I’ve recently had to deal with my father cognitive decline & falling for scams left & right using Meta’s apps. This has been so hard on our family. I did a search the other day on marketplace and 100% of all sellers were scams, 20-30 of them.
Meta is a cancer on our society, I’m shutting down all my accounts. Back when TV/Radio/News paper were how you consumed news, you couldn’t get scams this bad at this scale. Our parents dealt with their parents so much easier as they cognitively declined. We need legal protections for elders and youth online more than ever. Companies need to be liable for their ads and scam accounts. Then you’d see a better internet.
My grandmother has been through the same thing. She was scammed out of all of her savings by accounts impersonating a particular celebrity. Thankfully the bank returned all of the money, but the perpetrators will never be caught, they operate out of Nigeria (one of them attached their phone to her Google account.)
Unfortunately these fake celebrity accounts are swarming her like locusts again. We tried to educate her about not using her real name online, not giving out information or adding unknown people as friends, but there's a very sad possibility that she doesn't fully understand what she's doing.
It was emotionally difficult going through her laptop to gather evidence for the bank. They know exactly how to romance and pull on heart strings, particularly with elderly people.
Meta's platforms are a hive of scammers and they should be held accountable.
The number of my outer circle of friends who fall for the “copied profile” adding of unknown people or accept a friend request from the attractive young woman who somehow is interested in them is shocking. (I’m gauging this from looking at the “mutual friends” in the friend request.)
Why can’t you do a power of attorney(?) over her finances or move them into a living trust, etc. seems like there are legal protections out there if you can convince her it’s in her best interest to let her family manage her estate so she can focus on enjoying final years (obviously don’t say it like that)
I don’t think it’s a silent crisis per se, but just one people ignore.
There’s tons of media about it, tons of people are aware of elder fraud etc but people don’t want to think about the vulnerable of society. There’s been jokes about it and media about it going back decades.
People are aware but solving it requires an uncomfortable level of change in society, training and regulations.
As an aside, both Thelma and The Beekeeper are recent movies about elders being scammed and revenge being taken. Both very different but enjoyable.
People survived with quite severe dementia hundreds of years ago. It doesn’t necessarily imply the rest of the body is unhealthy just their brain in a very specific way.
Children who are not cognitively and emotionally ready for the Internet shouldn't have access to it. Similarly, any elderly folks who are not cognitively able to deal with social media (or the Internet in general) should be cut off from it, too.
You can (and should) have That Talk with your parents about scams on the internet, but if they're still falling for them and not getting the message, maybe it's time to gently steer them off the Internet. We take the car keys away from people who can't handle driving anymore.
Unfortunately I have a similar experience. If someone's working at Meta right now, and has been in the past 10 years, they're willingly and actively contributing to making society worse. Some open-source tech is not going to undo any of this, nor any of the past transgressions. I get the pay is probably great, but have some decency.
I suggested a hiring ban on anyone who ever worked at Meta some years back. It was not met with open arms. Going to try again here...
I think it's a valid suggestion that might result in people rethinking working for Meta if it was taken seriously.
Working for Meta is ethically questionable. The company does unspeakable damage to our country. It harms our kids, our elders, our political stability. Working for it, and a number of similar companies, is contributing to the breakdown of the fabric of our society.
Why not build a list of Meta employees and tell them they're not eligible for being hired unless they show some kind of remorse or restitution?
It could be an aggregation of LinkedIn profiles and would call attention to the quandary of hiring someone with questionable ethics to work at your organization. It might go viral on the audacity of the idea alone. That might cause some panic and some pause amongst prospective Meta hires and interns. They might rethink their career choices.
What about Meta AI? For reasons I cannot comprehend they have been releasing quality research for free for years like PyTorch, FastText vectors, and the LLaMa models.
I don't know how to reconcile the one side of the company that should be burnt to the ground and the one that's pushing local models forward, but I'd say it's worth considering.
At FAANG, open source is de rigeur for things you can’t make money off of, either because it’s an ecosystem play or someone asked their boss.
You’d be surprised how little drama there is around this.
I’d note that the department that made open LLMs hasn’t produced any work since they produced a Gemini 2.5 Flash equivalent with much better tool calling, because the God King threw a fit. Without reasoning. And they had a reasoning model on deck that was cancelled too.
add the three-letter agencies, Surveillance firms, Palantir, military industrial complex and many more to the list. blacklisting people who worked for Meta seems so performative...
My litmus test is, do you think that the person managing Meta’s coffee supply is ethically questionable? If you met them, would you tell them that they need to quit, and would you consider them a bad person if they don’t? There are organizations that meet that bar, but I really don’t think Meta is one of them.
Surely there are employees at Meta who are not making the world a worse place. There may even be people in technical roles who are not. I can imagine Meta probably has some kind of ethics or privacy department (what a demoralizing place to do that kind of work!) who are even trying against the tide to do good! You can't just use "worked at Meta" as the filter. I'd want to know exactly what they worked on, and have them explain their ethical rationale for continuing.
>I’d want to know exactly what they worked on, and have them explain their ethical rationale for continuing.
Now I’m imagining I meet someone who is on the other side of the interview table having these thoughts. Are my capabilities ignored because they are already prejudiced to a decision I made years prior? What if my answer, trying to improve issues from within, is not good enough?
I guess this is just a risk that you have to accept when you decide to work somewhere like Meta. I wouldn't accept a job at Philip Morris for the same reason.
One must also check what YouTube recommends their elderly parents, because it is easy for them to slide into getting recommended harmful content, mostly things like psychological, religious or alternative-medicine topics. Note that not all of them are harmful, but most of them are published by very odd channels.
Opening YouTube on a new machine / OS / browser / without login is eye opening in terms of the awful stuff that gets recommended by default and how quickly it tilts worse if you watch any of it.
I just did this on Youtube for the first time in a while, and it won't show me videos unless I start watching things first, unless I go to Shorts, where I am presented with an infinite scroll of what appears to be deeply unsettling and uncanny short AI generated engagement bait videos.
Re: AI
I've noticed on YT there are some informercial level ads that are super obvious AI voice overs where it feels like they straight up lifted another ad and put their own dialog on top of it
This, so much! It's outright disgusting. I have no idea why we tolerate this as a society. I fear it is because this diagnosis isn't widely known, it's happening on the fringes.
Everybody, including journalists and tech people, is moving about their own algorithmic bubble nearly all the time. They just can't imagine how bad the situation has become out there. We're turning a blind eye to the very thing that is destroying our societies.
Every time I open YouTube in incognito mode, depending on the region I'm in, I get recommended either far-right content, Bitcoin grifters, Israel shills, nauseating YouTube vitality factories or straight up Jihadist/Hindutva/Christian-right content.
I think that any of these algorithmic feeds, by any company, should be held as if the companies have vetted the content and it is theirs. And the culpability that goes with that.
> should be held as if the companies have vetted the content and it is theirs.
It's not "as if" it "is". There is a scant difference between an LLM and a recommendation algorithm picking what to "say" out of what, 100 billion or more messages? Because the pool to choose from is so enormous, speech becomes not what one person typed but what one algorithm plucked out of the haystack to show, to influence, and to manipulate for financial gain.
That’s dishonest. Ivermectin is widely prescribed to people too. That’s like calling Ibuprofen a horse anti-inflammatory drug. That doesn’t mean it was an effective covid treatment though. The information from the third world that made it appear like it was seems to have been that it was treating preexisting parasites in covid patients, eliminating a comorbidity and thereby improving covid survival rates. But undiagnosed parasites are rare in the US, so that wouldn’t have worked here.
youtube also has kitboga, pirogi, deeveeaar, etc which are very helpful. i introduced my mother, who has early dementia and can't do much, so watches a lot of netflix and youtube, to kitboga and she loved it and found other scambaiters. i'm stoked. i know she will tell a scammer to f off now.
Have you seen some of the ads between the videos? There are some shady get rich quick types of influencers selling stuff that might really set them back financially as well.
In case anyone needs to help a relative without a Google account block YouTube channels or videos, the subreddit for uBlock Origin has a wiki that can help. You can block videos by channel or video title or URL using CSS rules. Removing the clickbait and watching a few videos of decent content with them helps a lot.
So many of us have been there - it is brutal. These platforms are ripping us apart from each other, providing criminals easy access to the most vulnerable, and concentrating wealth to an unimaginable degree.
My dad had fallen for two scams - one through WhatsApp, the other texts.
I’m not sure how much we can blame individual companies for this. Obviously they should be doing more - shutting down accounts that message people at random, for instance, but I feel like the scammers will find a way.
I also don’t know what else we can do. It should be easier for kids (or anyone else) to shut down their parent’s accounts at least once this happens, stop all wire and crypto transfers, etc.
One third of all scams in the US are operated on Meta platforms.
They have a policy that if a scammer’s ad spend makes up more than 0.15% of Meta revenue, moderators must protect the scammer instead of blocking it.
Meta is working hard to scam your dad for ad spend. It’s hugely profitable for them and they are helping to grow it per internal policy. They are only interested in fostering big-time scammers.
I would like to understand the downvotes: is it from doubting these facts? If so, I will post the sources (which were recent mainstream news on the front page of HN). Or is it because of the negative sentiment about Meta? Or disagreement that Meta has any responsibility over moderating scams they promote?
These are verified facts that make up the substance of my message:
- Meta protects their biggest scammers, per internal policy from leadership
- Meta makes a huge profit from these scammers (10% of total revenue; or in other words, their scam revenue is approximately 5x larger than the total Oculus revenue)
- The scams that Meta promotes represent one-third of the total online scams in the US
> I would like to understand the downvotes: is it from doubting these facts? If so, I will post the sources (which were recent mainstream news on the front page of HN). Or is it because of the negative sentiment about Meta? Or disagreement that Meta has any responsibility over moderating scams they promote?
It may be as simple as "there are a lot of Meta employees browsing HN."
> One third of all scams in the US are operated on Meta platforms.
And 100% of all internet scam traffic in the US goes through either US ISPs or US cell carriers.
Should those entities be held liable instead? Or maybe, Meta instead should scan users' private messages on their platforms and report everything that might seem problematic (whatever the current US administration in power considers as problematic) to the relevant authorities?
My personal take: there should be more effort in going after the actual scammers, as opposed to going after the "data pipes" (of various abstraction levels) like Meta/ISPs/cell carriers/etc.
I don't mean to be rude or anything - and I don't disagree with what you're suggesting - but don't you think at some point you have a responsibility to stop them accessing these platforms yourself?
Our own attempts to do something about (successful) scammers were meant with utter indifference by my parent's state's (Arizona) attorney general, county sheriffs, local police.
Meta is a cancer on our society, I’m shutting down all my accounts. Back when TV/Radio/News paper were how you consumed news, you couldn’t get scams this bad at this scale. Our parents dealt with their parents so much easier as they cognitively declined. We need legal protections for elders and youth online more than ever. Companies need to be liable for their ads and scam accounts. Then you’d see a better internet.