Lawmakers from both sides of the political aisle are furious that Meta is allowing advertisements that promote illicit drugs to continue to appear on its platforms.
On Thursday, a bipartisan group of Congress members sent Meta a letter to express their “deep concerns” over recent reports about these advertisements that are allegedly running on platforms that the company owns, including WhatsApp, Messenger, Facebook and Instagram.
The letter follows a March report from The Wall Street Journal about the company being under investigation for “facilitating the sale of illicit drugs.”
Democratic Representatives Lori Trahan of Massachusetts and Kathy Castor of Florida, along with Republican Representative Tim Walberg of Michigan, led the effort.
Their letter reads:
“Instead of quickly addressing the issue and fully removing the illicit content,” the WSJ reported late last month that Meta was again “running ads on Facebook and Instagram that steer users to online marketplaces for illegal drugs.”
A recent report from the Tech Transparency Project outlined that there were more than 450 ads that they found on Meta’s platforms pushing places that sell pharmaceuticals and some other drugs — just in the last few months.
The lawmakers’ letter, which was signed by 19 members of Congress in all, continued:
“Meta appears to have continued to shirk its social responsibility and defy its own community guidelines. Protecting users online, especially children and teenagers, is one of our top priorities.
“We are continuously concerned that Meta is not up to the task and this dereliction of duty needs to be addressed.”
Content is moderated on all of Meta’s platforms by artificial intelligence technology. However, according to the WSJ’s report, the tools the company uses haven’t been able to detect drug advertisements that are able to bypass the AI system.
One example that the media outlet found happened last month. It was an advertisement that read, “Place your orders” and had a picture of yellow powder that was arranged so that it formed the letters “DMT,” which is known as a psychedelic drug.
It was “particularly egregious,” according to the lawmakers, that advertisements such as these were “approved and monetized by Meta.”
As they wrote:
“Many of these ads contained blatant references to illegal drugs in their titles, descriptions, photos and advertiser account names, which were easily found by the researchers and journalists at the Wall Street Journal and Tech Transparency Project using Meta’s Ad Library. However, they appear to have passed undetected or been ignored by Meta’s own internal processes.”
When contacted by media outlet The Hill, a spokesperson for Meta said the company always works with law enforcement agencies to combat illicit drug activity.
The spokesperson added:
“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. We continue to invest resources and further improve our enforcement on this kind of content.
“Our hearts go out to those suffering from the tragic consequences of this epidemic — it requires all of us to work together to stop it.”
