I’ve delayed my piece on credible Exit options so I can react to breaking news from yesterday about reprehensible levels of scam and fraud within Meta’s ads business. I’m coming in hot, people. Brace yourselves.
If 10% of my income came from illegal behavior, I’d be in jail
On Thursday, Jeff Horwitz of Reuters reported on shocking leaks from inside Meta about a plague of ads for scams and illegal content. You should read the whole thing, but here are some lowlights.
Meta internally projected late last year that it would earn about 10% of its overall annual revenue – or $16 billion – from running advertising for scams and banned goods, internal company documents show…
On average, the company shows its platforms’ users an estimated 15 billion “higher risk” scam advertisements – those that show clear signs of being fraudulent – every day…
Users who click on scam ads are likely to see more of them because of Meta’s ad-personalization system, which tries to deliver ads based on a user’s interests…
A May 2025 presentation by its safety staff estimated that the company’s platforms were involved in a third of all successful scams in the US.
[For what it’s worth, I foreshadowed this last month, when I wrote about the scaled abuse that comes from easy, anonymous accounts.]
It’s not the crime, it’s the coverup
As bad as these revelations are, what makes my blood boil is the absolute swill that Meta’s spokesperson, Andy Stone, shoveled us in trying to push back on the story.
Misleading faux-transparency is at the heart of how companies defend their rule over the Platformocracy. As I explained over the summer, these platforms are so big that you can’t describe them with anecdotes. You need hard data. The thing is, our only source of this data is the platforms themselves, and everything they share is censored or manipulated by PR and policy teams. If we are prevented from knowing the truth, we can’t make informed decisions, which keeps us at the mercy of unelected platform executives.
I’m going to quote Meta’s response in the article at length, and then chew it into tiny pieces point by point.
Bullshit response one: We graded our own homework, in secret, and passed!
The company’s internal estimate that it would earn 10.1% of its 2024 revenue from scams and other prohibited ads was "rough and overly-inclusive," Stone said. The company had later determined that the true number was lower, because the estimate included "many" legitimate ads as well, he said. He declined to provide an updated figure.
I can’t believe an experienced communications professional would even try this technique. No revised number, no data to support his claim that the leaked document is wrong. Just straight denial and “trust us, it’s better.” Monty Python knew this was crap fifty years ago: “Argument’s an intellectual process. Contradiction’s just the automatic gainsaying of anything the other person says.”
Bullshit response two: We deserve an “A” for effort, regardless of the results.
“We aggressively fight fraud and scams because people on our platforms don’t want this content, legitimate advertisers don’t want it and we don’t want it either.”
This statement of high ideals is less insulting, but more pathetic. There’s no discussion about what the results are, and whether they are even minimally acceptable. If you showed up to a Google performance review with only effort and no outcomes, you’d end up on a performance improvement plan.
If Meta wants to have a debate about how many people it’s worth hurting to protect their revenues, then by all means let’s have it. Chipotle went through hell for poisoning only about 1,100 people from 2015-2018. Meta’s big goal in the leaked documents is to cut the fraud to 5.8% of revenue by 2027. In Chipotle terms, that would mean selling something like sixty million bad burritos a year. Can you imagine?
Bullshit response three: we made a number go down, who cares if it’s relevant?
“Over the past 18 months, we have reduced user reports of scam ads globally by 58 percent.”
This one is more clever and at least shows some respect for the audience. If you don’t know much about online safety, it even sounds pretty good. It’s bullshit, though, because we have no idea of the correlation between reports of scam ads and the incidence of scam ads.
For example, if filing a report is cumbersome and Meta does nothing to help, reports could drop over time because people give up on the process, even if the abuse continues or gets worse. Additional data in the leaked documents strongly suggests that this is what happened.
By 2023, safety staffers estimated that Facebook and Instagram users each week were filing about 100,000 valid reports of fraudsters messaging them, the document says. But Meta ignored or incorrectly rejected 96% of them. [Emphasis mine]
Bullshit response four: Look at our giant numerator! Don’t ask about the denominator.
“So far in 2025, we’ve removed more than 134 million pieces of scam ad content.”
This is a classic dodge which, to be fair, you’ll find in almost every platform’s transparency reports. Throw out a huge number that we mortals can barely comprehend as a sign of how much success they’re having. Surely big means good, right? Who knows, because Meta doesn’t tell us the total number of pieces of ad content on their platforms. Meta’s Ad Library doesn’t include totals.
The leaked documents give us a hint when they mention showing users 15 billion higher-risk ads a day (as quoted above) What’s the relationship between taking down 134 million all year, versus showing users 15 billion every day? Is this good or bad? Meta doesn’t want you to be able to do the math.
Who do you think you’re fooling?
I don’t know Andy Stone, but this is clearly not his first rodeo. His LinkedIn says he spent a decade in politics, including stints with the John Kerry campaign and as Senator Barbara Boxer’s press secretary. He’s been Communications Director at Meta since 2014, and shows up regularly as a Meta spokesperson (POTUS account handovers, erroneous Group suspensions, Meta Ray-Bans, etc). He’s been through some stuff – Russia sentenced him in absentia to six years in prison over comments he made in the wake of the invasion of Ukraine.
All this experience makes his bullshit responses even more outrageous to me. They aren’t innocent mistakes. This is a deliberate communications strategy, designed by highly-compensated experts, to deflect and obscure what’s actually going on, in order to protect Meta’s reputation and power.
And yet the rhetoric is so thin that one angry newsletter writer like me can rip it apart in a few hundred words.
Coming from a huge company with staggering resources, this is just insulting. Either Meta has such contempt for their users that they really think we’ll buy it, or they are so arrogant that they believe they can get away with stonewalling and a smirk, like Robert DeNiro as Al Capone in The Untouchables shouting “You got nothing!”
What are you prepared to do?
In The Untouchables, the tide didn’t turn until Sean Connery showed up and challenged Kevin Costner to get tougher. We’re never going to get straight answers about what the platforms are doing (and doing to us) until we get mad, stop accepting their bullshit transparency numbers, and demand something better. They won’t change until they’re afraid that we can hurt them, somehow – through mass Exit, or a loud enough Voice that forces them to change their practices for real, not just for show.
I know that many of you reading this are already in the fight. You’re building independent social networks, organizing decentralized identity systems, and trying to shine a light on the dark places. I am grateful to all of you and will continue to try to be helpful where I can.
For everyone else, I hope this rant made you as angry as I am. I leave you with the Sean Connery question.
What are you prepared to do?
Please share this if you enjoyed it! I’m (obviously) super angry and therefore hoping this rant will get some traction. And as always, feel free to reach out any time at [email protected].
