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There are many ads on Instagram that makes me wonder how this is legal; for example, I saw a fake site that pretended to be Marine Layer where the clothes were suspiciously cheap. I reported the ad, but they dismissed it.

And don't get me started on all the "mushroom alternative", "caffeine alternative", drugs. And it's like everyone and their grandmother has their own Viagra or Hair Loss drug company now

Infomercials for millennials, I suppose.



It’s possible they’re not legal.

Google got hit for internet pharmacies and forfeited all the revenue they got.

I’m sure Google had no problem paying the same number of dollars in 2011 but really liked that money in their earlier days when there wasn’t as much big $ legit ad demand.

https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/google-forfeits-500-million-g...


I routinely see ads for scams on YouTube and report them and never hear back.

Stuff like "a 19 year old invented this that saves you a hundred bucks on your power bill but Big electricity is suppressing it"

Just the most bullshit claims over stock footage, things I saw debunked on Snopes 20 years ago as a literal child.

It's disappointing


Its not just youtube. I unsubscribed from LA times after their email newsletter had one too many "Doctors don't want you to know about this!!!!" esque ads. Pure poison marketing. I can't believe people greenlight this crap to run on their platform. Maybe they already fired who greenlights ads.


For me Washington Post and Daily Beast newsletters were filled with ads for "Grunt Style" brand qanon clothing, sometimes all 5 or 6 of the ads in a given newsletter email. I ended up DNS blackholing some FQDNs, but I suspect that Grunt Style was targeting ads to "own libs".


> Stuff like "a 19 year old invented this that saves you a hundred bucks on your power bill but Big electricity is suppressing it"

I had some of the booklets on that theme when I was a kid: https://archive.org/details/george-trinkaus-tesla-the-lost-i...

Given how cheap PV is these days, I'm surprised that particular scam is still a thing.


There's a sucker born every minute. I suppose that when Googlers look at their huge paychecks it's easy to rationalize building tools that help scammers steal from suckers. From a legal standpoint they have plausible deniability but most YouTube advertising is just so slimy, like even more unethical than TV infomercials.




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