Facebook relies heavily on artificial intelligence to detect and remove content that violates its policies, including the advertising it allows on its platforms. However, those systems don’t always work as well as they should — and Facebook may have a financial incentive to keep it that way. According to experts, many ads for illegal drugs can be easily found on the site, including ads for tax-free cigarettes, illicit cannabis, LSD and hallucinogenic mushrooms. Despite Facebook explicitly banning this kind of content, experts have criticized Facebook for being lax in its enforcement in order to keep raking in revenue.

In addition to possible financial motives for allowing illegal content to flourish, experts have also noted that Facebook’s enforcement teams aren’t what they once were.

“When these platforms started, they had departments full of people — actual humans — to sift through the most toxic and horrible parts of the internet,” media economics professor Brett Caraway told the National Post. “With the amount of content that goes up every minute, there’s just no way humans can put eyes on everything, so they rely increasingly on algorithms and AI for the first round of filtration.”

No matter why the company is failing to remove these ads, it’s clear that it’s stuck in a hopeless cycle of whack-a-mole, with new harmful content springing up as soon as the old version is removed. Hopefully the company can hone its enforcement methods, because the current ones don’t seem to be sustainable.

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