Pocket Change

It appears that the criminal enterprise formerly known as Facebook™ will be pay somewhere between $12 and $17.1 billion to settle the lawsuit accusing it of deliberately making an addictive product.

That is by my calculation less than 1 month's revenue.  

They can find it in their couch cushions. 

Meta on Wednesday reached a landmark settlement with 47 states, the District of Columbia and U.S. territories, agreeing to pay up to $17.1 billion in penalties and make major changes to its products over claims it endangered children with addictive social media platforms.

In a dramatic capitulation, the owner of Facebook and Instagram agreed to the financial penalties for violating federal child privacy and states’ consumer protection laws, the states announced. Meta also agreed to limit how long teenagers can spend on its platforms and to bans on features that stoke mental health issues, striking at the heart of the company’s business of engagement for advertising.

………

The settlement effectively ends a bellwether federal trial in the U.S. Northern District of California in Oakland, where California, Colorado, Kentucky and New Jersey were seeking roughly $200 billion over accusations that Meta harmed children. The states filed their agreement with Meta on Wednesday morning in that court, and Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers approved it.

Separately, Meta said on Wednesday that it settled with Texas for about $1 billion over similar allegations. The company still faces numerous other lawsuits from school districts and individuals, some of which are scheduled for trial in the coming months.

Meta’s stock rose on the news, closing up just over 1 percent. The company is valued at $1.47 trillion and most recently generated $60.8 billion in quarterly revenue.

 Like I said, pocket change.

Also, there is a condition to this settlement that will likely mean that they won't even be paying that.

………

The full value of Meta’s payout depends on whether other social media companies also settle with the states and agree to financial penalties and product changes. Meta will initially pay about $12 billion. It will pay an additional $5 billion if Snap, TikTok and YouTube also settle with the states and agree to financial penalties and product changes. 

I would be very surprised if a significant amount of this payout will occur this decade.

Facebook is, and always has been, a bad actor, and this settlement will not change that.

What would change this is frog-marching Mark Zuckerberg out of his offices in handcuffs. 

Gee, Ya Think?

A former safety engineer at Facebook, Arturo Béjar, has testified that Mark Zuckerberg does not give a f%$# about protecting children.

Gee, you think?

A massive trial is underway in California, where state attorneys general are holding Meta’s feet to the fire for its role in fueling a children’s mental health crisis.

According to the testimony of former Meta safety engineer Arturo Béjar, the company has purposefully adopted a “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy when it comes to keeping children safe on its platforms, the Guardian reported.

Throughout his time on the witness stand, Béjar asserted that Meta has known its platform is actively harming children, pushing things like violent and predatory sexual content onto their feeds.

Béjar, whose role in the company reportedly involved briefing CEO Mark Zuckerberg on safety issues, said that executives were well aware of the issues, but weren’t in any hurry to solve them, despite repeated assurances that Meta and its platforms Instagram and Facebook “don’t prioritize profit over safety,” per the Guardian.

Why are they not looking at criminal prosecutions? 

Will This Get Me Banned from Ecch (Twitter)?

When I want the opinion of a drug addled bigot, I will beat it out of you, thank you very much.

— Not the Apartheid Emerald Heir Pedo Guy/MG Saroff (@40_Years) July 26, 2026

Original Ecch (Tweet)


Screenshot backup

I have made the decision that I will stay on Ecch (Twitter) until the motherf%$#ers ban me, because I'm childish and immature.

I guess that the question is if I am being childish and immature enough.

We shall see in the next 24 hours. 

Good News Everyone!

It appears that this years versions of glassholes (remember Google Glass?) no longer feel comfortable serrupticiously taping people.

Good.

Meta’s camera-equipped “AI Glasses” are so divisive that some adopters are now leaving their expensive smart glasses at home, as Engadget reports.

Influencers, mostly men, have been using the glasses to inconspicuously — and non-consensually — capture footage of themselves approaching women and attempting to hit on them, interactions they’ve then posted online for content. Some wearers have even attempted to extort victims of covert recordings for cash. That’s on top of serious allegations of alleged privacy breaches by Meta itself.

And then, of course, there’s the simple fact that a lot of people just really don’t like the idea of the world’s largest and most powerful social media giant, which has a history of misusing biometric information and other data, facilitating abuse and surveillance in this way — especially as Meta has taken highly controversial steps to infuse facial recognition capabilities into the tech.

The wearables have become so alienating that many people have taken to simply referring to the shades as “pervert glasses.”

Creeps don't want to be called out as creeps.

F%$# them. 

Lame Ass Business Management

As a result of mass layoffs and widespread forced AI grinding, the morale of the employees the criminal enterprise formerly known as Facebook™ is falling off of a cliff.

It appears that Meta's answer to this problem is to improve the snacks at work.

As Anna Russel would say, "I'm not making this up, you know."

After axing thousands of jobs and monitoring employees as they train the AI that could ultimately replace them, it’s perhaps unsurprising that morale at Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta is at a low ebb.

It was confirmed this week in a leaked meeting to Business Insider in which Chief Technical Officer Andrew “Boz” Bosworth said that morale is “probably one of the worst it’s ever been.”

………

So far in 2026, Meta staff have had plenty to grumble about. The company laid off 8,000 jobs in April and began tracking workers’ computer activity. The monitoring is so that the company can train its AI models, raising the awkward issue that staff could be helping the very tech that could wind up replacing them.

Aside from the layoffs and 1984-esque surveillance, Meta has assigned roughly 10% of its workforce to train its AI models full-time, which is largely mind-numbing data-labeling. The Applied AI engineering unit comprises roughly 6,500 engineers and product managers. Workers liken it to being “drafted” — one even went so far as to describe it as a “gulag.”

………

But Meta’s leadership, recognizing the company’s sagging esprit de corps, is taking steps to improve morale. For starters, the snack budget is being increased, along with the travel and events fund.

I wish that I had the guillotine concession at Meta.  I'd be as rich as Mark Zuckerberg.  

Criminals Gotta Crime

And by criminals, I mean the criminal enterprise formerly known as Facebook™, who just got caught surreptitiously installing facial recognition software on their smart glasses.

Seeing as how they did not announce this to their users, it would have been a selling point, it is not unreasonable to assume that this was for Meta to spy on its users.

Hell, everything in Meta is about spying on its users.

One day after WIRED revealed that Meta had quietly embedded an unreleased face-recognition system into an app installed on more than 50 million phones, the company removed it, according to a WIRED analysis of the latest version’s code.

The most recent version of Meta AI, a companion app for its line of smart glasses, strips out the unactivated software components that powered the system Meta internally called NameTag. The version published the day of WIRED’s report included several code libraries explicitly named for face recognition. Friday’s release includes none of them.

Andy Stone, Meta's vice president of communications, told WIRED on Monday that the feature is purely exploratory, adding: “No final decision has been made on what to do here, if anything.”

On Thursday, WIRED reported that Meta had quietly integrated substantial portions of the NameTag system into the Meta AI app. Though never publicly enabled, the feature was designed to convert faces captured by the glasses into unique biometric signatures, commonly known as faceprints, and compare them against a database of faceprints stored on the user's device. WIRED also found that faces the system failed to recognize were cropped, indexed, and stored locally for future processing.

Well, this seems completely aboveboard and not suspicious at all.

Gee, Ya Think?

This is my shocked face Santa Clara county, California is suing the criminal enterprise formerly known as Facebook™ for knowingly profiting from advertising scams.

Given the decades long history of Facebook actively harming its users for a few books by allowing dishonest and fraudulent advertisements, (remember Cambridge Analytica?) this development not a surprise at all.

California’s Santa Clara county has sued Meta Platforms, alleging it has profited from Facebook and Instagram ads promoting scams in violation of California’s false advertising and unfair business practices laws.

The lawsuit – filed on Monday in Santa Clara county superior court on behalf of all California residents – accuses the social media giant of tolerating fraudulent advertising on a global basis. The suit seeks restitution, civil damages and an order prohibiting Meta from engaging in unfair business practices.

Citing leaked internal documents first reported by Reuters last year, the complaint alleges that the company earned as much as $7bn in annual revenue from so-called “high-risk” scam ads which show clear signs of being fraudulent.

Rather than undertaking a broad crackdown on fraudulent advertisers, the county alleges, Meta largely tolerated the misconduct and even established “guardrails” to block scam reduction efforts if they cost the company too much money.

I live for the day when Mark Zuckerberg is frog-marched out of his home in handcuffs.

I Guess That Reddit Is Too Busy Sucking Google's Dick to Run the Site

Paul McCartney was banned from Reddit briefly for sharing concert pictures on r/PaulMcCartney. (Alternate link)

It would seem to me that the basic purpose of the subreddit is Paul McCartney sharing concert pictures, but the site has been complete pants since its IPO. 

Sir Paul McCartney was banned from Reddit after sharing pictures of a concert in the r/PaulMcCartney subreddit. Over the weekend, Paul McCartney’s Reddit account attempted to share pictures from a show at Fonda Theatre to the site via a Dropbox link. Shortly afterwards the account was banned.

Why did this happen? That’s in dispute. At first it appeared that the mods of r/PaulMcCartney had kicked Sir Paul from the subreddit dedicated to him. But moderators insist that’s not what happened and pointed to a Reddit admin comment explaining that Paul was banned site-wide, not at the subreddit level. “Ask yourself, why would we ban the account of the man we're all passionate about? Moderators also have no power over [whose] account is deleted from this website. Only admins do, which again has already been addressed by them,” r/PaulMcCartney moderator RoastBeefDisease said in a stickied post on the subreddit.

In a different thread, an admin explained that McCartney was never banned and that his account was booted from the site due to a glitch. “Just for clarity, that account was never banned from the site (or the subreddit) there was a technical error that made it appear to be banned from the site,” the admin said. “This has now been resolved. Sorry for any confusion this caused or issue for the mod team here!”

So Reddit management's response was basically, "Don't blame us, we're stupid incompetent prats."

With Good Reason

Did you know that the 2nd most blocked account at Bluesky is their AI tool Attie?

Given that it's only been out a few days, I expect it to pass JD Vance shortly. 

Bluesky has launched an AI assistant called Attie that allows users to design their own social media algorithms and create custom feeds within the company’s AT Protocol ecosystem. And let’s just say the response has been heated.

Attie debuted this weekend at the ATmosphere conference, which Bluesky sponsors. But Bluesky’s userbase did not embrace the new product. Instead, about 125,000 users have already blocked Attie’s Bluesky account, making it the second most blocked account on the network, according to open source data. Attie only has 1,500 followers, meaning that about 83 times more users have blocked the account than followed it.

The only account with more blocks than Bluesky’s AI agent is Vice President J. D. Vance, with about 180,000 blocks — Attie even surpassed the White House account (122,000 blocks) and the ICE account (112,460 blocks). That’s some seriously detested company for a platform that skews left politically.

 "This is not a good look for Bluesky, said Captain Obvious.

Judge Calls Bullsh%$ on Elon

Rather unsurprisingly, when advertisers decide not to buy ads from you because you have created a cesspool of racism, bigotry, and misinformation, it is not a violation of antitrust law.

Being Elon's lawyers must be the worst job on earth. 

On Thursday, Elon Musk lost his lawsuit alleging that advertisers violated antitrust law by colluding on an ad boycott after he took over Twitter, gutted content moderation teams, and disbanded the Trust and Safety Council.

In her opinion, US District Judge Jane Boyle wrote that the lawsuit was dismissed because Musk failed to state a claim. His arguments that advertisers acted against their own best interests by avoiding advertising on his platform, now called X, did not plead facts showing that consumers were harmed. Without consumer harm, there can be no antitrust violation, the judge wrote, deeming the ad boycott perfectly legal.

“The very nature of the alleged conspiracy does not state an antitrust claim, and the Court therefore has no qualm dismissing with prejudice,” Boyle said. At one point, she emphasized, “the question underlying antitrust injury is whether consumers—not competitors—have been harmed.”

For Musk, the loss is likely significant. He had argued that advertisers should be “criminally prosecuted” after allies in Congress released a report claiming they were conspiring to tank Twitter’s revenue with the supposed goal of censoring conservative voices.

………

There are many ways that Musk’s antitrust claims could have succeeded, Boyle noted. He could have argued that the boycott prevented X from competing with other social media companies to “corner the supply against users’ interests.” Or that advertisers were somehow motivated to help a rival platform raise ad prices to exclude X from that market. Or possibly show that the World Federation of Advertisers intended to shut X out in order to launch its own social media ad business. 

Much like any official statements regarding his businesses, in the final analysis, there is no, "There," there. 

Headline of the Day

Elon Musk Moves for Mistrial in Twitter Fraud Case Because Everyone Hates Him

—Electrek covering the latest attempts by the Apartheid Era Emerald Heir Pedo Guy™ to get a mistrial in his stock manipulation lawsuit.

Elon, you need to understand that this is a civil lawsuit, which means that the jury could use your refusal to testify against you, and once they see you on the stand, they will hate you anyway.

Elon Musk’s legal team filed a motion for mistrial in the ongoing Twitter securities fraud class action lawsuit in San Francisco, arguing that the plaintiffs’ lawyers and the judge have created an environment where Musk cannot get a fair trial. The 20-page filing, submitted on March 7, explicitly cites “the animosity in the community toward Mr. Musk apparent during jury selection.”

The motion comes just days after Musk took the stand in the Pampena v. Musk trial, where shareholders accuse him of deliberately tanking Twitter’s stock price through misleading tweets about bot accounts before completing his $44 billion acquisition in 2022.

Face it dude, you are Dick Cheney without the charm. 

We Live in the Worst Timeline Ever

Fascist Kink Roleplay Subreddit Draws the Line: No More ICE Porn

—404 Media (Alternative link at archive.is) On how reality became too awful for a Reddit kink forum.

This buggers the mind.

In the wake of the public killings of multiple US citizens, protestors, and legal observers in recent weeks by immigration agents in Minneapolis, January 26, 2025 marked a watershed moment for r/FuckingFascists: they will no longer allow content or roleplay featuring ICE. 

The Reddit community r/FuckingFascists is for people with a kink for roleplaying sex with fascists. The subreddit’s description explicitly states that the sub is “about making porn or making fun of authoritarians. REAL FASCISTS, SEXISTS, HOMOPHOBES, TRANSPHOBES AND OTHER BIGOTS ARE NOT WELCOME HERE!,” and “Rule 1: No Fascists”. 

On Monday morning, moderator LilyDHM announced a complete ban of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) content in the sub. “No ICE related content will be allowed in kink posts,” the post reads. “We believe that this is the best option to allow people to still post MAGA content without touching this particular aspect of it, as it directly involves current politics and multiple lost lives.”

 

 

Ecch (Tweet) of the Day

pic.twitter.com/fOPnviJCVf

— Kevin May (@Yam_Nivek) February 23, 2026

Perfect.

There is an Advantage to Being Hated

It appears that is almost impossible to seat a jury in Elon Musk's Twitter stock manipulation trial because everyone hates him so much.

I think that this will be a strategy used by Donald Trump's defense team when (if) he ends up in the dock.

Jury selection kicked off Thursday in San Francisco federal court in a trial centered on Elon Musk’s $44 billion buyout of Twitter in 2022.

Musk is set to stand trial in early March in a class action brought by Twitter investors who claim Musk manipulated Twitter stock leading up to his multibillion-dollar purchase of the social media platform.

Investors, including lead plaintiffs Steve Garrett, Nancy Price, John Garrett and Brian Belgrave, sued Musk in October 2022 over claims they suffered major losses when Musk deliberately made misleading statements about the presence of spam bot accounts on Twitter to drive down the company’s stock, in hopes of backing out of the acquisition deal or renegotiating more favorably for himself.

The investors claim that Musk attempted to artificially lower Twitter’s stock price after agreeing to acquire the platform, while also failing to disclose when his Twitter stake exceeded 5% or that he had initially been invited to join Twitter’s board.

………

More than a third of the initial jury pool indicated they could not serve impartially and were dismissed by the judge. Others were questioned by the parties about the answers they provided to the court, indicating a strongly held negative opinion of Musk.

Stephen Broome of Quinn Emanuel Urquhart & Sullivan, an attorney for Musk, raised concerns with Breyer following jury screening that the court was “desensitized” to how improper it would be to seat jurors who expressed extreme dislike for the defendant. He claimed that if Musk was any other defendant, a juror who said “I hate that guy and he has no moral compass” would be dismissed.

Breyer pushed back, saying that the case was not like any other because Musk is a well-known public figure akin to a United States president, and jurors are allowed to have personal views on public figures.

The judges is right.  It is ordinary when people of good will look at Elon Musk, and say, to quote the Dead Kennedys:

Proof of the Divine

French police have raided the offices of the child pornography distribution network formerly known as Twitter.

It would be nice if authorities in the US enforced the law. 

French police raided Elon Musk's X offices in Paris this morning as part of a criminal investigation into alleged algorithmic manipulation by foreign powers.

The Paris prosecutor's office (Parquet de Paris) announced [PDF] the action on Tuesday. The investigation, which began in January 2025, stems from two complaints - one from a French parliament member and another from a senior official at an unnamed public institution.

Prosecutors are investigating allegations of organized disruption of automated data processing systems and fraudulent data extraction, in essence, whether X allowed foreign powers to manipulate its algorithm.

Parquet de Paris handed the case to the national police in July. The probe later expanded to include X's Grok AI chatbot, which prosecutors claim disseminated Holocaust denial content and sexually explicit deepfakes. As the investigation involves organized crime allegations, French police have enhanced powers including wiretapping and surveillance of X executives.

………

Parquet de Paris said it has summoned Elon Musk and former CEO Linda Yaccarino to voluntary interviews on April 20, 2026, with other X employees summoned throughout that week. Authorities want to give the current and former social media execs the opportunity to present their case as prosecutors pursue criminal charges.

In addition to organized crime concerns, potential charges facing X include the possession and dissemination of child pornography, infringing people's rights through the creation of sexual deepfakes, and the denial of crimes against humanity.

(emphasis mine)

President Macron?  I suggest that you re-open Devil's Island just for Elon.

Well, That was Quick

Less than a week after Oracle Executive Chariman (and serial workplace sexual predator)  Larry Ellison took over TikTok, it looks like he is already suppressing anti-Trump views.

Now there is a surprise.

Gov. Gavin Newsom on Monday said he is launching an investigation into whether TikTok has censored videos critical of President Donald Trump, and whether its actions constitute a violation of California law.

Newsom weighed in late Monday after a growing swarm of users — including two San Francisco candidates for Congress — reported that their videos regarding the administration and were being suppressed or kept from viewers entirely.

“It’s time to investigate,” Newsom posted X, alongside screenshot from a user who claimed TikTok would not allow them to mention the word “Epstein.”

Over the last year, Newsom has utilized various social media channels to aggressively criticize Trump and his policies.

………

Influencers and celebrities with large followings have logged similar complaints, following posts they made about the shooting death of Alex Pretti by federal immigration agents in Minnesota over the weekend. A Border Patrol agent shot and killed Pretti, an ICU nurse, on Saturday. It was Minneapolis’ second fatal shooting death by a federal agent this month as President Donald Trump’s ongoing immigration crackdown in the city continues. 

This is not a surprise.  Given that Oracle needs government subsidies, specifically IP protections and extensive government contracts, to survive, and given his history of sucking up to Trump, this is a feature, not a bug.

Trump Admin Goes to Bat for Pedophile Welfare Queen

Now that Elon Musk has turned Ecch (Twitter) into a Pedo Porn generator, the UK is seriously considering blocking the social media site as well as the Grok AI tools that are used to generate this material.

In response, the Trump administration is demanding that Great Britain take no sanctions against the Apartheid Era Emerald Heir Pedo Guy™. 

The State Department is issuing a blunt warning to the United Kingdom: Ban Elon Musk’s X, and the United States could retaliate.

The threat follows increased concern in Britain over a flood of AI-generated sexualized deepfakes circulating on X, including non-consensual images and material that could violate child-safety laws.

U.K. regulators are now considering whether the platform ran afoul of the country’s Online Safety Act, a decision that could trigger a transatlantic standoff—with arguments for free speech on one side and growing pressure to curb AI-fueled sexual abuse on the other.

In an interview with GB News on Tuesday, the State Department’s Undersecretary for Public Diplomacy, Sarah B. Rogers, suggested that the Trump administration is prepared to push back aggressively if Britain takes action against Musk’s platform.

“With respect to a potential ban of X, [U.K. Prime Minister] Keir Starmer has said that nothing is off the table. I would say from America’s perspective, nothing is off the table when it comes to free speech,” she said. “Let’s wait and see what Ofcom does, and we’ll see what America does in response. This is an issue dear to us, and I think we would certainly want to respond.”

Gee, hypocrisy much?  (Ask the owners or TikTok)

Snark of the Day

Also, in This Universe, Elon Musk Found His Highest Personal Calling as Dinner for a Family of Hogs Some 20 Years Ago

—Defector, describing a non-broken universe in which Elon Musk's child pr0n creation machine did not exist.

This made me laugh out loud. 

Twitter, also called X, the social media network owned and constantly used by the world's richest man as well as virtually every powerful person in the American tech industry, and on which the vast preponderance of national political figures also maintain active accounts, has a sexual harassment and child sexual abuse material (CSAM) problem.

I disagree a bit.  I do not think that this is a problem, I think that this was a deliberate choice.

This has been true more or less since Elon Musk took it over, but this problem's latest and most repellent efflorescence is the result of one of Musk's signature additions as owner. Grok, the network's embedded AI chatbot, will—or would, as recently as yesterday, and certainly did many, many times—generate graphically sexualized images of real people, including minors and non-consenting third parties, in response to any user's request. Another Twitter feature bearing Elon Musk's fingerprints is that the site filled with the kind of people who, when a photograph of a 14-year-old TV actress appears on their timeline, will ask Grok to generate an image of her without clothes on. As a result, for much of this week Twitter has been rife with AI-generated revenge porn, deepfake celebrity porn, and CSAM.

And then they go in for the kill:

………

Surely, however, to the extent that many laws prohibit the creation and proliferation of CSAM and revenge porn, someone is responsible for Twitter's embedded chatbot having spent much of the past week visibly and flagrantly breaking those laws. Yes? If a cineplex spends a week showing CSAM in one of its theaters, a posted apology purportedly in the voice of the screen seems unlikely to get that cineplex's owners and operators off the hook, legally speaking. If the owner of a roadside billboard lets strangers use the thing, and one of them tacks a huge sexualized image of a child—or an unconsenting celebrity, or an ex-girlfriend he's mad at for dumping him—on there, no one would accept a legal consequence which stopped at the assurance that the billboard's fucking support stanchions sincerely feel real bad about it.

So. Who's standing trial for this one? Who's going to jail?

I think it's important for a person to hold an imaginary sane and just society in their mind, against which to measure the actual society that exists instead. In a sane and just society ... well, Grok probably doesn't exist in the first place in a society like that. (Also, in this universe, Elon Musk found his highest personal calling as dinner for a family of hogs some 20 years ago.) But somewhere along the wide spectrum of social operability in between that sane and just place and the shambling, clattering junk heap where I wrote this blog and you're reading it, there is a theoretical place in which OK, yes, Grok exists, but maybe not absolutely everything has yet been motherfucked all the way out of function.

(emphasis mine)

I would note that the response of Ecch/Twitter/Grok has been to GEO FENCE the feature, not shut it down, which means that people in countries where fake revenge porn is legal, and those with sufficiently sophisticated VPNs, can continue to generate this slash-fic bullshit.

This shows us something:  This came from Elon.

If Musk were not actively supporting this, no one would suggest this to him, because of fear that they would be perceived as setting him up for an Epstein style take-down.

The creation of this feature, and its continued availability in limited areas had to come from the top. 

Headline of the Day Week Month Year

Who’s Who at X, the Deepfake Porn Site Formerly Known as Twitter

—The Financial Times, giving a rundown of senior management at the Apartheid Era Emerald Heir Pedo Guy's hellsite.

It is notable that this headline appears in the, "Pink Paper."

While nowhere near as stodgy as, for example, the Economist, it is notable just how out of character this is for them, particularly when their rogues' gallery of senior Ecch executives were all in Photoshop clown makeup, except for Elon, who needs no makeup to be a clown.

Today in the Annals of the Criminal Enterprise Formerly Known as Facebook™

Literally a sketch from the 1970s movie The Groove Tube

In a move that seems to have been foretold by the 1974 sketch comedy film The Groove Tube, Facebook (Meta) decided that the appropriate response to its inundation by scammers and fraud was to sabotage the tools used by government regulators to find fraudulent advertising.

No attempt to protect the users, no attempt to protect its legitimate advertisers, just lobby to allow for business as usual. 

I'm not surprised, but I am disappointed. 

Japanese regulators last year were upset by a flood of ads for obvious scams on Facebook and Instagram. The scams ranged from fraudulent investment schemes to fake celebrity product endorsements created by artificial intelligence. 

Meta, owner of the two social media platforms, feared Japan would soon force it to verify the identity of all its advertisers, internal documents reviewed by Reuters show. The step would likely reduce fraud but also cost the company revenue. 

To head off that threat, Meta launched an enforcement blitz to reduce the volume of offending ads. But it also sought to make problematic ads less “discoverable” for Japanese regulators, the documents show.

The documents are part of an internal cache of materials from the past four years in which Meta employees assessed the fast-growing level of fraudulent advertising across its platforms worldwide. Drawn from multiple sources and authored by employees in departments including finance, legal, public policy and safety, the documents also reveal ways that Meta, to protect billions of dollars in ad revenue, has resisted efforts by governments to crack down.

………

Meta’s internal documents cast new light on the central role played by fraudulent advertising in the social media giant’s business model – and the steps the company takes to safeguard that revenue. Reuters reported in November that scam ads Meta considers “high risk” generate as much as $7 billion in revenue for the company each year. This month, the news agency found that Meta tolerates rampant fraud from advertisers in China.

If there is any justice in the world, (s[poiler, there isn't) we will see Mark Zuckerberg frog-marched out of Meta's corporate offices in handcuffs.