[plantain]

User-generated 'free' content - ok, I kind of get it. The volume is insane, the product is not viable with everything reviewed.

Paid advertising though? How is it I get Facebook adverts for drugs, with pictures of the drugs, or fake money, from BLUE TICK advertisers? Obviously zero review, LLM or human.

How is it that with paid advertising they can't have one human or even a savvy LLM in the loop spend one single CENT's worth of time reviewing the adverts?

[lwo32k]

Cuz the primary goal is hitting revenue targets and showing "growth" in those metrics every quarter. All else is secondary. You can see what their priorities are when they talk to Wall St every quarter - https://investor.atmeta.com/investor-news/press-release-deta...

[dandanua]

Every USA company is the same. If you don't grow by 15% in a year you are a failed company. No wonder the USA is turning into fascism, you can't keep those numbers without exploiting and eating everything you can.

Black holes on Earth are created not in large hadron colliders, they are in human minds.

[robertlagrant]

> If you don't grow by 15% in a year you are a failed company

This just isn't true. Giant numbers of small companies out there doing just fine.

It's only if you need investment that it's hard, because the government sets a floor on what you should expect on a return with the bond market. So a business taking money has to promise a return greater than what the government will just give you.

[financetechbro]

This is true for any company with investors. The 15% figure may be hyperbolic when applied to all companies no matter the size and sector. But the need for ongoing growth is very factual

[robertlagrant]

That's not all companies in the US, though.

[redserk]

The last two publicly traded companies I’ve worked for had increased revenue YoY for several quarters but the stock price was smacked because the gains weren’t enough. I looked around and this doesn’t seem to be an uncommon trend either.

15% may be hyperbolic but there seems to be a percentage of growth that exists where the company is still perceived as failing.

[nradov]

Stock prices for growing companies are highly volatile because no one really knows what the enterprise will ultimately be worth. This is fine. If investors actually perceived the company as failing then the stock price would be close to zero (or at least down close to book value).

[s1artibartfast]

Seems like the relevant information is what the stock price was before and after. As nardov says, price is an estimation of future value, not just the current.

As a result, it varies based on performance relative to expectation, as well as a wide range of external factors.

[lazide]

It’s a race globally - no one wants to be the first to not keep up.

A large enough simultaneous spike to reset expectations though, and all the sudden investor expectations switch to ‘lose the least money’.

Notably, the ones who expect/require this up and to the right are generally things like mutual funds, pension funds, and other institutional investors.

You know, the ones who Grandma (or Mom) relies on to not be eating dogfood in retirement.

Also Billionaires.

[matsemann]

I've reported so many scam ads that someone has made to look like a link to a real news site. Like, in some field they fill in "wsj.com", and that's then prominently displayed on the ad the same place as you normally use to verify where a link takes you, but clicking it takes you somewhere else entirely. Every report have been denied, saying it didn't violate their standards.

They're just happy they get money, don't care if it screws their users. The users aren't their customers...

[0xEF]

And there it is. The massive scam culture of Meta is profitable for Meta, without them having to actively participate in the scams, and therefore it will remain. This problem exists for the same reason we have crooked cops in every major police department in the US; when you pay someone to turn a blind-eye to certain activities, they will probably take the money. Meta gets so much engagement from scams, AI content and misinformation that their empire would collapse without it, at this point.

[pjc50]

This will not improve until the platform shares proper liability. The US isn't going to do that, but the EU might be able to.

There's a reasonable argument that user generated content platforms can't survive being held liable for the crimes of their user. However, the advertising is a much smaller volume of content and they're making money directly from it.

[econ]

It isn't very hard to give a registered business a monopoly on their company name.

[ahtihn]

It's impossible actually. Company names aren't unique. There is no global registry of company names. Even trademarks aren't globally unique.

[econ]

You start with the largest, work you way down then start work on local registers.

City names is probably enough but you can still allow ads from two the same businesses in the same city.

With domains it is even more obvious. No need to pretend everyone could be the nyt.com

[quitit]

and to take it a step further:

1. reporting such advertising doesn't do anything,

2. nor the reporting of accounts that are directly soliciting such in messages,

3. nor policing of instagram accounts whose entire profile is just photos of drugs with instructions on how to buy them

It's farcical. It's also standard for these accounts to have tens of duplicate accounts which only differ by an incremental number after their handle.

[55555]

I get IG story ads for cocaine, with pictures of cocaine. They go to telegram accounts run by Russians and I know people who have bought from them and they actually deliver cocaine. I also get ads for illegal poker rooms.

[actionfromafar]

Is this what it means when they say, US - Russia relations "normalizing"?