Matt Beard

SPRING HAS SPRUNG! 🌸🌸🌸 Our pop-up shop opens at 10 am! You’ll find everything from t-shirts to hoodies to unique Metro merch you can only get in store. Details here: wmata.com/popup

Latest podcast from @Gregory_C_Allen has an insane section on criminal activity at Meta. Internal docs leaked to Reuters show: • 10% of all Meta revenue comes from ads for scams & banned goods ($16B/year) • Meta estimates it's involved in 1/3 of all successful scams in the US • That suggests they drive $50B in scam losses for US consumers alone each year • Meta earns ~$3B annually from scam/banned goods ads run by Chinese operations alone The China case study: • In 2024, Meta made $18B+ from Chinese companies advertising to foreign consumers • Internal teams found ~19% was scams/banned content • An anti-fraud team successfully cut these ads in half • When Zuckerberg saw the revenue impact, he told them to "pause" and the team was disbanded • By mid-2025, banned ads climbed back to 16% of China revenue • This results in money being stolen and going directly from ordinary Americans to Chinese criminals The deliberate enabling: • Fraud earns 10% of all revenue, but anti-fraud teams were blocked from any action costing >0.15%, so they couldn't effectively do anything • Meta charged higher rates for suspected fraudulent ads — a "scam tax" • Their algorithm naturally identifies people vulnerable to frauds and feeds them more and more The cold calculation: • Meta anticipated up to $1B in regulatory fines for this • But they make $3.5B every 6 months from high-risk ads • They view these fines as just "cost of doing business" Senators Blumenthal & Hawley now calling for FTC/SEC investigations in a blistering letter, noting that all this happened while Meta cut safety staff and moved billions over to VR and AI. WTF.