Rob Wiblin

And as the debate goes mainstream, it could easily become a dumbed down culture war where you're either for government control or against it.

But caring about precisely what the government is doing, and whether it's justified, isn't hypocritical, naive, or undemocratic.

People should be proud to say they care about their specifics, and they're actively pushing for the ones that they think would be best.

And they certainly shouldn't allow themselves to be bullied into silence by the kinds of mediocre arguments we've seen above.

And with that, I'll speak with you again soon.

An overarching question that matters for governance of artificial intelligence is how much we can trust technology companies to do the right thing in cases where it becomes seriously costly for them to do so.

Well, some internal documents leaked from Meta, the company behind Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp, are a really important piece of evidence in this debate, and one that, in my opinion, far too few people have heard anything about.

These documents, which were leaked to Reuters by a frustrated staff member, show that Meta itself estimated that 10% of all its revenue was coming from running ads for scams and goods that they themselves had banned, around $16 billion a year.

That's 10% of all revenue, coming quite often from fundamentally enabling crimes.

Meta also estimated that its platforms were involved in initiating a third of all successful scams taking place in the entire United States.

How much might we expect that to actually be costing ordinary people on average?

Well, the FTC estimates that Americans lose about $158 billion a year to fraud.

If Meta is really leading to a third of that, we're talking roughly $50 billion a year in losses connected to Meta's platforms, or about $160 per person per year.

Now, not everyone inside Meta loved this state of affairs, as you can imagine, and the documents also show that a Meta anti-fraud team came up with a screening method that, when tested, successfully halved the prevalence of scams being operated from China, at the time one of their worst fraud hotspots.

The only trouble?

Meta was making $3 billion a year from these fraudulent Chinese ads, and according to the documents, after Zuckerberg was briefed on the team's work, he instructed them to pause.

Meta's spokesperson disputes this characterization.

He says that Zuckerberg's instruction was to redouble efforts to reduce scams all across the globe, including in China.

But whatever he said, what actually happened is that the China-focused anti-fraud team was disbanded entirely, and the freeze on giving new Chinese ad agencies access to the platform was lifted.

Naturally then, within months, fraud from China bounced back to nearly its previous level.