Mark Zuckerberg, president of Meta Platforms Inc., throughout a meeting on “The Circuit with Emily Chang” at Meta head office in Menlo Park, California, United States, on Thursday, July 18, 2024.
Jason Henry|Bloomberg|Getty Images
A Republican congressman pounded Meta on Thursday over what the legislator called an insufficient action to issues concerning immoral medicine promotions on Facebook and Instagram.
Michigan Rep Tim Walberg identified a letter sent out by Meta to a bipartisan team of legislators on Monday as “unacceptable,” asserting the firm stopped working to attend to the certain concerns the political leaders sent out to chief executive officer Mark Zuckerberg in August.
The concerns to Meta focused around current reports from The Wall Street Journal and the nonprofit Tech Transparency Project (TTP) that exposed an expansion of Facebook and Instagram advertisements guiding individuals to third-party solutions where they can get prescription tablets and leisure medications like drug. The legislators meant the listing of 15 concerns to aid identify the frequency of immoral medicine advertisements on Meta’s applications, the quantity of sights and communications the advertisements got, the amount of minors involved with them and the activities Meta has actually taken versus the accountable teams.
“Meta’s response not only ignores most of the questions posed in our letter, but also refuses to acknowledge that these illicit drug ads were approved and monetized by Meta and allowed to run on their platforms,” Walberg stated in a declaration. “This is unacceptable. Meta must answer for its negligence and the resulting impact on users, especially children and teens.”
Meta decreased to comment.
In its letter to legislators, Meta Vice President of Global Legal Strategy Rachel Lieber stated that the firm shares legislators’ issues “about the public safety and health threat caused by the opioid epidemic.”
“We know this problem impacts many Americans, often with tragic results, which is why fighting drug trafficking online is bigger than any single platform,” Lieber stated in the letter, which was gotten by. “At Meta, we remain committed to playing an important role in the solution.”
Lieber described in the letter that Meta’s plans “prohibit buying and selling illicit drugs across our apps” which the firm has different steps and sources that it makes use of “to detect and remove drug-related content that violates our policies.”
Meta “has repeatedly skirted direct questions from members of Congress, the media, and the public about the hundreds of ads for illicit drugs on its platform,” TTP Director Katie Paul stated in a declaration.
“Meta tries to deflect blame and push a ‘whole of society’ approach,” Paul stated. Meta is “profiting from proving paid amplification to drug trafficking sites that would not have the reach without Meta’s advertising platforms.”
Walberg’s remarks followed Zuckerberg, throughout an online podcast recording in San Francisco, stated Meta ought to press back harder “when people make allegations about the impact of the tech industry or our company” that are not established in any kind of reality.
“One of the things that I look back on and regret is I think we accepted other people’s view of some of the things that they were asserting that we were doing wrong or were responsible for that I don’t actually think we were,” Zuckerberg stated at the occasion on Tuesday.
Read Meta’s letter to legislators listed below:
