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Facebook Is Cracking Down On Deceptive Ads For Porn, Diet Pills (adweek.com) 90

Posted by BeauHD from the authentic-posts dept.
According to Adweek, the next target in Facebook's efforts to keep its News Feed clean is cloaking -- a technique used by "bad actors" to circumvent Facebook's review processes and show content to people that violates Facebook's Community Standards and Advertising Policies. For example, they will set up web pages so that when a Facebook reviewer clicks a link to check whether it's consistent with Facebook's policies, they are taken to a different web page than when someone using the Facebook app clicks that same link. "Facebook product management director Rob Leathern and software engineer Bobbie Chang described in a Newsroom post how 'bad actors' -- such as those promoting diet pills, pornography or muscle-building scams -- attempt to game the social network's review processes," reports Adweek. From the report: Leathern and Chang said Facebook has removed "thousands" of offenders from its platform over the past few months, and any advertisers or pages that are caught cloaking will be banned, as well. Facebook is using artificial intelligence in its anti-cloaking efforts, expanding efforts by human reviewers to identify, capture and verify incidents of cloaking and revising its policies. Pages that are not engaging in these practices should see no impact in their referral traffic.
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Facebook Is Cracking Down On Deceptive Ads For Porn, Diet Pills More

Facebook Is Cracking Down On Deceptive Ads For Porn, Diet Pills

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  • Deceptive ads for porn?? (Score:4, Funny)

    by SuperKendall ( 25149 ) on Wednesday August 09, 2017 @11:33PM (#54980881)

    Heyyy... wait a minute, those aren't *Peruvian* goats... Damn you Facebook!

  • Fuck Facebook to hell

  • I wonder if they do like Google and hide stuff that makes them look bad.

    See this site: http://www.marchongoogle.com/ [marchongoogle.com]

    try to find it via google if you don't know the domain name.

    the more this shit goes on, the more I understand how bad it was for people who tried to organize demonstrations during the arab spring.

    • Re:More censorship (Score:4, Informative)

      by theweatherelectric ( 2007596 ) on Thursday August 10, 2017 @01:53AM (#54981343)

      try to find it via google if you don't know the domain name.

      marchongoogle.com has only existed [whois.com] since the 8th of August. Did they even submit the site for indexing?

      As it is, searching for march on google without quotes on Google returns a YouTube video [youtube.com] talking about it as the first result. The same search doesn't return anything related to marchongoogle.com in the first page of Bing or DuckDuckGo results (although if you switch to the video tab in DuckDuckGo it shows the same video as the first video result).

      But searching for "march on google" with quotes returns the marchongoogle.com site as the first result in Bing and DuckDuckGo and the site is listed in the second page of results on Google.

      So I'd suggest this is less about some kind of conspiracy and more about the newness of the March On Google website.

      • Sorry, you were expecting this person to actually have a clue about how indexing works, how long it takes things to get indexed, how complex pageranking is, and the very VERY small chance of hitting the front page for a site that is new and not very crosslinked in its first year of life?

        Ah yes, this is slashdot, you SHOULD be able to expect that, sadly those days are long, long gone.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

        From marchongoogle.com:

        "protesting in front of the homes of Googleâ(TM)s executive team."

        Way to go guys, that definitely won't end badly.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by lucm ( 889690 )

          Yeah and it looks like an alt-right thing, so the antifa vandals will probably show up and throw glass bottles at them. Popcorn time.

          Still, it's good to see people standing up to censorship.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Arab ( 466938 )

      I literally just Googled march on google and marchongoogle.com is the second result... They are totally censoring it... /s

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by lucm ( 889690 )

        Must be because they saw all the traffic coming from Slashdot and they got scared so they unblacklisted it for Slashdot visitors.

  • I wouldn't hold my breath on this.. I've had a few occasions where Facebook will stop an ad link from opening because it suspects malware, BUT will not stop SELLING the ad!! Priorities, it's good to have them..

  • On all ads? Destroy this industry, revolutionize economy.

    In the past ads perfomed information function, now they don't. People can search for information now, any information.

    The only acceptable way of advertisement should be word of mouth. If someone is caught paying or being paid for "word of mouth", astroturfing, shilling etc, they need to be executed on the spot.

    How can people that tasted ad-blocking software have anything good to say about ads?

    • Re:How about we crack down (Score:4, Interesting)

      by ScentCone ( 795499 ) on Thursday August 10, 2017 @09:59AM (#54982769)
      Ah, I see you've never actually owned a business or been smart enough to understand that your paycheck (assuming you earn one, and aren't living off of other people's taxed income) is actually tied to the prosperity of business ventures that - in order to prosper - have to compete. Competition includes, among other things, communicating to prospective customers about why your product or service might be more attractive than the next one. I presume you think that a someone running a brand new start-up that's never had a single customer should be "executed on the spot" for trying to tell you about what they're offering. Idiot.
  • Any weight loss pill that's not backed up by an independent double blind study that proves it causes fat reduction is a fraud.
  • collecting outsized ad revenues, in the hundreds of millions, Facebook has decided to crack down on a few categories of the deceptive ads.

  • FTFA : -

    they will set up web pages so that when a Facebook reviewer clicks a link to check whether it's consistent with Facebook's policies, they are taken to a different web page than when someone using the Facebook app clicks that same link

    Am I missing something? Why are the Facebook reviewers not using the same sort of browser or app as an end user would?

    • ip block checking , browser fingerprinting, referrer and "crawler" cloaking

      or even a trick of time delay swapping (the ad is in version X for the first 2 minutes and then swaps to version Y)

  • You mean like those Taboola ads Slashdot slaps on?

  • And here, I was starting to wonder if Facebook reviewers had gone over the wall into approving of porn, based upon their response when I reported a link, several months back. It actually makes so much more sense that the porn purveyors are just more adept at technical manipulation, and the content reviewers (literally) didn't see what I saw.

    ... except that the porn link was attached to a Facebook profile that had friend requested me.

    ... and that profile itself had adult oriented content in it.

    ... and for s

  • They need to target viral posts about ridiculous "natural" cures with essential oils and plants and chinese fruit and all that other BS. I'm soooo sick of my idiot friends posting that shit.
  • Is to get the hell off of Facebook.

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