Congress Furious With Mark Zuckerberg for Making Money From Illegal Drug Ads

Illegal drugs are shockingly easy to find on Facebook.

Drug Runner

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg is under major fire from Congress after a recent report found that the company had been profiting from ads for illegal drugs.

In a letter to Meta, a bipartisan group of House members cited a recent report from the Wall Street Journal, which found that Meta's public marketplaces were inundated with ads for illegal drugs including cocaine and DMT.

At the beginning of this year, Zuckerberg put on a tearful apologetic performance in front of Congress and families whose kids had been affected or even died because of harmful content found on Meta's social networks. Despite insistence that the company would do something about it, however, it appears that as of last month, the Meta Ad Library, which houses advertisements for Instagram and Facebook, was still profiting from the sale of drugs.

In the most recent cache of ads, dealers circumvented algorithmic censors by spelling out whichever substance they were selling in the photograph associated with the ad. In one such instance discovered by the Tech Transparency Project earlier this summer, the letters "DMT," a popular psychedelic drug, are seen spelled out in what appears to be a powdered version of the substance itself.

These obvious exploitations of loopholes and unenforced oversights are bad enough — but as members of Congress have repeatedly noted, including in this most recent letter, the results have been severe for young people who died or became addicted to drugs after allegedly accessing them on Meta's social networks.

Self-Rule

Earlier this year, the Wall Street Journal revealed that US prosecutors were investigating the company over the claims that beyond being illegal and unethical, the drug ads also go against the company's own policies.

"What is particularly egregious about this instance is that this was not user-generated content on the dark web or on private social media pages," the latest bipartisan letter reads, "but rather they were advertisements approved and monetized by Meta."

"Many of these ads contained blatant references to illegal drugs in their titles, descriptions, photos, and advertiser account names," it continued, "which were easily found... [and] appear to have passed undetected or been ignored by Meta’s own internal processes."

A Meta spokesperson told Engadget that the company plans to respond to the House members' letter soon — but in the meantime, those ads are still, as Tech Transparency Project noted, just a few clicks away.

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