Source: www.reuters.com/legal/litiga...

Source: www.reuters.com/investigatio...

Universal advertiser verification would cut a lot of this off at the root. Meta’s own numbers put the cost around $2 billion, plus up to 4.8% of revenue. So instead the scams get managed, the optics get managed, and when a country forces verification the ads just get rerouted elsewhere.

In Japan, staff pulled the keywords officials used, ran the same searches, and scrubbed results until the library looked clean. Then they expanded the approach into a “general global playbook” for other markets.

That’s why “neutral algorithmic feeds” is a contradiction unless you pretend ranking is not a form of governance.

If a platform claims neutrality while running a ranked feed, then either the ranking is being treated as editorial power without editorial responsibility, or the company is redefining neutrality as “we don’t want to be blamed”.

Ask a simpler question: who makes money when the grid doesn’t get built? If renewables are cheaper, the only durable opposition is whoever benefits from bottlenecks: fuel suppliers, owners of constrained generation, and anyone whose margins depend on scarcity rents and slow permitting.

That’s why “privacy-first ad empires” only works if we redefine what privacy is protecting you from.

It will rebuild them through first-party data, on-device inference, and modeled results.

If a company sells privacy while maximizing measurement, then either it’s narrowing the definition to “privacy from third parties”, or it’s hoping users confuse reduced tracking with reduced surveillance.

Source: www.reuters.com/world/asia-p...

The state violates rights because it’s cheap. The downside is delayed, diffused, and mostly paid by people with the least leverage.