Digital giants are in bed with scammers, so make them pay
Our legislators seem quick to clamp down on privacy, hate speech and the use of Artificial Intelligence in an increasingly online world.
Yet blatant fraud, scams and illegal, dangerous products can be promoted online – with utter impunity!
Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and Google are awash with scams, usually using paid-for advertising that boost their profits.
How much money they make was highlighted this week when scam victims sued Google for tens of millions. That’s how much Google profited from the London Capital & Finance scam, a Ponzi scheme promoted mainly via ads on the platform.
And this is just the tip of the iceberg. When we challenged Google about advertising illegal goods and outright scams, it responded that it took down well over 3 billion ‘bad ads’ a year. Sorry Google, that’s not good enough. These ads can do a lot of harm before they are taken down… eventually.
Unlike proper publications like newspapers, digital platforms are not held responsible for content, only for taking it down. And they can apparently take a ridiculous amount of time to do even that!
Consumer champion Which? this week revealed how it exposed a car-leasing scam on Instagram in November – yet the offending ad remained live up to early this week. Which? has been repeatedly ‘begging’ Instagram owner Meta (which also owns Facebook) to take it down – to no avail. ‘It’s still live today and its victims keep being scammed,’ @ WhichUK railed in a tweet earlier this week.
Twitter is just as bad. It features a stream of ads that use wellknown people including Tánaiste Micheál Martin and Taoiseach Leo Varadkar in fraudulent and libellous ads for cryptocurrency investment scams.
The new Digital Services Act came into force this year. It was decades in the making – a miserable failing in itself given how fast things move in the digital world. Yet even after all that time it seemingly still fails to bring digital giants to heel over repeatedly profiting from fraud, scams and selling illegal goods.
Instead, it persists with the ridiculous notion that they are not responsible for content, no matter how awful and criminal it is.