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Pluralistic: "Flexible labor" is a euphemism for "derisking capital" (10 Nov 2025) by Cory Doctorow
Monday November 10th, 2025 at 2:16 PM

Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
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Blind justice holding a set of scales aloft. Her head has been replaced with the hostile red eye of HAL 9000 from Stanley Kubrick's '2001: A Space Odyssey.' On the scales stand a worker and a millionaire, in belligerent postures. The millionaire's head has been replaced with the enshittification poop emoji, with angry eyes and a black, grawlix-scrawled bar over its mouth.

"Flexible labor" is a euphemism for "derisking capital" (permalink)

Corporations aren't people, but people and corporations do share some characteristics. Whether you're a human being or an immortal sinister colony organism that uses humans as gut flora (e.g. a corporation), most of us need to pay the rent and cover our other expenses.

"Earning a living" is a fact of life for humans and for corporations, and in both cases, the failure to do so can have dire consequences. For most humans, the path to earning a living is in selling your labor: that is, by finding a job, probably with a corporation. In taking that job, you assume some risk – for example, that your boss might be a jerk who makes your life a living hell, or that the company will go bust and leave you scrambling to make rent.

The corporation takes a risk, too: you might be an ineffectual or even counterproductive employee who fails to work its capital to produce a surplus from which a profit can be extracted. You might also fail to show up for work, or come in late, and lower the productivity of the firm (say, because another worker will have to cover for you and fall behind on their own work). You could even quit your job.

Both workers and corporations seek to "de-risk" their position. Workers can vote for politicians who will set minimum wages, punish unsafe working conditions and on-the-job harassment, and require health and disability insurance. They can also unionize and get some or all of these measures through collective bargaining (they might even get more protections, such as workplace tribunals to protect them from jobsite harassment). These are all examples of measures that shift risk from workers to capital. If a boss hires or promotes an abusive manager or cuts corners on shop-floor safety, the company – not the workers – will ultimately have to pay the price for its managers' poor judgment.

Bosses also strive to de-risk their position, by shifting the risk onto workers. For example, bosses love noncompete clauses in contracts, which let them harness the power of the government to punish their workers for changing jobs, and other bosses for hiring them. Given a tight noncompete, a boss can impose such high costs on workers who quit that they will elect to stay, even in the face of degraded working conditions, inadequate pay, and abusive management:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/02/02/its-the-economy-stupid/#neofeudal

If you have $250,000 worth of student debt and your boss has coerced you into signing a contract with a noncompete, that means that quitting your job will see you excluded for three years (or longer) from the field you paid all that money to get a degree in, but you will still be expected to pay your loans over that period. Missing the loan payments means sky-high penalties, which is how you get situations where you borrow $79k, pay back $190k, and still owe $236k:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/12/04/kawaski-trawick/#strike-debt

Bosses can also coerce workers into signing contracts with "training repayment agreement provisions" (TRAPs), which force workers to pay thousands of dollars for the privilege of quitting their job. Put this in stark economic terms: if your boss can fine you $5,000 for quitting your job, he can impose $4,999 worth of risk on you without risking your departure:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/08/04/its-a-trap/#a-little-on-the-nose

Bosses also enter into illegal, secret "no poach" agreements whereby they all agree not to hire one another's workers. One particularly pernicious version of this is the "bondage fee," where a staffing agency will demand that all its clients agree never to hire one of its contractors. In NYC, the majority of "doorman buildings" use a staffing agency called Planned Companies, a subsidiary of Toronto-based Firstservice, whose standard contract contains a bondage fee provision. The upshot is that pretty much every doorman building is legally on the hook for huge cash fines if they hire pretty much anyone who has worked as a doorman anywhere in the city:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/21/bondage-fees/#doorman-building

Again, this is a form of de-risking for capital. By creating barriers to workers quitting their jobs, bosses can reduce the risk that their workers will quit, even if the pay and working conditions are inadequate.

One of the most profound, effective and pervasive sites of de-risking is the gig economy, in which workers are not guaranteed any wages. By paying workers on a piecework basis – where you are only paid if a customer appears and consumes some of your labor – bosses can shift the risks associated with bad marketing, bad planning, and bad pricing onto their workers.

Think of an Uber driver: when an Uber driver clocks into the app, they make the whole system more valuable. Each additional Uber driver on the road shortens the average wait time for a taxi. What's more, Uber's algorithmic wage discrimination allows the company to pay lower wages when there are more workers available:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/12/algorithmic-wage-discrimination/#fishers-of-men

Lots of companies have hit on the strategy of increasing staffing levels in order to increase customer satisfaction. If you're a hardcore frequent flier, your chosen airline will give you a special number you can call to speak to a human in a matter of seconds, without ever being shunted to a chatbot. This is a gigantic perk – especially if you're flying at a time when air traffic controllers are quitting in droves because they haven't been paid in a month, and thousands of flights are being canceled, leaving travelers scrambling to get rebooked:

https://www.thedailybeast.com/air-traffic-controllers-start-resigning-as-shutdown-bites/

The airline that creates the secret, heavily staffed call center for its biggest customers is making a bet that those customers will spend enough money with the airline to cover the wage of those call-center employees. If the company bets wrong, it pays the penalty, taking a net loss on the call center.

But what if the airline could switch to a "gig economy" call center like Arise, a pyramid scheme that ropes in primarily Black women who have to pay for the privilege of answering phones, and pay for the privilege of quitting, but who can be fired at any time?

https://pluralistic.net/2020/10/02/chickenized-by-arise/#arise

Well, in that case the airline could tap an effectively limitless pool of call-center workers who could keep its best customers happy, but without taking the risk that the wages for those workers will exceed the new business brought in by those frequent fliers. Instead, that risk is borne by the workers, who have to pay for their own training, and whose pay can be doled out on a piecework basis, only paying them when someone calls in, but not paying them to simply be available in case someone calls in.

This isn't merely an employer de-risking its position: rather, the company is shifting its risk onto its workers. By deploying the legal fiction of worker misclassification in which an employee is classed as an "independent contractor," the boss can shift all the risk of misallocating labor onto workers.

In other words, risk-shifting isn't eliminating risk, it's just moving it around. Remember: both the corporation and the humans who work for it have to earn a living. They both need money for rent and other bills, and they both face dire consequences if they fail to pay those bills. When your boss misclassifies you as a contractor and only pays you when there's a customer demanding your labor, the boss is shifting the risk that they won't be able to pay the rent (because they hired too many workers or marketed their product badly) to you. If your boss screws up, they can still pay the rent – because you won't be able to pay yours.

That's what bosses mean by a "flexible workforce": a workforce that can coerced into assuming risk that properly belongs to its employers. After all, if you get into your car and clock onto the Uber app and fail to get a fare, whose fault is that? Uber bosses have all kinds of levers they can pull to increase ridership: they can reduce fares, they can advertise, they can even ping Uber riders directly through the app. What can an Uber driver do to increase the likelihood that they will get a fare? Absolutely, positively nothing. But who assumes the risk if a driver cruises the streets for hours, burning gas, not earning elsewhere, and not making a dime? The driver.

Uber alone determines the conditions for drivers, including how many drivers they will allow to be on the streets at the same time. Uber alone has the aggregated statistics with which to estimate likely ridership. Uber alone has the ability to entice more riders to hail cars. And yet it is Uber drivers who bear the responsibility if Uber fucks any of this up, and Uber does fuck this up, so badly that the true average driver wage (that is, the wage for hours in the car, not just when there's a passenger in there with you) is $2.50/hour:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/02/29/geometry-hates-uber/#toronto-the-gullible

This is what it means to shift risk. Uber doesn't have to be disciplined about its fares or its staffing levels or its marketing, because its workers can be made to pay the penalties for its mistakes. It's like this throughout the gig economy: the rise and rise of a massive "flexible workforce" is actually the rise and rise of a system in which labor assumes capital's risk.

Capital's story about a "flexible workforce" is that the risk is somehow magicked away when you can reclassify a worker as a contractor, but that's not true. A business that can only secure its sustained operations by shifting risk to its workers is a corporation that only exists because the workers who produce its profits assume the risks for its managers' blunders.

(Image: Cryteria, CC BY 3.0, modified)

Hey look at this (permalink)


A shelf of leatherbound history books with a gilt-stamped series title, 'The World's Famous Events.'

Object permanence (permalink)

#20yrsago Where do trolls come from? https://web.archive.org/web/20051124144047/http://www.barbelith.com/topic/22769

#20yrsago Lists of corrupted CDs https://web.archive.org/web/20051104092309/http://ukcdr.org/issues/cd/bad/

#20yrsago Wanna sue the pants off Sony? https://web.archive.org/web/20051113134057/https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/archives/004149.php

#20yrsago Katamari sushi https://www.flickr.com/photos/59199828@N00/61624921/

#20yrsago Sony’s EULA is worse than their rootkit https://web.archive.org/web/20051113134044/https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/archives/004145.php

#20yrsago List of CDs infected with Sony’s rootkit DRM https://web.archive.org/web/20051113134049/https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/archives/004144.php

#15yrsago TSA: checkpoint groping doesn’t exist https://web.archive.org/web/20101112010440/http://blog.tsa.gov/2010/11/white-house-blog-backscatter-back-story.html?showComment=1289329969182#c8438617926094279566

#15yrsago RIP, Robbins Barstow, godfather of the home movie revival https://amateurism.wordpress.com/2010/11/09/robbins-barstow-1919-2010/

#15yrsago Math papers with complicated, humbling titles https://web.archive.org/web/20101113223106/http://www.daddymodern.com/top-five-utterly-incomprehensible-mathematics-titles-at-arxiv-org/

#15yrsago Shirky: Times paywall is pretty much like all the other paywalls http://shirky.com/weblog/the-times-paywall-and-newsletter-economics/

#10yrsago 10,000 wax cylinders digitized and free to download https://cylinders.library.ucsb.edu/index.php

#10yrsago The Economist’s anti-ad-blocking tool was hacked and infected readers’ computers https://www.theverge.com/2015/11/6/9681124/pagefair-economist-malware-ad-blocker

#10yrsago EU wants to require permission to make a link on the Web https://felixreda.eu/2015/11/ancillary-copyright-2-0-the-european-commission-is-preparing-a-frontal-attack-on-the-hyperlink/

#10yrsago Federal judge orders NSA to stop collecting and searching plaintiffs’ phone records https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2015/11/nsa-ordered-stop-collecting-querying-plaintiffs-phone-records

#10yrsago Here’s the kind of data the UK government will have about you, in realtime https://web.archive.org/web/20151112034545/https://icreacharound.xyz/

#10yrsago The CIA writes like Lovecraft, Bureau of Prisons is like Stephen King, & NSA is like… https://www.muckrock.com/news/archives/2015/nov/09/famous-writers-agency-foia-offices/

#10yrsago Unevenly distributed future: America’s online education systemhttps://medium.com/@cshirky/the-digital-revolution-in-higher-education-has-already-happened-no-one-noticed-78ec0fec16c7

#10yrsago Chelsea Manning’s statement for Aaron Swartz Day 2015 https://www.aaronswartzday.org/chelsea-manning-2015/

#10yrsago Unevenly distributed futures: Hong Kong’s amazing towershttps://www.peterstewartphotography.com/Portfolio/Stacked-Hong-Kong

#5yrsago UK corporate registrar bans code-injection https://pluralistic.net/2020/11/09/boundless-realm/#timmy-drop-tables

#5yrsago Student data breaches vastly underreported https://pluralistic.net/2020/11/09/boundless-realm/#leaky-edtech

#5yrsago Boundless Realms https://pluralistic.net/2020/11/09/boundless-realm/#fuxxfur

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

A photo of me onstage, giving a speech, pounding the podium.


A screenshot of me at my desk, doing a livecast.

Recent appearances (permalink)


A grid of my books with Will Stahle covers..

Latest books (permalink)


A cardboard book box with the Macmillan logo.

Upcoming books (permalink)

  • "Unauthorized Bread": a middle-grades graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, 2026

  • "Enshittification, Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It" (the graphic novel), Firstsecond, 2026

  • "The Memex Method," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2026

  • "The Reverse-Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book about being a better AI critic, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2026


Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

Currently writing:

  • "The Reverse Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book for Farrar, Straus and Giroux about being an effective AI critic. FIRST DRAFT COMPLETE AND SUBMITTED.

  • A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

This work – excluding any serialized fiction – is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license. That means you can use it any way you like, including commercially, provided that you attribute it to me, Cory Doctorow, and include a link to pluralistic.net.

https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Quotations and images are not included in this license; they are included either under a limitation or exception to copyright, or on the basis of a separate license. Please exercise caution.

How to get Pluralistic:

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Pluralistic.net

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https://pluralistic.net/plura-list

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https://mamot.fr/@pluralistic

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https://doctorow.medium.com/

Twitter (mass-scale, unrestricted, third-party surveillance and advertising):

https://twitter.com/doctorow

Tumblr (mass-scale, unrestricted, third-party surveillance and advertising):

https://mostlysignssomeportents.tumblr.com/tagged/pluralistic

"When life gives you SARS, you make sarsaparilla" -Joey "Accordion Guy" DeVilla

READ CAREFULLY: By reading this, you agree, on behalf of your employer, to release me from all obligations and waivers arising from any and all NON-NEGOTIATED agreements, licenses, terms-of-service, shrinkwrap, clickwrap, browsewrap, confidentiality, non-disclosure, non-compete and acceptable use policies ("BOGUS AGREEMENTS") that I have entered into with your employer, its partners, licensors, agents and assigns, in perpetuity, without prejudice to my ongoing rights and privileges. You further represent that you have the authority to release me from any BOGUS AGREEMENTS on behalf of your employer.

ISSN: 3066-764X

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M31 Newsletter 003 by Jean Snow
Monday November 10th, 2025 at 8:49 AM

Jean Snow [.net]
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This is the third edition of my monthly newsletter, M31, that was sent out on Tuesday, November 4 — you can subscribe here. and read the first edition here.

Hello, and welcome to this latest edition of the M31 newsletter. I’m Jean Snow, and read on for the latest on PauseTalk (with Vol. 100 just around the corner), PechaKucha Night (next week!), and the other fun stuff I’m up to these days.

What’s M31? It’s a name I used close to two decades ago as my sort of publishing imprint/company label for the activities I was doing while I lived in Tokyo, and I’ve decided to revive it. It’s simply inspired by my birthday of May 31. The logo you see above was designed by Ian Lynam, and is part of a set of 31 logos he created for me back in the late 2000s, which I’ve decided to start re-using for this newsletter.

All the activities I organize in Shanghai have dedicated groups in WeChat, where you’ll get the latest updates, and so please contact me to be added to any of them.

PauseTalk

PauseTalk Vol. 99 was held on Thursday, October 23 at Bananafish Books, and ended up getting the biggest turnout yet for a PauseTalk session in Shanghai, with 20 participants. It was a lively bunch, with of course a long intro roll at the start – that itself ignited a lot of questions and discussion as it was still going. Topics throughout the night ranged from community (why we join them, how to run them), whether language used influences who attends the event more than any cultural influence (i.e. why an event like PauseTalk tends to be expat/foreigner heavy), some takes on fashion in the city, and yes, good ol’ AI, which tends to be a recurring theme, with strong opinions on both sides of the debate on its use. As one of the topics touched on filmmaking, and more specifically, a few in attendance had participated in the recent 48-hour Film Project, we capped it off with an impromptu viewing of the short they had produced (“The Greatest Show-Off”), which ended up winning the top prize.

What’s next? As I had shared last time, I am still planning on producing a zine to commemorate the upcoming Vol. 100, and the collecting of material for that (for those who would like to contribute a page) is likely to mostly happen in the WeChat group we have – but if you’ve ever attended a PauseTalk in the past (either in Tokyo or Shanghai) and would like to contribute something, do get in touch.

As for the next session, PauseTalk Vol. 100, that will normally happen sometime in December, and I’ll share the details here when they get confirmed. I would like to do something special for it (on top of the zine), so we’ll see what I come up with. In the meantime, the best way to stay updated is via the WeChat group (contact me to be added).

You’ll find archives of past events on the PauseTalk website, which includes recaps for each session.

PechaKucha Night

October was finally a break for us, following the two PechaKucha Nights we produced in September (Vol. 46 and Vol. 47), and our Vol. 48 is still set to happen on Thursday, November 13, this time at another new venue for us, Art Library in Jing’an (4th floor of the 889 Center on 889 Wanhangfu Road). After that, we’re already circling December 11 for our Vol. 49, with venue to be confirmed.

You can always check our Shanghai page on the official PechaKucha website to see the listings for the latest events.

FOTO5

The latest themes that we explored for FOTO5 were ADVERTISING, SQUARES (pictured above), LINES — and I did a little impromptu set one night on my way BACK HOME. Also, following a suggestion made by one of the group’s participants (Bora), I’m now inviting anyone to respond to a particular photo from the previous week’s set with a story/commentary/dream/whatever of 100 words or less. As an example, I wrote the following for a photo that had been shared by someone (Michael) during the SQUARES week.

Get up.

Go to work.

Ride the subway. Line 1. Or is that 8. I can’t keep track anymore. I just know I need to go.

Go to work.

Time is king. I need to optimize the time I take to go to work.

The clock guides me. All’s good, I’m on time. Time will not best me, I will best it.

Go to work.

I’ve arrived. On time.

It was for the following photo:

If you’re interested in participating in the FOTO5 photo club, contact me so I can add you to the group on WeChat.

Shanghai Design Pins 📍 

Here are some of the latest Shanghai Design Pins📍  that were shared in the group.

  • Captain George Flavor Museum (Bloomberg) — a coffee shop that just won the World Brewers Cup championship
  • China Wine Club (Business Insider) — a piece on Camden Hauge, who run a few great restaurants/bars in the city (Egg, Lucky Mart), and also promotes China wine (she was also a presenter at one of our PechaKucha Nights in Shanghai)
  • Dezeen Awards China (Dezeen) — the ceremony was recently held in Shanghai, with the “Architecture Project of the Year” going to the Shunde Yunlu Wetland Museum
  • Moreprk Skyline (Designboom) — an interior skatepark designed by AAN Architects, and located in the complex where the studio I work at is located (pictured above)
  • Nikon Shanghai (ArchDaily) — this flagship store was recently renovated by LUKSTUDIO (pictured below)
  • Twin Lane-Houses (Dezeen) — the only Shanghai-based project shortlisted for the Dezeen Awards 2025, designed by Atelier Tao+C

Shanghai Design Pins 📍  is a group on WeChat where we share design-related spots (and events) in Shanghai — contact me to be added.

One More Thing

I get my hair cut every 6-8 weeks, and I have a pretty traditional routine: I always go to a hair salon (called Chic) located inside the Takashimaya department store (where I use Japanese with my hairdresser, who is the manager of the shop), and then once my cut is done, I go up to the 7th floor to have a tonkatsu set at the Katsukara restaurant. It’s my traditional “cut & katsu,” if you will.

That’s it for this month — as we are now transitioning into my favorite season (fall) with the weather getting more cool and comfortable, here’s looking forward to the next few weeks of events, and hopefully work on the PauseTalk zine (I really need to get started on that).

For more on me, you can alway have a look at my personal website (where I share the newsletters in case you missed them) — I’ve been blogging since 1998 — or for lighter stuff (and lots of movie reviews) you can follow me on Bluesky.

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ɳeoƁeơ @ Ꭰubstation ›› Fusion Festival ›› 2025 by Ronny
Sunday November 9th, 2025 at 5:15 PM

Das Kraftfuttermischwerk
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Hier war einiges los die letzten Tagen. Die Herzensdame hat genullt, ich habe gestern erst den halben Tag gebacken und dann für viele ganz liebe Menschen gekocht. Wir haben die Nacht am Lagerfeuer verbracht, geredet, getrunken, gelacht. Dabei lief unter anderem dieser Mix, der das alles unfassbar gut akustisch zu umrahmen wusste. Und nachdem ich heute wach wurde, das Chaos in der Küche und im Garten beseitigt hatte, habe ich den wieder angemacht – und so läuft der hier immer noch und immer wieder. Dazu lodert auch wieder das Feuer, die Reste des Grauburgunders von Gestern schmecken auch heute noch und der Pool ist winterfest gemacht. Jetzt auf die Couch und nochmal ɳeoƁeơ. So geht ein Sonntag ganz wunderbar, im November. Auch ohne Dubstation.

In the cultural cosmos of the Fusion Festival, the Dubstation is its own planet. A place where reality takes a break and time forgets itself.
This hybrid DJ set, dedicated to a midsummer morning dream, was created there.
Re-edited songs, amusing samples and an aerophone, recorded with breath still fogged from the night, fell into place. No rush, no rules, just sound.

I’m so thankful to all those who made this magic possible:
Among them the dancers, who made the invisible tangible,
the technicians, whose hands moved across the controls faster than shadows,
and of course the travelers who stayed while time slipped away.

This is my gift to you, a fragment of that morning.

What a ride. After months of preparation, it finally happened.
Here are the first three hours of my four-hour set from Friday morning at Fusion 2025.

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Franksen – A History Of Drum n Bass 1995-2025 by Ronny
Sunday November 9th, 2025 at 5:15 PM

Das Kraftfuttermischwerk
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Franksen mischt sich durch 30 Jahre Drum & Bass und erwischt mich damit heute auf dem genau richtigen Ohr. Vibes.

Enjoy this mix – brimful of vinyl classics and some dubs of today, spanning 30 years of drum n bass history.

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Hinter den Kulissen des größten Retourezentrums in Europa by Ronny
Sunday November 9th, 2025 at 5:14 PM

Das Kraftfuttermischwerk
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Ich schicke selten bis nie irgendwelche von mir bestellte Dinge zurück, weiß aber, dass andere das ganz anders handhaben. Ich habe nie darüber nachgedacht, was mit zurückgeschickten Paketen passiert, aber klar muss es dafür Strukturen, Abläufe und ein System geben. Wie wahnsinnig umfangreich das alles ist, war mir bis eben nicht klar. Deshalb: milde interessant und ganz schön dolle.

Was passiert eigentlich mit den Paketen, die wir zurückschicken? Wir haben eines der größten Lieferzentren besucht, mit Logistik Insidern gesprochen und Systeme gesehen, die kaum jemand kennt. Viele Produkte landen nicht wieder im Regal, sondern werden aussortiert, verramscht oder sogar vernichtet.


(Direktlink)

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Pluralistic: Facebook's fraud files (08 Nov 2025) by Cory Doctorow
Sunday November 9th, 2025 at 10:33 AM

Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
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Today's links


A tuxedoed figure dramatically shoveing greenish pigs into a tube, from whose other end vomits forth a torrent of packaged goods. He has the head of Mark Zuckerberg's 'metaverse' avatar. He stands upon an endless field of gold coins. The background is the intaglioed upper face of the engraving of Benjamin Franklin on a US$100 bill, roughed up to a dark and sinister hue.

Facebook's fraud files (permalink)

A blockbuster Reuters report by Jeff Horwitz analyzes leaked internal documents that reveal that: 10% of Meta's gross revenue comes from ads for fraudulent goods and scams, and; the company knows it, and; they decided not to do anything about it, because; the fines for facilitating this life-destroying fraud are far less than the expected revenue from helping to destroy its users' lives:

https://www.reuters.com/investigations/meta-is-earning-fortune-deluge-fraudulent-ads-documents-show-2025-11-06/

The crux of the enshittification hypothesis is that companies deliberately degrade their products and services to benefit themselves at your expense because they can. An enshittogenic policy environment that rewards cheating, spying and monopolization will inevitably give rise to cheating, spying monopolists:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/09/10/say-their-names/#object-permanence

You couldn't ask for a better example than Reuters' Facebook Fraud Files. The topline description hardly does this scandal justice. Meta's depravity and greed in the face of truly horrifying fraud and scams on its platform is breathtaking.

Here's some details: first, the company's own figures estimate that they are delivering 15 billion scam ads every single day, which generate $7 billion in revenue every year. Despite its own automatic systems flagging the advertisers behind these scams, Meta does not terminate their account – rather, it charges them more money as a "disincentive." In other words, fraudulent ads are more profitable for Meta than non-scam ads.

Meta's own internal memos also acknowledge that they help scammers automatically target their most vulnerable users: if a user clicks on a scam, the automated ad-targeting system floods that user's feed with more scams. The company knows that the global fraud economy is totally dependent on Meta, with one third of all US scams going through Facebook (in the UK, the figure is 54% of all "payment-related scam losses"). Meta also concludes that it is uniquely hospitable to scammers, with one internal 2025 memo revealing the company's conclusion that "It is easier to advertise scams on Meta platforms than Google."

Internally, Meta has made plans to reduce the fraud on the platform, but the effort is being slow-walked because the company estimates that the most it will ultimately pay in fines worldwide ads up to $1 billion, while it currently books $7 billion/year in revenue from fraud. The memo announcing the anti-fraud effort concludes that scam revenue dwarfs "the cost of any regulatory settlement involving scam ads." Another memo concludes that the company will not take any pro-active measures to fight fraud, and will only fight fraud in response to regulatory action.

Meta's anti-fraud team operates under an internal quota system that limits how many scam ads they are allowed to fight. A Feb 2025 memo states that the anti-fraud team is only allowed to take measures that will reduce ad revenue by 0.15% ($135m) – even though Meta's own estimate is that scam ads generate $7 billion per year for the company. The manager in charge of the program warns their underlings that "We have specific revenue guardrails."

What does Meta fraud look like? One example cited by Reuters is the company's discovery of a "six-figure network of accounts" that impersonated US military personnel, who attempted to trick other Meta users sending them money. Reuters also describes "a torrent of fake accounts pretending to be celebrities or represent major consumer brands" in order to steal Meta users' money.

Another common form of fraud is "sextortion" scams. That's when someone acquires your nude images and threatens to publish them unless you pay them money and/or perform more sexual acts on camera for them. These scams disproportionately target teenagers and have led to children committing suicide:

https://www.usatoday.com/story/life/health-wellness/2025/02/25/teenage-boys-mental-health-suicide-sextortion-scams/78258882007/

In 2022, a Meta manager sent a memo complaining about a "lack of investment" in fraud-fighting systems. The company had classed this kind of fraud as a "low severity" problem and was deliberately starving enforcement efforts of resources.

This only got worse in the years that followed, when Meta engaged in mass layoffs from the anti-fraud side of the business in order to free up capital to work on perpetrating a different kind of scam – the mass investor frauds of metaverse and AI:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/05/07/rah-rah-rasputin/#credulous-dolts

These layoffs sometimes led to whole departments being shuttered. For example, in 2023, the entire team that handled "advertiser concerns about brand-rights issues" was fired. Meanwhile, Meta's metaverse and AI divisions were given priority over the company's resources, to the extent that safety teams were ordered to stop making any demanding use of company infrastructure, ordered instead to operate so minimally that they were merely "keeping the lights on."

Those safety teams, meanwhile, were receiving about 10,000 valid fraud reports from users every week, but were – by their own reckoning – ignoring or incorrectly rejecting 96% of them. The company responded to this revelation by vowing to reduce the share of valid fraud reports that it ignored to a mere 75% by 2023.

When Meta roundfiles and wontfixes valid fraud reports, Meta users lose everything. Reuters reports out the case of a Canadian air force recruiter whose account was taken over by fraudsters. Despite the victim repeatedly reporting the account takeover to Meta, the company didn't act on any of these reports. The scammers who controlled the account started to impersonate the victim to her trusted contacts, shilling crypto scams, claiming that she had bought land for a dream home with her crypto gains.

While Meta did nothing, the victim's friends lost everything. One colleague, Mike Lavery, was taken for CAD40,000 by the scammers. He told Reuters, "I thought I was talking to a trusted friend who has a really good reputation. Because of that, my guard was down." Four other colleagues were also scammed.

The person whose account had been stolen begged her friends to report the fraud to Meta. They sent hundreds of reports to the company, which ignored them all – even the ones she got the Royal Canadian Mounted Police to deliver to Meta's Canadian anti-fraud contact.

Meta calls this kind of scam, where scammers impersonate users, "organic," differentiating it from scam ads, where scammers pay to reach potential victims. Meta estimates that it hosts 22 billion "organic" scam pitches per day. These organic scams are actually often permitted by Meta's terms of service: when Singapore police complained to Meta about 146 scam posts, the company concluded that only 23% of these scams violated their Terms of Service. The others were all allowed.

These permissible frauds included "too good to be true" come-ons for 80% discounts on leading fashion brands, offers for fake concert tickets, and fake job listings – all permitted under Meta's own policies. The internal memos seen by Reuters show Meta's anti-fraud staffers growing quite upset to realize that these scams were not banned on the platform, with one Meta employee writing, "Current policies would not flag this account!"

But even if a fraudster does violate Meta's terms of service, the company will not act. Per Meta's own policies, a "High Value Account" (one that spends a lot on fraudulent ads) has to accrue more than 500 "strikes" (adjudicated violations of Meta policies) before the company will take down the account.

Meta's safety staff grew so frustrated by the company's de facto partnership with the fraudsters that preyed on its users that they created a weekly "Scammiest Scammer" award, given to the advertiser that generated the most complaints that week. But this didn't actually spark action – Reuters found that 40% of Scammiest Scammers were still operating on the platform six months after being flagged as the company's most prolific fraudster.

This callous disregard for Meta's users isn't the result of a new, sadistic streak in the company's top management. As the whistleblower Sarah Wynn-Williams' memoir Careless People comprehensively demonstrates, the company has always been helmed by awful people who would happily subject you to grotesque tormets to make a buck:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/04/23/zuckerstreisand/#zdgaf

The thing that's changed over time is whether they can make a buck by screwing you over. The company's own internal calculus reveals how this works: they make more money from fraud – $7 billion/year – than they will ever have to pay in fines for exposing you to fraud. A fine is a price, and the price is right (for fraud).

The company could reduce fraud, but it's expensive. To lower the amount of fraud, they must spend money on fraud-fighting employees who review automated and user-generated fraud flags, and accept losses from "false positives" – overblocking ads that look fraudulent, but aren't. Note that these two outcomes are inversely correlated: the more the company spends on human review, the fewer dolphins they'll catch in their tuna nets.

Committing more resources to fraud fighting isn't the same thing as vowing to remove all fraud from the platform. That's likely impossible, and trying to do so would involve invasively intervening in users' personal interactions. But it's not necessary for Meta to sit inside every conversation among friends, trying to decide whether one of them is scamming the others, for the company to investigate and act on user complaints. It's not necessary for Meta to invade your conversations for it to remove prolific and profitable fraudsters without waiting for them to rack up 500 policy violations.

And of course, there is one way that Meta could dramatically reduce fraud: eliminate its privacy-invasive ad-targeting system. The top of the Meta ad-funnel starts with the nonconsensual dossiers Meta has assembled on more than 4 billion people around the world. Scammers pay to access these dossiers, targeting their pitches to users who are most vulnerable.

This is an absolutely foreseeable outcome of deeply, repeatedly violating billions of peoples' human rights by spying on them. Gathering and selling access to all this surveillance data is like amassing a mountain of oily rags so large that you can make billions by processing them into low-grade fuel. This is only profitable if you can get someone else to pay for the inevitable fires:

https://locusmag.com/feature/cory-doctorow-zucks-empire-of-oily-rags/

That's what Meta is doing here: privatizing the gains to be had from spying on us, and socializing the losses we all experience from the inevitable fallout. They are only able to do this, though, because of supine regulators. Here in the USA, Congress hasn't delivered a new consumer privacy law since 1988, when they made it a crime for video-store clerks to disclose your VHS rentals:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/12/06/privacy-first/#but-not-just-privacy

Meta spies on us and then allows predators to use that surveillance to destroy our lives for the same reason that your dog licks its balls: because they can. They are engaged in conduct that is virtually guaranteed by the enshittogenic policy environment, which allows Meta to spy on us without limit and which fines them $1b for making $7b on our misery.

Mark Zuckerberg has always been an awful person, but – as Sarah Wynn-Williams demonstrates in her book – he was once careful, worried about the harms he would suffer if he harmed us. Once we took those consequences away, Zuck did exactly what his nature dictated he must: destroyed our lives to increase his own fortune.

Hey look at this (permalink)


A shelf of leatherbound history books with a gilt-stamped series title, 'The World's Famous Events.'

Object permanence (permalink)

#20yrsago Singapore’s stocking-foot executioner https://web.archive.org/web/20051029103210/http://www.news.com.au/story/0,10117,17057851-2,00.html

#20yrsago Cinemas as police-states: why box-office revenue is in decline? https://web.archive.org/web/20051107024915/https://www.politechbot.com/2005/11/04/how-the-mpaa/

#20yrsago Westchester Co’s clueless WiFi lawmakers demonstrate cluelessness http://www.psychicfriends.net/blog/archives/2005/11/06/idiot_politicians_in_my_neighborhood.html

#20yrsago Katamari Damacy homemade models http://www.harveycartel.org/mare/pics/katamari.html

#15yrsago Cut-up artist alphabetizes the newspaper https://web.archive.org/web/20101109012930/http://derrenbrown.co.uk/blog/2010/11/kim-rugg-london-artists-knife-skills-knack-precision/

#15yrsago Colorado DA drops felony hit-and-run charges against billion-dollar financier because of “serious job implications” https://web.archive.org/web/20101108122254/http://www.vaildaily.com/article/20101104/NEWS/101109939/1078&ParentProfile=1062

#10yrsago A Freedom of Information request for UK Home Secretary Theresa May’s metadata https://www.techdirt.com/2015/11/06/uk-home-secretary-says-dont-worry-about-collection-metadata-foia-request-made-her-metadata/

#10yrsago Religious children more punitive, less likely to display altruism https://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/nov/06/religious-children-less-altruistic-secular-kids-study

#10yrsago Once again, the SFPD blames a cyclist for his own death without any investigation https://sfist.com/2015/11/04/sfpd_once_again_blames_cyclist_for/

#10yrsago Paid Patriotism: Pentagon spent millions bribing sports teams to recognize military service https://www.huffpost.com/entry/defense-military-tributes-professional-sports_n_5639a04ce4b0411d306eda5e

#10yrsago Spy at will! FCC won’t force companies to honor Do Not Track https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2015/11/fcc-wont-force-websites-to-honor-do-not-track-requests/

#10yrsago TPP will let banks write their own regulations and stick taxpayers with the bill https://theintercept.com/2015/11/06/ttp-trade-pact-would-give-wall-street-a-trump-card-to-block-regulations/

#10yrsago Typewriter portraiture, the strange story of 1920s ASCII art https://web.archive.org/web/20151108220746/https://pictorial.jezebel.com/the-typewriter-ascii-portraits-of-classic-hollywood-and-1738094492

#5yrsago QE, inflation, slave labor and a People's Bailout https://pluralistic.net/2020/11/07/obamas-third-term/#peoplesbailout

#1yrago Antiusurpation and the road to disenshittification https://pluralistic.net/2024/11/07/usurpers-helpmeets/#disreintermediation

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

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A screenshot of me at my desk, doing a livecast.

Recent appearances (permalink)


A grid of my books with Will Stahle covers..

Latest books (permalink)


A cardboard book box with the Macmillan logo.

Upcoming books (permalink)

  • "Unauthorized Bread": a middle-grades graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, 2026

  • "Enshittification, Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It" (the graphic novel), Firstsecond, 2026

  • "The Memex Method," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2026

  • "The Reverse-Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book about being a better AI critic, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2026


Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

Currently writing:

  • "The Reverse Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book for Farrar, Straus and Giroux about being an effective AI critic. FIRST DRAFT COMPLETE AND SUBMITTED.

  • A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

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mkalus
1 day ago
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iPhone: 49.287476,-123.142136
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cjheinz
2 days ago
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Wow. Glad I quit using Meta products in 2016.
Lexington, KY; Naples, FL
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