Meta Is a Fraudulent Company Run By a Clueless, Creepy Boy King

But apparently his bread is buttered by at least 10 percent scams! The Zuckerberg defenders are welcome to e-mail me an apology at their leisure. In any well-regulated world, Meta’s business would not be anywhere near as viable as it is in our modern social media era that is akin to letting everyone smoke indoors. Our brains are all no doubt getting cooked by our algorithms of choice, but Meta has really turned it into an art form. Elon’s MechaHitler site gets all the attention for algorithm manipulation (there’s another good report on that today), but Meta has turned that feat into an economic superpower.

This is fraud by algorithmic design, as Reuters reports that “The documents further note that users who click on scam ads are likely to see more of them because of Meta’s ad-personalization system, which tries to deliver ads based on a user’s interests.” You should really read the whole report because this is just a tweet-length recap of its documented depravity that I’m riffing off of. Kudos to Reuters for sticking their journalism ahead of Meta’s response, but it’s notable that Meta spokesman Andy Stone told them that these documents “present a selective view that distorts Meta’s approach to fraud and scams.” That’s not exactly a denial of the report that Meta is financially dependent on scams to some degree. Stone claimed that the 10.1 percent scam ad revenue figure that Reuters reported was allegedly “rough and overly-inclusive” and that Meta later determined the real number was lower.

Dear reader, if you are wondering whether Meta provided that supposed real number to Reuters, this must be your first Meta rodeo. They did not. Silicon Valley PR is a special kind of propaganda where they demand to be taken seriously while being aghast that anyone would dare ask them for details about their claims.

Meta is really unique in so many ways, including its core product. At least Google built the greatest product in the history of the web before destroying it and most of the web. Sure, Tesla’s cars may be a poorly made and a poorly conceived system with vulnerable central points of failure sold by the most racist and deluded man on planet earth determined to kill people with his not full self-driving system, but they did build a pretty kick ass electric engine with all that government money they were given that helped popularize EVs. Amazon may be turning into the personification of the banality of evil, but at least they are providing a genuine service in e-commerce before adding their unique dash of the devil to it. Microsoft is about to ruin computers as we know it, but you do have to give them credit for building the software infrastructure that the entire business world has operated on since the 1980s. As much as we on the left (rightly) complain about capitalism, many of these companies are providing or have provided some basic and useful benefit before exploiting us for the pleasure of entering their world of monopoly and oligopoly.

Except for Meta, who has always centered its core business around exploiting you. On Meta, you are the product. Mark Zuckerberg could give a fuck about what happens to you on his platform so long as you stay on his platform, and he’ll build a pedophile chatbot if that will do the trick. This is a major and scandalous story not just because it yet again demonstrates a pernicious disregard for user safety on a shrinking social network rapidly becoming synonymous with widespread lies and AI slop like shrimp Jesus, but because it blows a hole in the financial narrative that has propped Meta up all these years: that it’s a fantastic business as far as the numbers are concerned. Markets are down a sizeable chunk across the board today, but Meta is one of the businesses leading the pullback, down a little over 2 percent while the Nasdaq is down just 1.55 percent as I write this. It’s more of an AI-driven pullback, as Nvidia (-3 percent) Tesla (-2.9 percent) and Oracle (-2.29 percent) are the big leaders ahead of the pack, but Google and Apple, also tied to the AI narrative to a lesser degree, are up ever so slightly today. There is a story being told for those willing to pay attention (mainly that AI is shambolically over-valued, and companies like Microsoft who rode the wave up are concerned about leading it back down).

Meta has proven to be a completely untrustworthy company, far outpacing the distrust many other Silicon Valley titans have earned for themselves. Their PR statements aren’t worth the bits of code they’re typed in on. This is a business specifically designed around predatory relationships with its users, all so it can turn around and sell its users’ information to advertisers simply trying to find the biggest number of eyeballs, and now we’re learning that many of those ads for real companies have run next to scam ones. Zuckerberg clearly understands the precarious position he finds Meta in, as earlier this year he said that Meta’s share of social media usage has “gone down meaningfully.” This panic around his golden goose starting to get cooked is reflected in desperate reports like ten percent of ad revenue being tied to scams, or a chatbot that will try to sext with your children, or his enthusiastic embrace of Peter Thiel’s Silicon Valley-driven fascism. Zuckerberg’s forays into messaging and photo sharing and virtual reality proved that when he has to compete on a somewhat level playing field, he loses, and he knows it.

This company began with Mark Zuckerberg stealing Harvard students’ data, and its credibility has never risen above that level as he has invited multiple shareholder lawsuits over his despotic control over it. Zuckerberg is a man on an island even within his own island. If I were a Meta advertiser today, I would be asking myself whether 10 percent is the actual figure of scam ad revenue, and how many more revelations are there like this to come that Reuters seems to have a pretty good beat on. See you again in a few months for the next shameless Meta scandal!