How Meta Brings in Millions Off Political Violence

Colin Lecher and Tomas Apodaca over at The Markup:

Meta’s ad policies forbid calling for violence. But when faced with crucial tests of its content moderation practices, the company has repeatedly failed to detect and remove inflammatory ads. A 2018 report, commissioned by Facebook itself, found that its platform had been used to incite violence in Myanmar, and that the company hadn’t done enough to prevent it. 

So, a social company says one thing but does another. No news there.

A clothing company called Red First, which offers everything from customized shirts for pet owners to flags saying “Hillary belongs in prison,” offered assassination-related merchandise through a network of pages with names like 50 Stars Nation and Red White and Blue Zone.

The company, which operates in California and Vietnam, according to Meta’s required disclosures, has spent more than $1.8 million since February 2023 to promote ads through its various pages. But in the wake of the shooting, the company pivoted to merchandise around the event. 

OK, companies use emotionally-charged events to sell crap to people on Facebook. No news there, either. But pairing Meta’s say-this-do-that cosplay on violence with merchants using implicitly sanctioned violent coverage for profit? Now we’re seeing the smoke.

After our review, we determined that more than 2,600 of those more than 4,200 ads were related to the assassination attempt. The total Red First paid to Meta in the 10 weeks after the shooting for those ads: between $473,000 and $798,000.

Let’s generalize this a bit and frame it as a media company using politics to drive revenue. Sounds a lot like cable news to me. And now we know that Meta is as much an infotainment empire as CNN or Fox News.