Lawmakers press Meta over illicit drug advertising concerns

A bipartisan group of lawmakers penned a letter Thursday to Meta expressing “deep concerns” over reports it has continued to promote Illicit drug advertisements on its platforms — including on Instagram, Facebook, Messenger and WhatsApp.

The letter — led by Reps. Tim Walberg (R-Mich.), Gus Bilirakis (R-Fla.), Kathy Castor (D-Fla.) and Lori Trahan (D-Mass.) — comes after The Wall Street Journal first reported in March that Meta was under investigation for “facilitating the sale of illicit drugs.”

“Instead of quickly addressing the issue and fully removing the illicit content,” the lawmakers wrote, the Journal reported July 31 that Meta again was “running ads on Facebook and Instagram that steer users to online marketplaces for illegal drugs.”

The Tech Transparency Project recently reported that it found more than 450 advertisements on those platforms that sell pharmaceuticals and other drugs in the last several months.

“Meta appears to have continued to shirk its social responsibility and defy its own community guidelines. Protecting users online, especially children and teenagers, is one of our top priorities,” the lawmakers wrote in their letter, which was signed by 19 lawmakers.

“We are continuously concerned that Meta is not up to the task and this dereliction of duty needs to be addressed,” they continued.

Meta uses artificial intelligence to moderate content, but the Journal reported the company’s tools have not managed to detect the drug advertisements that bypass the system.

The Journal found an example of an advertisement from last month that said, “Place your orders,” along with a photo of yellow powder arranged to form the letters “DMT,” which is a psychedelic drug.

The lawmakers said it was “particularly egregious” that the advertisements were “approved and monetized by Meta.”

“Many of these ads contained blatant references to illegal drugs in their titles, descriptions, photos, and advertiser account names, which were easily found by the researchers and journalists at the Wall Street Journal and Tech Transparency Project using Meta’s Ad Library,” the lawmakers wrote. “However, they appear to have passed undetected or been ignored by Meta’s own internal processes.”

A Meta spokesperson referred The Hill to a statement it provided the Journal last month. The spokesperson said the company works with law enforcement to combat the activity.

“Our systems are designed to proactively detect and enforce against violating content, and we reject hundreds of thousands of ads for violating our drug policies. We continue to invest resources and further improve our enforcement on this kind of content. Our hearts go out to those suffering from the tragic consequences of this epidemic – it requires all of us to work together to stop it,” the spokesperson said.

The lawmakers noted Meta repeatedly pushes back against their efforts to establish greater data privacy protections for users and makes the argument “that we would drastically disrupt this personalization you are providing,” the lawmakers wrote.

“If this personalization you are providing is pushing advertisements of illicit drugs to vulnerable Americans, then it is difficult for us to believe that you are not complicit in the trafficking of illicit drugs,” they added.

The lawmakers asked for a response to a list of questions by Sept 6. The questions ask for data on the number of advertisements Meta has discovered and the number that have been reported elsewhere that it has missed. Also included are questions about the processes to review the advertisements, how much revenue it makes from the illicit drug ads and what steps are in place to track and guard against them, as well as interactions between minors and the ads and how Meta uses people’s personal data to target the ads.