Rank: #10 out of 4859 in peer accuracy at Metaculus for the time period of 2016-2020.
If you argue that the likely fine you have to pay is lower then the profit you are making and thus you don't need to engage in strong measures to reduce fraud, I do see that as sign of intent.
When Meta shows it's users an ad that it believes to with 90% probability from a scammer, it should at least tell the user about the ad likely being a scam. Withholding that information when especially older users probably thinks that Meta goes through some effort about not just presenting the user with scams seems clearly intentional as it would be easy to show the user a warning that Meta thinks that the ad is more likely than not a scam.
The article you links essentially argues a strawman:
Most people named in the Epstein files are not being prosecuted for the simple reason that what appears there does not meet anything like the legal standards required for prosecution, let alone conviction. Being mentioned in an email, a contact list, or a flight log may be morally damning and emotionally enraging, but it’s not evidence of a crime in the way the criminal justice system is actually supposed to require.
You wouldn't persecute people who are just mentioned in an email, contact list or flight log. You would persecute those accused by the women who told the police they are victims. According to the lawyer for the victims there are at least twenty men against whom victims gave testimony.
Given victim testimony and the files we have I think it's also would make sense to say that Epstein was running a criminal enterprise that's subject to the RICO act. That means that plenty of employees like the pilot that was trafficking the girls to the island likely committed crimes. If you start you RICO proceedings you can offer lower level employees immunity for providing more evidence.
What scenario are you imagining where the pizza joint facilities fraud and people get scammed because of the pizza joint that otherwise wouldn't be reached by the scam?
If you have some mafia element that runs a casino as their main profit source that technically legal and makes 90% of their profit through crime, would you say that's a criminal enterprise?
The pizza joint does not provide a way to target specific demographics who are likely vulnerable to scam attempts and run complex machine learning algorithms that optimize the effectiveness of the scam and auction of the marks to different scammers.
Comparing the money made by meta to the amount of value stolen via burglaries is not a vibe based argument.
Some bigger spenders – known as “High Value Accounts” – could accrue more than 500 strikes without Meta shutting them down, other documents say.
Fraudulent ad campaigns can reach massive size: Four removed by Meta earlier this year were responsible for $67 million in monthly advertising revenue, a document reviewed by Reuters shows.
To draw attention to the company’s perceived failures, an employee earlier this year began issuing reports highlighting that week’s “Scammiest Scammer.” The report profiled whichever advertiser had earned the most user complaints about scams in the past week.
Colleagues praised the initiative. But being name-checked in the report wasn’t always enough for such accounts to get shut down.
The right action for ads that are more likely than not fraudulent is to put them in a queue to be reviewed by human moderators and probably tell the police about fraud attempts that human moderators consider to be relatively certain to be fraud.
When ten percent of their revenue is facilitating fraud than getting rid of those ten percent of their revenue hits "specific revenue guardrails" even when it doesn't impact legitimate users at all. It's quite obvious that removing 25% of the profits would result in some revenue guardrails being violated.
Increasing the price for fraudulent ads is a way to keep revenue high while reducing the amount of fraud.
The company’s internal estimate that it would earn 10.1% of its 2024 revenue from scams and other prohibited ads was “rough and overly-inclusive,” Stone said. [...] Is this reasonable or a greedy corporation trying to cover its ass?
If Meta would believe that the correct number is substantially lower in a way that would motivate people to be less angry, they would probably have shared with it, so what we take from that statement is that Meta believes that the correct number is so high that it's embarrassing to them.
Generally, do you believe that if corporate accountants have the job to estimate a number that's bad for the corporation and could possibly surface in lawsuits or government investigations are they more likely to over- or underestimate it?
I would also note that the corporate statement includes any sign of Meta investing resources. It does not say things like "Because we care about our users not getting scammed we spent 100 million on investigators to remove fraud from our platform."
For Elon motivating SpaceX employees is important, so he needs to tell the public a story about how SpaceX isn't just about building AI datacenters even if he thinks building superintelligence is the main goal of SpaceX and it's important to build AI datacenters for that and he can't build enough of them on earth.
As far as the AI datacenters in orbit go, it's not clear to me that the thermodynamics work out for that project and it's easy enough to lose the heat that the datacenters produce.
I think the idea is that >5k karma users have karma to lose to punish them for posting low-quality content and it's better to have humans make the judgement about what's low-quality than AI.
Murder is about intent. I think Dario believes that his actions reduce the chance of human extinction due to AI because Anthropic is doing a better job then competitors.
When it comes to Sam Altman, I don't think he believes that OpenAI is likely going to kill humanity.
Facebook on the other hand, is intentionally and knowingly facilitating fraud because they think that the government is unlikely to punish them for it and try to make as much money as they think they can get away with without the government punishing them.
Saying the optimal amount of fraud is nonzero is a way to avoid the question of what amount of fraud is reasonable. Is the optimal amount of fraud that Facebook facilitates really a multiple of the value stolen through burglaries?
With $62 billion in net income, the $16 billion made from crime is a quarter of their net income or a tenth of their revenue.
Actions you take to limit crimes inevitably also impact legitmate users as well and disrupt their ability to use the service legally.
While this might be true for some companies, if you mail around lists of the biggest fraudsters on your platform within your company and don't do anything to stop them, you aren't at that point. Banning people that you internally call the biggest fraudsters that make millions does very little to impact legitimate users.
Because Meta shares a huge responsibility for making the digital crimes easy to do. According to their own analysts their platforms are third of involved in a third of all successful scams in the U.S.
This isn't just about ads but also about other communication, but it should be Meta's responsibility to provide an environment for their users that doesn't make them prime targets for crime.
Digital crime proliferation is a sign of big tech failing customers by not adequately protecting them.