29
votes
Two popular Danish television presenters have reported Meta to the police after finding their images and words had been manipulated and misused in thousands of Facebook ads
Link information
This data is scraped automatically and may be incorrect.
- Title
- Danish celebrities report Meta to police over fraudulent ads
- Published
- Apr 11 2024
- Word count
- 345 words
This is true even in Czech Republic. Public figures gets their photos misused for scam ads, including one of the well known moderators and I have seen even our president's face and also biggest energy distributor in such ads. The ads are obviously fakes but pages ypu land on are exact copies (in terms of how they look) of some well known sites. There is no incentive to remove such ads. Or maybe there is, but they come back from new ad company I presume - before Facebook (or Youtube) punishes the company that placed the ad, it ceases to exist and new one uses the same ad.
The obvious solution to me is to fine the companies who allow these ads in the first place, and keep fining them until this proves to be enough incentive.
To me it's pretty ironic: it's illegal for a company to start placing ads in the public space, at least in the EU, double so scam ads. I could probably get away with something tiny and discreet. This is not the case with ads in the digital space, where potentially thousands of people can be exposed to them. And yet our institutions turn a blind eye to this space and not much is done about it.
Are you talking about ad company (the one which pays websites to place such ads) or the company that shows them on their website (ie. Facebook)?
The first one can be tricky to fine, as they may no exist by the time bureaucratic machine gets to them and they may use that to their advantage. This is the same for scam domains that may look like lgitimate website - scammers just stop the business and start over with new domain (or ad company or whatever).
The second may be tricky as well. The scam ad is clearly on their website but it is... How to say that? It's just a place where ad company places the thing from their servers. I can hear the excuse "we sold the place, we have no saying on what is there, it is automatic process". This don't excuse them in my.eyes though. I think if Facebook (or others, ie. Youtube) got fined heavily, they would implement countermeasures against these ads very fast. But they didn't get slapped on their wrist yet. Or at least not with enough force to make them do something about it.
I completely agree - not cautious individuals or not tech savvy people won't catch it in time and will get scammed. And I think big companies (on which websites the ads are placed and seen by people) are the ones who should do something about it.
EDIT: But I guess that money don't stink...