Australia’s broadcast industry group has condemned Facebook’s parent company Meta over its handling of scam ads featuring TV stars including David Koch and Karl Stefanovic, saying the company’s response time is inadequate and damages broadcaster reputations.
Free TV Australia – which represents broadcasters including Seven, Nine and Ten – said in a submission published this month to a Senate inquiry into digital platforms that scam ads featuring their networks’ stars without the network or star’s knowledge or authorisation, and fake news stories had been causing harm to consumers over the past few years.
The group highlighted scam ads on Facebook featuring fake endorsements from the Nine news reporter Georgie Gardner for an app, a fake account purporting to be the former Today Show host Allison Langdon encouraging people to enter a scam competition seeking bank details, and scam cryptocurrency ads featuring the Today host Karl Stefanovic and Sunrise host David Koch.
“His image was used as one of many fake celebrity endorsements that baited and lured users into scam bitcoin investments,” Free TV said regarding the fake Koch ads.
The group said scammers had also created fake Seven-branded Facebook pages and replied to users in the comment sections on Seven’s Facebook posts, telling them they’d won a prize.
The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission launched a case in the federal court in March last year alleging Meta had “aided and abetted” celebrity scam ads that had cost some Australians hundreds of thousands of dollars.
In its own submission to the inquiry, the ACCC said the losses from scam ads on social networks had almost doubled from a reported $49m in 2020 to $92m in 2021. These figures are likely to be much higher because most victims do not report their losses to Scamwatch.
The case had yet to be heard, and Free TV Australia said despite the regulator taking this step, Meta’s takedown processes remained “inadequate”.
“Fake ads continue to quickly reappear after they are taken down. These inadequate takedown processes damage the business reputations of broadcasters and also the personal reputations of the celebrities and media personalities that are misrepresented,” the organisation said.
“Notwithstanding the significant consumer harm from these scams, in addition to the reputational harm to Free TV members, the digital platforms are persistently slow in responding to takedown requests.”
Free TV said the social media platforms should be required to ensure that the content they were publishing was not “fake, damaging, misleading or defamatory”, and called for a social media code specifically targeting scam ads.
A spokesperson for Meta said scammers were a challenge across the board online, not just limited to social media platforms.
“We’re committed to safeguarding the integrity of our services, and dedicate substantial resources and technology solutions to protect our community from fake accounts and other inauthentic behaviour,” the spokesperson said.
In the ACCC’s fifth interim report arising from the digital platforms inquiry in November, the regulator recommended to the government that the digital platforms should appropriately verify advertisers to reduce the risk of scams, and implement a “notice-and-action” mechanism that would require the platforms to take action when a user reports a scam. The sixth interim report is due this week.
