How Facebook Helps Shady Advertisers Pollute the Internet

[FarCenter]

...

Gryn estimated that users of his tracking software place $400 million worth of ads a year on Facebook and an additional $1.3 billion elsewhere. (He later showed me reports that roughly support those figures.) It’s not just affiliates who think Gryn is at the pinnacle of the industry. In June, just before the conference, Facebook’s newly installed executive in charge of fighting shady ads, Rob Leathern, had invited him to the company’s London office to explain the latest affiliate tricks.

The basic process isn’t complicated. For example: A maker of bogus diet pills wants to sell them for $100 a month and doesn’t care how it’s done. The pill vendor approaches a broker, called an affiliate network, and offers to pay a $60 commission per sign-up. The network spreads the word to affiliates, who design ads and pay to place them on Facebook and other places in hopes of earning the commissions. The affiliate takes a risk, paying to run ads without knowing if they’ll work, but if even a small percentage of the people who see them become buyers, the profits can be huge.

Affiliates once had to guess what kind of person might fall for their unsophisticated cons, targeting ads by age, geography, or interests. Now Facebook does that work for them. The social network tracks who clicks on the ad and who buys the pills, then starts targeting others whom its algorithm thinks are likely to buy. Affiliates describe watching their ad campaigns lose money for a few days as Facebook gathers data through trial and error, then seeing the sales take off exponentially. “They go out and find the morons for me,” I was told by an affiliate who sells deceptively priced skin-care creams with fake endorsements from Chelsea Clinton.

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In a sense, affiliate scammers are much like Cambridge Analytica. Because Facebook is so effective at vacuuming up people and information about them, anyone who lacks scruples and knows how to access the system can begin to wreak havoc or earn money at astonishing scale.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2018-03-27/ad-scammers-need-suckers-and-facebook-helps-find-them


"There's a sucker born every minute" and Facebook is the way to find them.

[DemocracyMouse]

1. Remember Fbook's ads about dead (yet living) celebrities?

I complained to an official Facebook "feedback forum" about the practice, both before and after the election of Trouble, and pointed out how they were undermining the infosphere by profiting off of massive gaslighting and fake news.

Then I pointed out that Zuckerberg quit college before he absorbed anything about history, citizenship, the great international literature on human rights, etc. His focus was only on making money. Once he had used his classmates at Harvard to establish an "elite social network" he quit college and took their profiles and photos with him. (None of those original online guinea pigs got a dime for gentrifying Facebook).

Evidently FB's gatekeepers didn't like me pointing out that Zuckerberg's lack of a full education may have helped to elect Mr. Trouble and threaten the entire planet. They censored my comment. Took it off the Facebook feedback forum.

So the fake news and fake ads were free to circulate while my sincere effort to critique an exploitive and untruthful culture, along with Zuckerberg, was censored.