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A lot of social networks will crawl pages for content.

For example, Facebook crawls links sent in messenger. [0]

No source, but I believe the major advertising platforms, e.g. Google Ads are doing this today to check for banned content.

Facebook could build a heuristic of banned pages & not allow ads to be published. Humans could manually verify things at the edges.

There is a whole industry called link cloaking, that shows the crawlers a sanitized page, and the human targets the actual landing page.

It's a cat & mouse game between ad publishers & blackhats, often times foreign nationals outside of US jurisdiction.

I'm trying to think through the scenarios where a political campaign might use blackhat techniques to subvert verification crawls, and it's not clear that it would stop all cases, but I believe it would stop most.

Political campaigns could use the Facebook accounts & payment information of foreign nationals to temporarily push ads until they were reported - would the liability of blowback be enough to prevent it?

[0] https://twitter.com/vah_13/status/1187755829371555840




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