Photo-Illustration: WIRED Staff; Getty Images
This article was copublished with WIRED.
When billionaire Dutch TV producer John de Mol sued Facebook in 2019 over its alleged failure to stop scammers from using his image in deceptive ads, the social media company sent Rob Leathern to Amsterdam to meet with Del Mol’s team and to speak with the media.
"The people who push these kinds of ads are persistent, they are well-funded, and they are constantly evolving their deceptive tactics to get around our systems," Leathern told Reuters at the time.
During his four years at the company now known as Meta, Leathern was in many ways the public face of its effort to fight scam ads. He led the business integrity unit tasked with preventing scammers and other bad actors from abusing Meta’s ad products. He regularly spoke to the media about scam ads. Leathern also oversaw transparency efforts like the Meta Ad Library, the industry’s first free and searchable repository of digital ads, and the launch of identity verification for political advertisers.
But since leaving Meta at the end of 2020, Leathern has watched as criminals deployed deepfakes and used artificial intelligence to craft more convincing scam ads. He said he became alarmed as major platforms failed to invest in teams and technology at the rate needed to fight such exploitative ads.
“The technology and the progress has stagnated the last five years,” Leathern said in an interview. “I also feel like we just don't really know how bad it's gotten or what the current state is. We don't have objective ways of knowing.”
Leathern has teamed up with Rob Goldman, Meta’s former vice president of ads, to launch CollectiveMetrics.org, a nonprofit aimed at bringing more transparency to digital advertising in order to fight deceptive ads. The goal is to use data and analysis to measure things such as prevalence of online scam ads and to lift the veil on the opaque ad systems that generate hundreds of billions of dollars in revenue for companies like Meta.
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