Good morning from the team at Press Gazette on Wednesday, 26 November.

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🚨Press Gazette has repeatedly highlighted fraudulent ads on Facebook which steal journalists’ identities in order to con people into joining dodgy investment groups.

Reporting from Reuters based on leaked internal documents has revealed the reason why Meta is apparently so reluctant to tackle this issue: income from scam adverts is worth around $16bn a year in revenue to the tech giant.

Meta has gone from being just careless and a bit sketchy to likely the world’s largest organised crime network.

This has happened because of legal opt-outs in the US, EU and UK which came into force at the start of the online age and said tech platforms were not liable for the content they published. They are seen merely as distributors (like the owner of the wall which has been daubed with libellous graffiti).

This has helped Alphabet and Meta to destroy large parts of the global news industry by offering advertising at far cheaper rates because (freed from most legal compliance) their publishing costs are far lower.

Surely it can only be a matter of time before: a, far tighter regulation of Meta and others comes into force and b, Meta employees who knowingly got rich off the back of people being defrauded of their life savings see the inside of a prison cell.

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🤖 ChatGPT is a bad robot. It helped itself to paywalled data from the Press Gazette archive and then lied to me about doing so.

Asking an LLM to explain itself is an inherently problematic thing to do (it assumes a level of sentience that predictive search on steroids does not have).

But my encounter with ChatGPT nonetheless exposes an alarmingly cavalier attitude by the world’s largest AI answer engine when it comes to respecting both paywalls and online protocols intended to curb unwanted website scraping.

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