Most of my Instagram ads are for drugs, stolen credit cards, hacked accounts

And yet my wife and I, as boudoir photographers, have 9 out of 10 ads rejected because our work show women in lingerie, which is "inappropriate."

aspyct · 2 years ago

Yeah, screw them.

I've also been banned one day for posting ads for my pictures. Just portraits, nothing special.

I got zero explanation and could not recover my ad credits.

More recently I was shadow banned for including links to YouTube on my fb post. Got a reach of 21, where it was usually above 1000. My page didn't recover yet.

It's time to let meta die.

wahnfrieden · 2 years ago

they are more concerned with protectionism of platform monopoly than user safety, yet their trust & safety efforts get credit for managing the latter as the primary goal. apparently user safety was a "zero interest rate" era nicety and what we see now is a mask off moment.

same with apple's app store review process.

Dirak · 2 years ago

Ads are human reviewed. Either you’re exceptionally unlucky with reviewers or there’s more to the story here.

1MachineElf · 2 years ago

I haven't logged into Instagram in a while, but I recall there were plenty of accounts by women where were often wearing just lingerie. Seems like a hypocritical position for IG to take.

jamesponddotco · 2 years ago

There are, and there are also nude art photographers which seem to be doing just fine. My guess is that our account is too small to bypass certain rules—which is bs, considering the content of this article.

It could be just me but my Instagram Reels are all of like random thirst traps for Indian dudes with 4 likes on each post...

(Yes, I am aware that the 'algorithm shows you what you engage with' but no matter how many times I click 'not interested' I seem to be in Indian thirst trap hell)

SkyPuncher · 2 years ago

I have a similar thing with YouTube shorts on my work laptop.

I have never engaged with a YouTube short, I’m not signed in, and I use an isolated profile. I’ll occasionally watch YouTube while I eat lunch. Home repair, cars/trucks/RV, and how to videos; all of which I assume is primarily a male audience.

All of my shorts suggestions are scantily clad females with clickbait titles. I can only assume that it’s the default content for people YouTube thing identifies as males. If it knows nothing else about you, it simply defaults to “sex sells”.

My personal YouTube account is a bit better. It’s mostly content from channels I subscribe to, but they throw in an occasional thirst trap.

algas · 2 years ago

Fully 90 percent of my Instagram explore page is variations of one meme, which I don't remember ever clicking on. It's the blue guy from avatar with captions like "Selfish? How much does it cost?" I just opened my explore page and got *11* of them above the fold. All by different accounts, and I don't follow any of them. [0][1][2][3][4][5][6][7][8][9][10]

It's really confusing.

Deleted Comment

rchaud · 2 years ago

Likely related to your account history. The suggested pages I get are dog videos by influencers selling overpriced pet products. I follow a lot of pet channels so that adds up.

malshe · 2 years ago

I’m ashamed to admit it but I fell for a scam on Instagram ads. Ordered discounted Raybans from what I thought was Sunglasshut but instead was a scammer website. The name started with sunglasshut and then there were more characters. The website was an exact replica of sunglasshut. Anyway it was only $50 but the humiliation is very costly psychologically!

Luckily I only use one time cards created on Privacy so no worries about canceling the credit card either.

mandeepj · 2 years ago

Sorry for your bad experience. I've never bought anything by clicking on Ad; I collect their info then visit their site or reach out to them, after researching about their product. Not trying to say I'm smart, albeit I'm far from that.

> one time cards created on Privacy

Thanks for reminding me about that. I'd now definitely get one of those.

fred_is_fred · 2 years ago

Not sure about what using Privacy changes here, but why not just do a Chargeback?

sottol · 2 years ago

I assume they had a fake CC form and collected the CC number and information on top of the charge. So that'd involve cancelling the card and compromised PII.

talldatethrow · 2 years ago

The scammers didn't also get to steal his entire credit card info...

gravitronic · 2 years ago

I've gotten into a nice algorithm niche of "sketchy scams" that I find endlessly amusing. A device that strips the coating off copper wires, "We'll buy catalytic converters no questions asked", a prison metal toilet / sink combo, temu vibrators, $40k aliexpress factories in a box, ...

Contax · 2 years ago

> $40k aliexpress factories in a box

Sorry if this sounds stupid, but... what is that? One of those premade semiautomated drop shipping stores... or do you actually mean a factory?

It was like, a picture of a building that they'd ship to you in pieces and you'd assemble, or at least in theory (what would arrive, who knows?).

The ad might have been for alibaba, stuff like this https://www.alibaba.com/trade/search?fsb=y&IndexArea=product...

generj · 2 years ago

Some solid reporting from the new 404 Media.

What legitimate use for a Telegram link in a Facebook/Instagram ad exists? Simply blocking or having heightened suspicion of ads linking to Telegram would stop much of these problematic ads (not the ones linking through Telegram via LinkTree).

JBorrow · 2 years ago

gamblor956 · 2 years ago

All of my Instagram ads are for camping and video games...

Instagram ads are based on your Instagram (and possibly) Facebook viewing data, adjusted for your click-thru rates on the ads shown to you. If you don't want to see ads for drugs or stolen credit cards then don't spend all your time on Instagram looking at accounts about drugs or stolen credit cards, and definitely don't click on those ads.

On another note, based on the articles published so far by 404...not impressed. This isn't subscription quality reporting...it's barely Gizmodo-level reporting.

RoyalHenOil · 2 years ago

The point is that these are ads for illegal things. Regardless of whether the user wants to see them or not, Instagram should absolutely not facilitate trade of stolen credit card data, etc.

michele_f · 2 years ago

I totally agree! That’s why, as sad as it can be, a couple of weeks ago I decided to delete my FB and IG accounts.

I tried really hard in signalling inappropriate content, adding manual tags irrelevant for me, but nothing. I got frustrated of unasked violence, road rage acts, sex and physical injuries. Bye bye Meta.

The problem remain for everybody else. I hope governments start to pay close attention and investigate. Meta’s pure evil.

6stringmerc · 2 years ago

Oh if there was anything to learn from the catastrophe of Prenda Law there is one very big sword of Damocles here:

The number of fake accounts using copyright images of adult models and film stars is enough to probably give Thiel & Bodella’s lawyer a stroke of happiness.

I find it a weird wrinkle in safe harbor because we all know damn well they can photo check a database via super duper AI and not let those users join or stay on…

Short sale anyone?

mcpackieh · 2 years ago

> I find it a weird wrinkle in safe harbor because we all know damn well they can photo check a database via super duper AI and not let those users join or stay on…

Why should they? Safe harbor laws require them to respond to take-down requests, not to proactively police such infringement themselves.