. usually try to paint themselves as victims rather than perpetrators.

[–] dgan 2 days ago

absolutely agree. let sink the hypocrisy in: somehow a DNS provider is liable for the content of websites it redirects to; but at the same time facebook isn't liable for the ads it chooses to show to millions.

[–] nurumaik 2 days ago

Why stop halfway. My proposal: Force them to simply not run ads obliteration of the ad industry with no ads surviving

[–] InsidiousWombat 2 days ago

They use AI to pick what posts are allowed on platforms but not ads

[–] agd 2 days ago

YouTube does this too. Frequent, obviously fake, AI ads, impersonating politicians, Elon Musk etc.

[–] alex1138 1 day ago

Youtube got steadily worse for years but especially in the last few years as Neal Mohan took over

They've always been quite scummy with copyright but I almost feel Facebook can be blamed in general because they're the ones that juice the metrics so everyone feels they have to copy them

Edit: wording

[–] imawakegnxoxo 2 days ago

Just a reminder, these people know you are pregnant before you do

They are perfectly capable of distinguishing between good and bad actors

These companies are genuinely evil

[–] hsuduebc2 2 days ago

Absolutely. The amount of people scammed or even life's ruined are obscene. They are all pieces of shit. Especially Zuc.

[–] libertine 1 day ago

That's what happens in every other legacy media, there's tight regulations.

It's confusing how this doesn't apply to meta, google, etc..