Reprinted from TidBITS by permission; reuse governed by Creative Commons license BY-NC-ND 3.0. TidBITS has offered years of thoughtful commentary on Apple and Internet topics. For free email subscriptions and access to the entire TidBITS archive, visit http://www.tidbits.com/ Reuters Exposes Meta's Tactics to Avoid Scam Ad Oversight Adam Engst In a Reuters Special Report, [1]Jeff Horwitz writes: As regulators press Meta to crack down on rogue advertisers on Facebook and Instagram, the social media giant has drafted a "playbook" to stall them. Internal documents seen by Reuters reveal its tactics, including efforts to make scam ads "not findable" when authorities search for them. In the same vein as Sarah Wynn-Williams's book [2]Careless People: A Cautionary Tale of Power, Greed, and Lost Idealism, Horwitz paints a damning picture of Meta as a company that would rather deflect regulation than lose revenue from scam advertising. It's both understandable and appalling: understandable that a company like Meta would balk at spending $2 billion to develop universal verification that would reduce revenue by 4.8%, and appalling that the revenue at stake'as much as $7 billion annually'comes from scam ads that victimize real people. [3]Read original article References 1. https://www.reuters.com/investigations/meta-created-playbook-fend-off-pressure-crack-down-scammers-documents-show-2025-12-31/ 2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Careless_People 3. https://www.reuters.com/investigations/meta-created-playbook-fend-off-pressure-crack-down-scammers-documents-show-2025-12-31/ .