Jeff's incredible original reporting for Reuters is here: www.reuters.com/investigatio...

Or Spotify 🎧: open.spotify.com/episode/3EOd...

We've been covering all this at Question Everything. Listen here on Apple 🍎: podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/h...

Section 230 -- along with the lack of serious social media regulation in the US -- has allowed companies like Meta to make decisions that prioritize their profits over enforcement against fake, harmful, fraudulent content.

It's a mess. And one big reason this has been allowed to happen is Section 230: the 1996 law that makes it so it's really hard to successfully sue Meta and other internet companies for the stuff other people post on their platforms. Even if Meta knows they're scams.

The impact of this is not just that users are being bilked out of tons of money (while Meta rakes it in). The growth of the scam economy has led to organized crime in places like Asia setting up human trafficking operations to get thousands of people to run these scams.

Also: Meta's internal docs show that it ignores 96% of valid complaints from users about fraudsters messaging them. That means the company is ignoring nearly ALL complaints.

Another outrageous number from the @reuters.com story: Meta only bans advertisers if its automated systems predict that they are 95% likely to be committing fraud. How easy it would be for them to change that trigger to, say, banning accounts that are 50% likely? Or 25%? God forbid.

To that point: We recently did a test at Question Everything, where we tried to buy a ridiculous Facebook ad from a bare bones account marketing a sweepstakes for a free suborbital space flight. Meta took our money and posted the ad. questioneverything.substack.com/p/i-just-put...

Meta estimates that it shows its users an estimated 15 billion scam ads every day. (These are ads that show clear signs of being fraudulent.)

Meta projected at the end of 2024 that it would earn about 10% of its overall annual revenue that year from running advertising for scams and banned goods. That's $16 billion dollars total. In other words, scams are a major part of their business.

ou can read more about the astronomical (ha!) amounts of fraud on Meta's platforms, and why US laws shield the company from liability for this, in Question Everything's newsletter: open.substack.com/pub/question...

Hear more about the latest leak to @reuters.com from inside Meta showing this dark part of their business model, which they estimated accounted for 10% of their revenue last year.
t.co/cMMctXFYk9

These scam centers -- human trafficking hubs -- have sprung up across Asia. Hundreds of thousands of people are trapped in this system, which is fed by the massive amount of fraud on Facebook and other platforms, which Meta knows about -- and is raking in billions from.

She was sentenced to life in prison. It seems like she was working with Chinese organized crime. Was her name really Alice Guo? We don't know. www.nytimes.com/2025/11/20/w...

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Check out the timely and outrageous story.

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