The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) regulates advertising on social media, including Facebook – their guidelines require businesses to make true and accurate claims, and to be able to prove them. Facebook claim to have advertising standards and to follow them. In fact, here is what they say on Fraud, Scams and Deceptive Practices:
If you regularly use Facebook you will know it is full of scam and fraudulent advertising. I know many people who have fallen for these ads (usually buying something that was misrepresented), but few users actual take the trouble of reporting the ads to Facebook. I, however, report regularly, and after many years of this I can tell you that most of the time Facebook claim the ads reported do not go against their standards, even when clearly they do.
Scam Ads on Facebook
The other week I saw an ad pop up on my feed. It was similar to the one below (that also was on Facebook):
Much as I dislike Dutton, this is clearly not an endorsement or true fact about Peter Dutton. Note the scammy naming as “PeterCraigDutton” (no spaces), mention of 9NEWS.COM.AU yet the link is not 9 News, and the bizarre photoshopped black eye. A fairly clear case of some sort of fraud or scam.
But this wasn’t the only ad I saw. There were over 20 of them on my feed. Each one similar in format, with a different celebrity (with black eye). There was Gina Rinehart, Guy Sebastian, and many others. And each was sponsored by a different randomly named sponsor with no connection between the entities.
To prove a point that Facebook do not follow their own standards, nor the guidelines set out by our government, I reported every single ad I saw. One by one. A slow process over the day. Every time I saw one. As mentioned there were over 20 of them.
How Do You Report an Ad?
If you click the … in the top right of an ad on Facebook you get this popup:
Follow that through, and you get further popups and each of these has further options within:
Note that you have fixed categories, and at no point can you enter any text to explain why this is a scam of give anymore information to explain the situation. It is as if Facebook are not really interested in knowing about scams.
And now I waited. Though I knew what to expect.
Feedback
So, after almost a week I got the following messages from Facebook:
Every single reply told me that Facebook felt the ad didn’t go against their community standards!
They did give me the option to request another review. So I did. On every single one.
So far, a week later, I have had only one reply to my request for review, telling me:
It claims I can request a review again. This is not the case, as these are your remaining options:
Basically, reporting ads on Facebook is next to useless. Obvious scams are ignored in most cases. I could count on one hand the number of ads Facebook has removed after a report, and in those cases it has often been a week later, so the ad has already earned someone plenty of money and possibly scammed many.
It’s clear that Facebook do not look at ads before they are passed on to consumers. Could you imagine a newspaper that didn’t check the ads it was showing before publication? Sure, Facebook would say that would cost too much to do. And? Do your job.
Though perhaps, given Mark Zuckerberg has decided to drop all fact checking on Facebook, we should all stop using Facebook anyway.
Update: A few days after publishing this article, Facebook got back to me on the 20 other posts I had asked for a review on. As expected, Facebook decided all the ads did not go against their community standards.
