Big brands freeze out Facebook’s hateful ads
Fraudulent investment schemes and unregulated hate speech drives move by heavy spenders to shun internet giants
TOYMAKER Lego is one of the latest of many big brands – including Guinness-maker Diageo and Microsoft – to boycott Facebook in a powerful and growing global protest about the proliferation of hate speech and misinformation on the platform.
The protest was initiated by the civil liberties group Stop Hate For Profit, which has a petition for individual consumers to sign on its website.
I was happy to sign it. But, alas, hate speech is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to what tech giants are getting away with by refusing to invest more in policing advertising and other content.
They gladly accept payment for clearly suspect ads, while washing their hands of any responsibility for the crimes they are facilitating.
Such frauds are causing untold damage. Details recently emerged behind one shameful scam facilitated by lax advertising policies of tech giants that ruined thousands of lives worldwide.
You’ve probably seen some of their ads. They featured celebrities, including chef Gordon Ramsay, British money expert Martin Lewis and actor Hugh Jackman, all proclaiming how they made a fortune through an investment scheme.
In one ad I’ve seen Gordon Ramsay boasting of how he owned around half a dozen Bentleys thanks to his investments. Needless to say, it was all lies. These celebrities had been outrageously slandered and anyone who signed up was duped and intimidated into handing over sums ranging from €50 to one case of €70,000.
A whistleblower told the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP) how the Ukraine-based operation employing 200 scammers would ‘squeeze the money’ from clients until they were down to ‘the last cent’.
They enticed people to invest in the fake cryptocurrency scheme, then took money from their bank accounts, from their wages and even drove some to borrow before taking that money too, leaving them in dire straits.
‘Clients’ were mainly ‘old people and really needed someone to talk to,’ the whistleblower said.
Customers were described in documents as ‘stupid’ and pursued for their last cent even after bankruptcy. One note on a victim’s file seen by the OCCRP reads: ‘Getting f**ed every month for at least 1000 EUR. Gets pension on the 20th/ works every Tuesday.’
The whistleblower was quoted as saying: ‘People lost their savings – they lost their dreams. They tried to … maybe to help their children... They were cheated and thrown away just like s***.’
And where did the victims see the ads? On Facebook and other social media platforms, who took a sizeable chunk of ad revenue from the €60m-a-year scam.
How easy it still is for scammers to advertise on Google (through which I have also seen dubious bitcoin ads with fake Irish celebrity endorsements) was also highlighted in this month’s Which? magazine.
Which? investigators invented a dubious company and advertised it on the search engine. ‘We found that while Google “reviews” the adverts, this process does not require any proof that the business is valid. All we needed was a Gmail address,’ the magazine reported.
‘Online platforms do take steps to block bad ads,’ Which? investigators concluded. ‘But we are concerned with the amount of fake and fraudulent content that slips through.’
The EU legal framework is considered to be among the toughest in regulating Big Tech companies. Yet, incredibly, under current rules our data privacy is highly protected, while criminals like the Ukrainian gang have a field day because
platforms and search engines are deemed not to be responsible for the content that they host.
Grannies are prosecuted for posting pictures of their children on Facebook, while scammer gangs can ruin lives all over the world with lying, slanderous, criminal ads enabled by Facebook without the digital giant being called to account.
Much of what strict data privacy laws have done so far done to change our lives, in my own personal experience, seems petty, ludicrous and incomprehensible.
For example, when I visited my dentist recently I had to sign a form so she could tell another dentist in the same practice next door how many fillings I had.
Forcing every website you visit to ask your permission to use cookies every single time seems to achieve nothing apart from annoying everyone before they automatically tick the box.
And was the life and economy saving Covid-19 tracing app delayed so long because of concern over dreaded GDPR privacy rules?
The European Commission has brought out a white paper – Shaping Europe’s Digital Future – that aims to ‘increase and harmonise the responsibilities of online platforms.’
It will apparently set EU-wide requirements for how companies police illegal content online, although there is concern that it won’t go far enough and, at first glance, it seems more preoccupied with privacy protection than crime prevention, as usual.
In the meantime, today’s technology giants will sail on like 18th Century pirates, unhindered in apparently lawless international waters where they can profiteer to their hearts’ content – before burying their often ill-gotten gains in some tax-haven.