3/ Many of the products promoted are of the "brain pills" type or are the tackiest merch imaginable. The way the American right rips its audience off is disgraceful, and one day there must surely be a reckoning.

2/ Platforms could do a lot more to discourage podcasters/content creators from including undisclosed ads, and make disclosure easier. It's not that hard, they just don't particularly care (they're already selling ads on top of ads).

A few thoughts on this:

1/ The US media/podcast/right-wing ecosystem is big enough to make this profitable, and to make the podcasters rich. Unclear whether that's true anywhere else. Smaller countries don't necessarily follow where the US leads.

Re-sharing the recent reporting from @jeffhorwitz.bsky.social which suggests 10% of Meta's global revenues come from scam ads. www.reuters.com/investigatio...

Here's a blog post on the changes we've made (and what we want to do next):
whotargets.me/en/changes-t...

Here's a blog post on the changes we've made (and what we want to do next):
whotargets.me/en/changes-t...

It's pretty technical stuff, as a lot of what Meta provides via its Ad Library is *similar* to what the state requires, but not identical. Meta argues it's too expensive to comply fully. An interesting case about the legal specifics and enforcement of a specific transparency regime.

Sunak ran similar ads last year, to build an audience for his page for further, future ad targeting). The problem with this strategy is, given the party's high turnover of leaders in recent years, it doesn't seem to be a very long term investment.

The scale of scams, the ads, the profitability of all involved is just astonishing. Serious and widespread harm is being done, all over the world. It's a jaw dropping read, with example after example of corporate negligence.

In 2023, they laid off the team responsible for protecting brands from scams, along with many others in trust and safety. This made it harder to detect and remove them, made worse by lenient policy (advertisers could get lots of strikes for fraud, and keep going).

The actions reported on seem to bear that out. E.g. after discovering this (hard to believe it was difficult to notice), they focused on the countries where they were most likely to face regulatory action.

It's been said before, but there are elections, and there are American elections. 💰

Don't quote us on it, but $3.8m in a day, a few days out from a handful of state and local elections, is higher than the peak in any other country's national election (we think Australia is the next highest, with a peak earlier this year of US$3.2m, seen a few days before their federal election).