| Against a backdrop of recent Reuters reporting that 10% of Meta's projected revenue ($16 B) is coming from fraudulent or scam ads, and CBC's reporting on illegal drugs being sold via Instagram and Facebook ads (delivered by Canada Post), Meta is gobbling up Trump's former advisors and putting them into senior leadership positions. Dina Powell McCormick was appointed as Meta's new President and Vice Chair. Curtis Joseph Mahoney as Meta's new Chief Legal Officer. Both are former Trump advisors. These investigations reveal a pattern where legal compliance is treated as a variable cost, to be minimized and timed, rather than as a binding constraint. - Illicit revenue persists because it is better for the company to “manage” vs. eliminate
- Enforcement becomes most aggressive only when/where penalties are imminent.
- Fines are anticipated as a manageable line item relative to revenue. These stories are difficult to understand as isolated enforcement failures. They suggest a platform-level equilibrium: illicit advertising persists at scale because the systems that optimize for revenue and engagement do not treat illegality or harm to users as disqualifying in practice. It’s the same pattern we see in Meta’s orientation to keeping kids safe online; too much impact to their profits to do the right thing. Reuters reports internal documents that explicitly compare potential regulatory settlements to the revenue derived from higher-legal-risk scam ads, and it describes internal acknowledgement that leadership chose to act primarily in response to impending regulatory action (a characterization Meta disputes). Meta appears to be treating laws as negotiable through delay, opacity, and the asymmetry between platform-scale profits and public-sector enforcement capacity McCormick and Mahoney strengthen Meta’s ability to shape, resist, or reframe the rules that would otherwise constrain it. They have experience; they’ve done this for Trump. When a platform’s revenue model is tightly coupled to automated targeting and optimization, and when enforcement is managed to protect revenue stability and platform engagement instead of users, illicit markets and bad actors will predictably find purchase. We’ve allowed Meta to create a model where their public statements of commitment to safety can coexist with persistent actions that cause measurable harm. The question policymakers, researchers, and the public should keep returning to is whether Meta’s governance choices make illegal and exploitative monetization a recurring, manageable feature of its business. If the answer is yes, then the policy response should be designed accordingly: not as advice to improve moderation, not as a discussion about the burden on company of complying with law, but as an immediate shift of incentives and penalties around the only thing Meta cares about: their bottom line. |