Recent internal financial documents from Meta (formerly Facebook), obtained and reviewed by Reuters, suggest a growing concern over the company’s advertising practices. Despite Meta’s outward commitment to user safety across its social platforms, the company reportedly profits significantly from scam and fraudulent advertisements.
**Meta’s Internal Revenue Projections**
According to these internal documents, Meta projected in 2024 that approximately 10% of its annual revenue would come from advertisements promoting scams or banned goods. This revelation highlights the scale at which dubious ads are making their way onto Meta’s platforms—including Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp.
**Massive Influx of Fraudulent Ads**
Other documents chronicle a surge in fraudulent e-commerce, investment, gambling, and medical product ads. Shockingly, these questionable ads reportedly went unidentified and unchecked for about three years. In December 2024, additional internal reports stated that Meta was displaying around 15 billion “higher risk” ads each day—ads which could clearly be identified as potential scams—generating about $7 billion in annualized revenue for the company.
**A History of Profit Over Safety**
This isn’t the first time Meta has faced scrutiny for prioritizing profits over user protection. Many recall the 2021 whistleblower revelations from Frances Haugen, who exposed internal decisions to weaken safeguards against toxic content and misinformation on Facebook. Her disclosures pointed to a “profit over safety” culture, emphasizing how engagement—and, by extension, revenue—often took precedence over user welfare.
With these new revelations, concerns about Meta’s commitment to user safety are once again in the spotlight, raising important questions about the ethical responsibilities of major social media platforms.
https://www.shacknews.com/article/146740/meta-2024-revenue-scam-ads
