Facebook and Google are not doing very well in the fight against fraudulent ads

Um report A report from British consumer rights NGO Which (or rather, Which?) points out that Facebook and Google are failing to deal with fraudulent ads. The institution evaluated responses from 2000 participants who had been victims of some form of misleading advertising on the platforms, which has become increasingly frequent.

According to the report, about one in four respondents (27%) have been the victim of a fraudulent ad on Facebook, while about one in five (19%) have been the victim of a Google ad. Only 3% said they had been scammed by a Twitter ad.

And when it came to reporting, the situation wasn’t much better: almost half of the victims interviewed (43%) didn’t report the misleading ads. On Facebook, the main reason (31%) was that they didn’t believe the platform would do anything to take them down. On Google, a third of the participants (32%) reported not finding a space to report them.

Fraudulent ads on Facebook and Google use hydra-headed tactics

Even though both big techs have previously committed to tackling the wave of misleading advertising, ad scams are like the heads of a hydra: take one off and two appear in its place. According to the testimony of one of the people interviewed by Which?, Stefan Johansson, a Facebook page kept showing the same fraudulent ads under different names.

To make matters worse, reporting isn’t exactly straightforward on these platforms. More than half (51%) of 1,800 respondents didn’t know how to report fraudulent ads on Google searches – and on Facebook, that number was more than a third (35%) of respondents.

In response, Google said it has a team that uses human moderation and algorithms to help detect misleading advertisements, and encourages users to report scams via support. Facebook points out that it has a team of 35 thousand moderators, who also use artificial intelligence to bring down fraud.

Through which channels you reach those people, classic and out of the box. BusinessInsider

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