Gangster Mark Zuckerberg Running Facebook Ads for Drugs Found To Be Laced With Fentanyl
Despite a federal investigation into the practice, Meta continues to run ads on Facebook and Instagram selling cocaine and other illicit drugs — some of which have been found to contain fentanyl, a deadly opioid linked to hundreds of thousands of overdose deaths in recent years.
As the Wall Street Journal reports, the company’s ad marketplace was until recently still making money from ads for illicit drugs months after it was revealed that federal prosecutors in Virginia are investigating the troubling trend.
Despite running counter to its own policies banning such ads, tech-savvy dealers manage to skirt Meta’s rules by posting photos of their wares instead of writing out what they’re selling in the product description, which would trigger the AI censors deployed on the social networks. In one such ad found by the WSJ, the letters “DMT” are spelled out in what is presumably a powdered version of the powerful hallucinogen, which is short for the chemical name N,N-Dimethyltryptamine.
After clicking on the ads, users are generally taken to a third-party site or social network. Often, they’re entered into dealer chat feeds on the messaging app Telegram, a less-regulated WhatsApp clone that Meta does not own. After products are delivered, users will respond “TD” or “touchdown,” the WSJ notes.
As recently as last week, the WSJ said that it had seen ads selling cocaine and prescription opioids on the Ad Library, though after alerting Meta to their existence, all were taken down — the typical tech giant modus operandi once violating ads are brought to light by media.
Though the WSJ didn’t say exactly how many “dozens” of ads it found for the month of July, it did note that the Tech Transparency Project watchdog group found that between March and June, there were more than 450 of these ads running on Meta’s Ad Library.
“Our systems are designed to proactively detect and enforce against violating content, and we reject hundreds of thousands of ads for violating our drug policies,” a Meta spokesperson told the WSJ. “We continue to invest resources and further improve our enforcement on this kind of content.”
The fact that these ads manage to run and make Meta money is bad enough, but as the WSJ notes, these digital drug deals seem to have a death toll associated with them as well.
Last fall, for instance, 15-year-old California boy Elijah Ott died of an overdose after exchanging Instagram messages with someone who was selling marijuana oil and a Xanax-esque drug. His autopsy found that he had a fatal amount of fentanyl in his system, and his mother, Mikayla Brown, believes the drugs he’d bought off of IG had been laced with it.
Even more horrifically, the WSJ found that the accounts the teen had been in contact with remained live for months after his death — though of course, Meta took them down once the newspaper brought them to the company’s attention.
Like some of the parents who confronted Zuckerberg on the Senate floor at the beginning of this year about some of the other harms his social networks hath wrought, Brown very much blames Instagram for her son dying so young.
“Because of this app,” the grieving mother told the WSJ, “my child does not get to live.”
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