New reporting shows Meta is profiting from billions in revenue generated by scam advertising on Facebook and Instagram.
Cristobal Cheyre, assistant professor of information science, studies the effects of behaviorally targeted advertising on user behavior and well-being.
Cheyre says:
“Reuters’ investigation exposes a dark facet of behaviorally targeted advertising. Meta’s ad tools – engineered to maximize engagement – have also become potent instruments for scammers, enabling them to identify and repeatedly target vulnerable users with precision. The volume of fraudulent ads uncovered is staggering, yet it likely represents only the visible tip of a much larger ecosystem of deceptive, exploitative advertising sustained by behavioral targeting.
“Beyond the numbers lies an even greater, largely unmeasured story of consumer loss. If scammers are spending billions each year on Meta’s platforms, they must be earning several times that amount – pure consumer losses that go uncounted.
“Meta’s response underscores a deeper failure of incentives: it bans only the most flagrant offenders while allowing others under suspicion to remain active, so long as they pay higher ad rates. This structure perversely rewards the most profitable scams – and ensures the platform takes a larger share of their proceeds.
“The findings call for a clearer understanding of the consumer losses caused by misleading and fraudulent ads – and for new accountability mechanisms that go beyond penalizing ill-gotten profits to hold platforms liable for the financial harms they enable by giving scammers access to user data and powerful targeting tools.”
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