Beware of scam ads on Facebook and other Meta sites

Recent news reports have revealed that Meta (which owns Facebook, Whatsapp and Instagram) has knowingly made large profits from scam ads. See, for example, this article.

In this blog post I will describe how I tested a scam ad, and what happened when I reported it to Facebook. 

A couple of years ago Facebook started showing me ads that looked "too good to be true". They claimed to be from well-known chain stores, like Makro or TakeALot, and advertised excess, damaged, or outdated stock at very low prices -- laptop computers or cell phones were often advertised for R35.00, or somewhere between R35.00 and R39.00. 

One day I decided to check one that advertised Apple iPhones for R35.00. They were so cheap because the packaging had been damaged, or some such story.  I hovered my cursor over the link, and the URL was totally different from the name of the chain store selling them. I nevertheless went on to the site. And they said that this Apple iPhone for R35.00 would be delivered to my home within 2 days. I just needed to answer some questions. I answered some questions, gave my card details, and got an acknowledgement of payment. It then went on to a different site, dealing with something totally different, and at the end a message flashed across the screen saying "Thank you for subscribing to..." and was gone before I could see what it was thanking me for subscribing to.

I immediately called the bank and cancelled my card. 

Later the same day the bank phoned me, and said they had received by request for cancellation, but two requests for payment had come in since then -- one for R35.00, and the other for R650.00. Did I want the bank to pay them?

I said they should pay the R35.00, but not the other one. I had reckoned on losing R35.00 if the ad was a scam, but if I cancelled the payment I would never know, so I let it stand. And no iPhone ever was delivered to me, so I now know for certain it was a scam. And if I had not cancelled my card when I did, they would probably have taken the R650.00 every month as well.

But since I had responded to one such ad, Facebook began showing me a lot more. I would hover my cursor over them, note that the URL never corresponded with the ostensible advertiser, and would then report it as a scam. Sometimes Facebook would acknowledge by email that I had reported it, but would never say what action they had taken, except in a few cases where they responded by saying that they had investigated my complaint and found that the ad I had complained of "does not contravene our community standards".

I also once tried advertising on Facebook. I write children's books, and wanted to make them known to more potential readers. Setting up the ads was not easy, because the instructions were vague. I tried to specify the kind of people who would be interested in such books, but Facebook apparently showed them to a bunch of random people. They told me who had "liked" them, but none had shown any interest in reading them, and the demographic data showed that the people who had "liked" them would not be very likely to want to read them.

So the lesson I draw from this is twofold:

1. Don't buy stuff advertised on Facebook & other Meta platforms

2. Don't advertise stuff on Facebook and other Meta platforms

 

What's your lifestyle?

The word "lifestyle" has been around for more than a century, but was only popularised a little over 50 years ago, and now seems to have been hijacked by the advertising industry. An article in BusinessTech informs us that Lifestyle Estates are Booming in South Africa:

Giovanni Gaggia, CEO of Real Estate Services, said that lifestyle estates offer a unique blend of luxury living and community engagement.

The estates typically offer several amenities, including golf courses, fitness centres and nature reserves, which cater to various interests and promote an active lifestyle.

They also offer a secure environment and well-maintained infrastructure to add to their appeal.

But the shanty-town lifestyle estates of informal settlements not only don't offer such "typical" features as golf courses, fitness centres and nature reserves, they also do not typically have indoor plumbing, sewerage, proper roads or electricity.

The advertising hype suggests that only an affluent lifestyle of conspicuous consumption qualifies as a lifestyle at all.

The earliest reference to "lifestyle" in the Oxford English Dictionary was 1915, and it is defined as

A style or way of living (associated with an individual person, a society, etc.); esp. the characteristic manner in which a person lives (or chooses to live) his or her life.

It only became popular in the late 1960s, however, when it was used mainly to contrast the lifestyles of the "hip" and the "straight". The hippie counterculture espoused different values from those of "straight" society, and expressed these values through different lifestyles.

One of the values that hippies eschewed was the lifestyle of conspicuous consumption that was practised or aspired to by straight society.

The advertising industry, which was dedicated to promoting conspicuous consumption, fought back, and one of the ways it did so was by adopting hip jargon to promote products and services and sell them to the changing youth culture. "Lifestyle banking" was one of the earlier ones, illustrated with yachts and luxury cars.

Part of the countercultural lifestyle is, however, still reflected by my Collins Millennium Dictionary (does that make it a dictionary for "Millennials"?) which gives

lifestyle business a small business in which the owners are more anxious to pursue interests that reflect their lifestyle than to make more than a comfortable living.

Advertising hype has not taken over completely. We still talk about the lifestyle of hunter-gatherers as compared with the lifestyle of peasant farmers, neither of which would be found in the so-called "lifestyle estates".

When the term first became popular it was variously spelt as "life style", "life-style" or "lifestyle", depending on the house style (house-style, housestyle)  of the publication concerned, but now the "lifestyle" spelling predominates.

The point to remember here is that a lifestyle of poverty is  just as much a lifestyle as a lifestyle of affluence, no matter how much the advertising agencies would like us to believe otherwise. 

Another point to remember is found in the OED definition: the characteristic manner in which a person lives (or chooses to live) his or her life

A lifestyle may be voluntary or involuntary.

The lifestyle of a prisoner is involuntary.

The lifestyle of a person living in an affluent "lifestyle estate" is voluntary. If you can afford to live in one, you can also afford not to live in one. And if you can afford not to live in one, you can also choose to avoid an affluent lifestyle, and choose rather to live an abstemious one.

For most people, lifestyle is a mixture of voluntary and involuntary. Inmates of institutions like boarding schools, hostels, communes, monasteries, old-age homes, etc may have varying degrees of choice whether to enter such institutions, but, once within them, they need to adopt features of the prescribed lifestyle or leave. 

To some extent, this might be true of "lifestyle estates" as well. The lifestyle is prescribed and circumscribed, sometimes even more than the lifestyle of informal settlements. If you live in a "lifestyle estate" and start erecting shacks in your backyard to sub-let to others, you would soon discover the limits of freedom in a "lifestyle estate".

There are many ways in which lifestyle is determined by circumstances, such as wealth or poverty, ones upbringing, one's education or the lack of it. But some, like monks, choose voluntary poverty, and this was also the case with some in the hippie counterculture of the late 1960s.

Lifestyle is also linked to values. An authentic lifestyle reflects your values; an inauthentic lifestyle probably conflicts with your values, or perhaps reflects the values you actually hold rather than the values you profess. 

Before the hippies came the beats, who didn't speak of lifestyle, though they knew what it was. Their term for what the hippies called "straight" society was "square", and as Lawrence Lipton put it in his book The Holy Barbarians (Lipton 1959:150):

The New Poverty is the disaffiliate’s answer to the New Prosperity. It is important to make a living. It is even more important to make a life. Poverty. The very word is taboo in a society where success is equated with virtue and poverty is a sin. Yet it has an honourable ancestry. St. Francis of Assisi revered poverty as his bride, with holy fervor and pious rapture. The poverty of the disaffiliate is not to be confused with the poverty of indigence, intemperance, improvidence or failure. It is simply that the goods and services he has to offer are not valued at a high price in our society. As one beat generation writer said to the square who offered him an advertising job: ‘I’ll scrub your floors and carry out your slops to make a living, but I will not lie for you, pimp for you, stool for you or rat for you.’ It is not the poverty of the ill-tempered and embittered, those who wooed the bitch goddess Success with panting breath and came away rebuffed. It is an independent, voluntary poverty.

But for more on that see here: It's Cool to be Hip, but not Hip to be Cool.

Interestingly enough, though advertisers frequently misuse "lifestyle", the original meaning still lives and it has not been completely skunked. If you look here, you can see that when "lifestyle" is used as a modifier, the most common usage is "lifestyle changes", followed by "lifestyle choices" and "lifestyle factors".

 

Does Facebook's targeted advertising work?

We are told that Facebook uses our profile information to show us ads that are most likely to be interesting to us. How Facebook Ads Work - Social Ads Tool:

You are what you Like

Facebook Ads are targeted according to your Facebook Profile information: Your age, location, education, relationship status, interests like favorite movies, music and much more are available to advertisers that can access to aggregate data and reach the right audience for their ads.

Depending on their goals and the product that they are advertising, advertisers can set a targeting filter to select which group of people will see their ad. This makes it possible to focus on or target the people most likely to be interested in the product, amongst the 500 million worldwide Facebook users.

Having read that in several places, I expected that the ads that I saw on Facebook might, just possibly, be suited to the kind of demographic group I'm in. But this is what showed up...

Scuba diving, at my age? Living inland?

Shy women? I'm married.

Little black bottle coloured green? What's to like?

Looking for a partner? If I were single or divorced and 25 years younger, I might be, but given who I am, this is way off target.

The BBC recently decided to see how effective this was: BBC Finds Badly Targeted Facebook Ads Don’t Work. No Kidding. | TechCrunch:

the BBC tested out Facebook advertising by running a campaign for the Facebook page of a fictitious small business called VirtualBagel. The investigation was headlined “Facebook ‘likes’ and adverts’ value doubted”. During the week over 3,000 people Liked the ads even though the company doesn’t exist and simply shows you a picture of a bagel. The ‘investigation’ is partly a reminder that Facebook still has issues with fake profiles and Astroturfing, but is also a simple re-stating of the fact that you get what you pay for and if you put up a dumb ad targeted too widely you’ll waste your money.

And there are all those advertisers who ask you to "like" their ads or their produces. Perhaps that means you will see more of their ads, but even more important is that "like" means "Please send me spam".

The wheels on the bus go round and round

Apart from anything else, I hate travelling on buses with painted-over windows like this.



Wildrose campaign bus raises eyebrows - CBC News:

Alberta's Wildrose Party confirmed that the questionable placement of party Leader Danielle Smith's photo on the campaign bus will be changed.

A photo went viral on Twitter Monday shortly after the party unveiled the bus during a pre-election event in Edmonton.

Unlimited bollocks for bullockymorons

In an English usage discussion forum someone asked about the meaning of "unlimited" in the following examples:

"Unlimited Mobile Internet: Unlimited mobile internet is subject to a fair use allowance of 1GB per month."

"Unlimited Mobile Internet – 30p a day: Our daily charge for access to the mobile internet is subject to a fair use allowance of 25MB per day."

Source: Virgin Mobile Terms and Conditions

Apparently the British Advertising Standards Authority thinks such lies in advertising are OK, as long as they are truthful lies.

That really does give them incredible credibility.

Your very own atheist bus slogan generator.

Bus slogan generator

Atheists have started advertising on buses in the UK. Do you want to see your own message on the side of a bus? Well now's your chance.

Hat tip to Bishop Alan, who said: Gadget of the year! An Atheist Bus slogan generator, to help you make your very own atheist bus.

So here's mine: