How Meta Is Making Billions From Scam Advertising
Question Everything
Brian Reed
4.6 • 707 Ratings
🗓️ 20 November 2025
⏱️ 37 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
It seems like Meta just can’t lose. The Facebook parent company won a huge victory in court this week. The federal government was claiming Meta was too massive after acquiring Instagram and WhatsApp, and wanted to force the company to spin off those platforms. But a federal judge disagreed.
And that means, Meta will continue to make a ton of money from scam ads on those platforms.
Reuters reporter Jeff Horwitz received leaked documents from inside Meta where employees estimated that last year its platforms served up 15 billion scam ad impressions every day, totalling about $16 billion. That’s ten percent of the company’s total 2024 revenue. It’s a major part of their business.
And if you want to sue Meta for serving you ads that lead to your credit card or identity getting stolen, it’s going to be really tough – because of Section 230, the law that prevents companies from getting sued for the content posted on their sites.
Brian talks to Jeff about what he discovered in this latest leak: how these scam ads make Meta billions, one “queasy-making” fix Meta has come up with, and how Section 230 provides not just a shield, but a lack of incentive for the company to change its ways.
“Question Everything” is a production of KCRW and Placement Theory. Don’t forget to sign up for our newsletter. And please help support our show by visiting our sponsor, the notetaking and personal assistant device Plaud.ai, and using the offer code QUESTION.
Guests:
Jeff Horwitz, Reuters reporter and the author of “Broken Code: Inside Facebook and the Fight to Expose Its Harmful Secrets.”
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | There's a conflict I'm grappling with at the heart of Section 230, the law from 1996, that's responsible for the internet as we know it. |
| 0:15.0 | On the one hand, Section 230, lots of people argue, is the reason we have free speech on the internet, which |
| 0:23.2 | that is something I definitely want free speech on the internet. |
| 0:27.0 | The law is so fundamental to online life, like the foundation of your house, it's easy to take |
| 0:32.6 | for granted. |
| 0:33.7 | But ever since I started paying attention to it, I haven't been able to stop seeing Section 230 everywhere. |
| 0:39.9 | Like last week, when the new dump of Jeffrey Epstein documents came out with Donald Trump's name littered all over them, |
| 0:46.9 | millions of us could go on to X and TikTok and substack and blue sky and talk about them. |
| 0:53.0 | We could theorize about what Epstein meant when he wrote |
| 0:56.0 | that Trump was the dog that hasn't barked, or whether we thought Epstein was telling the truth when |
| 1:00.2 | he claimed that he had photos of Trump with scantily clad young women in his kitchen. And we could do that, |
| 1:05.4 | arguably, thanks to Section 230, because it makes it so that internet sites and providers can't get sued for |
| 1:11.9 | what users post on their platforms. And the same for users who repost something from someone |
| 1:17.0 | else. And that means when people share damning information about the president, X and TikTok |
| 1:22.2 | and Substack and Blue Sky don't have to worry about Trump suing them, the way he sued news organizations |
| 1:27.6 | for many millions of dollars. Because of Section 230, platforms are comfortable providing a space |
| 1:33.8 | for the public to debate this important information quickly, ruckously. I don't want to lose that. |
| 1:39.9 | And if Section 230 were repealed or reformed, it is possible that we could. |
| 1:46.2 | But at the same time, in the last year or so especially, I find myself more and more noticing the negative effects of Section 230. |
| 1:56.0 | Because this same law, this same legal foundation that the modern internet rests on, it's also propping |
| 2:02.5 | up some pretty gnarly, rotting, and extremely unsafe structures. |
| 2:06.9 | If you look at a list of cases where Section 230 has helped internet companies escape accountability, |
... |
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