'Confused and angry': Facebook users call out Meta for failing to remove drug ads

More Facebook users are speaking out, telling CTV News they're being inundated by ads for drugs while accessing the social media site.

On Wednesday, CTV News spoke with Calgarian Eric Priddle who said he noticed more questionable Facebook ads on his feed when he started posting updates about his sobriety journey.

After sharing his story, multiple viewers reached out to CTV News to complain about the same issue, saying ads for everything from cocaine nasal sprays and MDMA moon rocks to Percocet, Xanax and ketamine were showing up on some their news feeds.

"The picture on the advertisement was quite literally, people snorting cocaine off of a glass table," said Layne Ollenberg.

"I clicked on it thinking 'What's this all about?' And yeah, sure enough it was for sale, like you could pick your quality of cocaine as if it was gasoline on this website, so I reported it."

Ollenberg says he submitted a report to Meta – Facebook's parent company – a couple of months ago, and was informed a week later that the ad "did not violate their community standards."

"It gave me the option to appeal that decision, which I did. About a week after that, I had my Facebook account deactivated permanently for going against community standards on drugs and sale of illegal substances," Ollenberg said.

Meanwhile, Joshua MacNeil says he experienced a similar occurrence.

He says he was frustrated to see ads for drugs so he reported them but received the same response, that they didn't violate the community standards.

"I was confused and angry, you know, just thinking about other people who have been in recovery like myself," said MacNeil.

"I read the comments to the most recent CTV article saying that 'Meta takes this seriously' and there's 'zero tolerance for it,' but that's not at all what my experience with Meta was when I reported it."

Meta commits to removing ads

Meta told CTV News earlier this week that the "buying and selling of pharmaceutical and non-medicinal drugs" is prohibited on its platform and that ads of that nature are removed when it is made aware.

"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," said the statement. "We continue to invest resources and further improve our enforcement on this kind of content to keep our platforms safe."

The company also noted it efforts to make vital resources easier to find, directing people to mental health resources when they search for certain terms and blocking negative terms associated with illicit drug sales.

Meta to ditch fact checking

Meta's chief executive officer Mark Zuckerberg announced on Tuesday that the company plans to ditch fact-checking on Instagram and Facebook.

The move is a concerning one for people like cybersecurity expert Tom Keenan, a professor in the School of Architecture, Planning and Landscape at the University of Calgary.

"Meta used to have human fact checkers that were mainly for political stuff, but I suspect that if a fact checker saw an ad for methamphetamine or cocaine, they would probably flag that," said Keenan.

"Now you've got an algorithm to do it, and you've also got the community. The problem is there's a lot of code words out there, so I did some research, and 'four loaves of bread' means 'four kilos of heroin.' Other words like 'Tina' are short for amphetamines, so the bad guys have all kinds of language to try to evade the fact checking whether it's an algorithm or a human being."

Keenan says those code words are likely how many scammers or sellers of illicit drugs get their ads through Facebook's review system.

"What typically happens is that they look for customers on platforms like Facebook, then they ask them to move over to the dark web, to something that's encrypted to actually do the transaction."

"So they're not buying and selling on Facebook, but they're certainly using Facebook to advertise drugs."

CTV News has reached out to Meta to follow up on why reports for harmful drug ads were allowed to stay on the website even after they were reported. We have yet to receive a response back.

'The cracks are really large'

Staff Sgt. Lon Brewster with the Calgary Police Service's drug unit say officers regularly attend drug calls in person, but online investigations add a layer of complexity.

"The cracks are really large for these people selling drugs online, it's not even that they're slipping (through them), they're walking right through, because I think there's never been a really massive focus on the online portion of drug investigations," Brewster said.

"We've really noticed in the last year an uptick not just on social media, but also through direct to mail. You know, even stuff that's coming through Canada Post and those sorts of things, where they're just sending this right to some people's houses, advertising some of these things."

Brewster says these types of crimes are challenging for the justice system.

"You're dealing with multiple jurisdictions, and not just provincial boundaries, we're talking international boundaries as well.

"We're all trying to work together to figure out how it's going to look. At the end of the day, you have somebody who's trafficking drugs, they're trafficking an illicit substance, and it's out goal to find these people, charge them and have them go to jail."

Brewster also warns that many of the ads tend to be scams to seize a user's identity or banking information.

'Challenging' legal situation

Doug King, a professor of criminology at Mount Royal University, says there isn't much that members of law enforcement in Canada can do from a criminal perspective when it comes to advertisements for illicit substances on social media that are coming from other countries.

"There's not much that Canada can do about this on Facebook. We can only go after the people who decide to buy them and try to bring them into the country," he said.

"It's a very limited criminal scope and authority in Canada to do something about it."

King went on to say that the recent proroguing of government announced this week could also have detrimental impacts given that the Online Harms Acts (Bill C-63), meant to address a range of harmful content online, has now been stopped in its tracks.

"The Government of Canada was going to pass legislation to be a more active player in monitoring social media, and that part was very controversial, right? It was one of the many things that people didn't like about the Trudeau government," said King.

"Whether or not another government will bring it back, we'll see. So, Canada was ready to take a little bit more of an aggressive role, and that got caught up in the politics of the day. So we'll just have to see what happens afterwards."

Protect yourself online

Kathy MacDonald, a cyber crime expert, is warning people to take precautions to protect themselves online.

She suggests social media users should do everything they can to prevent the cross-tracking of their information.

"Block cookies. Information is bought, traded and sold to third parties who will then send targeted advertising. If a person has visited or searched a website connected to a product, sure enough advertisers will connect," MacDonald said.

"For example, if you search Safari for a sporting device, suddenly that sporting device will show up on your feed on Meta. Cross-site tracking may help. Use a Virtual Private Network to help anonymize Internet searches. Monitor your Location Services and turn off as needed."