Sell Me Lies, Sell Me Sweet Meta Lies

We don't necessarily set out to bash meta here on control or speech, but they do kind of bring it on themselves.

And I think that's certainly the case when it comes to ad fraud, which is a story I want to focus on this week.

Our listeners will know fairly well that last year there was a big story that Jeff Horowitz at Reuters published about Meta's significant ad fraud problem.

He did a big investigation and found that around 10% of Meta's revenue for 2024 was based on fraudulent ads or scam ads.

And when you think about how much revenue that consists of, it's a very large advertising machine.

It's a huge, huge thing.

The analysis and the discussion after that was whether Meta was really doing enough to combat ad fraud on the platform.

Was it kind of incentivized to deploy the tools that it used for organic content in the same way for its ad business? And a really interesting interview that came out this week with one of their VPs in EMEA actually adds a bit more context to that.

So let's talk a bit about that.

And then I'll get your thoughts, Mike, on whether ads, trust and safety is still a massive issue for us.

The interview is kind of interesting because it's fairly wide ranging.

It's with a vice president called Dalia Matras, who's a European-based vice president.

And she's in Cannes when she gives this interview.

So there's a few things that have happened since then.

She talks about smart glasses, which are obviously fairly controversial.

She talks about the UK social media ban.

She talks a little bit about the California product design appeal, which we're kind of expecting to happen at some point this year.

But it's really the stuff about ad fraud that I found really interesting.

And she says a couple of things that stood out.

First of all, she said, and I quote, it's not like we knowingly have bad ads, which is a phrase I take a lot of umbrage with.

And it goes on to say that as a company, Meta has spent north of $30 billion fighting fraud, including building AI systems to catch fraudulent ads and scams.

To which my reaction was, well, you're not trying quite hard enough, right? And there is this kind of question as to whether Meta is looking the other way or leaving ads up as part of its revenue goals.

And those quarter-on-quarter results are increasingly impressive.

The piece that we'll include in the show notes talks about how just in Q1 of 2026 alone, its revenues grew 33% year-on-year to $56 billion.

So it has spent historically... a half of what it earned in revenue in Q1 alone, just to kind of make the maths clear.