As an anecdote, since July they've started showing me ads for body armor almost nonstop whenever I actually open the app. Just the other day it was a body armor ad then an ad for a tactical communication earpiece.
I'm seeing adds for illegal pistol and rifle suppressors (aka "silencers") only barely disguised as "fuel filters" and "solvent traps".
The companies selling the suppressor kits claim they are legitimate auto parts. They clearly aren't.
Some people have claimed that it would be legal to buy these if you applied for a license to manufacture a suppressor, but good luck arguing that in federal court, especially since these are manufactured in China. Both the import of these goods, and buying without the correct federal license are felonies....
And yet they are all over Facebook. And people are buying them.
Here is the crazy thing. I enjoy shooting as a hobby, and could understand if FB chose to show me adds for legitimate firearm accessory companies.
I am not a car guy.
Either FB add targeting is terrible, or they can connect the dots between these obviously illegal "solvent traps" and people who are interested in firearms.
This isn't a post made by a random FB user, it's an ad on their ad network on their platform. At what point does FB facebook become culpable?
Some people have claimed that it would be legal...
Over half a century of life might not have made me much of a programmer, but one thing it has taught me time and again is that if an amateur lawyer says something is “legal if...” and your gut said otherwise, go with your gut. It is as if they forget that the argument is not with me, but the hypothetical judge they’re going to stand before (as you point out).
I'm going to be pedantic, but in the US, those silencer kits can be legal. There are requirements for the provenance of the components used in them (can't be imported) but until you drill out the bore they're solvent traps or fuel filters. And if you pay for a tax stamp and file the correct paperwork with the ATF, it's completely legal to transform those items into a firearm suppressor.
The ones I saw were clearly not manufactured in the USA, and based on the comment sections were clearly understood to be suppressor components.
Lots of YouTube/internet "I'm not a lawyer, but..." comments floating out there.
Even if we were being extraordinary charitable, all plausible deniability goes out the window with even a cursory reading of the the description and the comments for these items.
Man, you get to see all the cool ads. The first three ads on my feed this morning are for the internet provider I already use and two different pneumonia medications targeted at people 20-25 years older than me.
I guess my life is more boring than I thought or the Facebook containers on my computer and phone do a really good job of keeping FB in the dark.
Interestingly enough, after I reported the first two ads I was shown I clicked on a link that was supposed to show why I was targeted.
The companies had targeted me by gender and age, and a couple of other broad identifiers I cant remember, but nothing about my hobbies, search history, or political orientation.
It's possible that FB didn't show me all of the criteria used to target these ads.
That still doesn't take away from the question of at what point do they become culpable with facilitating a felony offense?
Just because something is hard to do at scale (in this case review ads for illegal behavior), doesn't absolve a company from the responsibility to act.
To be clear, I don't know the answer to this question. Parlor got dumped for not doing enough (and personally I'm okay with that), but how do we determine if Facebook is doing enough?
My guess would be people who Facebook has identified as similar to you clicked on the ads. It's like those "people also bought..." recommendations on Amazon: the algorithm doesn't understand causation, only correlation.
It seems plausible that FB's algorithms noticed a connection between the type of person interested in guns and the type of person that would engage with an ad for illegal, misnamed accessories.
As another anecdote, I've had the same ad targeting for this last week or so. (Which is really unfortunate timing.) At some point I must've clicked on the wrong article while seeing what the "other side" was up to. And now my feed is full of tacticool insurrectionist chic.
The most disconcerting to me was an ad showcasing a "tactical hooded trench coat"[0], with the model holding an AK in the FB ad. I mean, nobody is going hunting, or defending their home, with their tactical hooded trench coat. Seemed pretty squarely targeted at the aspiring insurrectionist crowd.
Don't get me wrong, I'm all for letting people buy whatever strange clothes they want. If I have any point here it's that maybe FB doesn't get to claim the moral high ground when they're pushing ads using AKs as props, targeted at the crowd that stormed the capital (also, they need to fix their algorithm if they're pushing them to me).
If Google Images is any indication a "tactical hooded trench coat" seems like exactly the kind of thing you see the HN demographic wearing while walking to work on a rainy day.
TBH I was expecting to see actual trench coats but they all seem like normal tight-ish fitting jackets in various grays, greens, browns and camo.
That looks to be fan art from the video game/book Stalker/roadside picnic (specifically a bandit) used for advertising whatever you'd actually get in the mail. If you reverse image search it a couple different variations of the image will pop up, a lot of which are less than reputable looking stores.[2][3]
I wonder how many dollars have been spent on bombarding you specifically with shit you're (probably) not interested in, instead of just randomly doing so (with a chance of success).
I don't know about Facebook (I don't use it) - but YouTube adverts do nothing but make me hate the products being advertised (and yes I give as much feedback as it will let me).
Edit: Fortunately I find Nigel Farage trying to sell me financial products fairly amusing...
The clever (as in, psychopathic, but clever) thing for Facebook to do is for them to show you more crazy "The lizard people are taking over, and they're going to eat all of us!" newsfeed stories so that you actually get brainwashed, join the other side, and buy the body armor to join the "Intifada". This way their paying customer, the advertiser, is satisfied...
The companies selling the suppressor kits claim they are legitimate auto parts. They clearly aren't.
Some people have claimed that it would be legal to buy these if you applied for a license to manufacture a suppressor, but good luck arguing that in federal court, especially since these are manufactured in China. Both the import of these goods, and buying without the correct federal license are felonies....
And yet they are all over Facebook. And people are buying them.
Here is the crazy thing. I enjoy shooting as a hobby, and could understand if FB chose to show me adds for legitimate firearm accessory companies.
I am not a car guy.
Either FB add targeting is terrible, or they can connect the dots between these obviously illegal "solvent traps" and people who are interested in firearms.
This isn't a post made by a random FB user, it's an ad on their ad network on their platform. At what point does FB facebook become culpable?