Big Tech Ignoring Calls To Protect Users from Scams, Says ASIC
According to the Australian Securities and Investments Commission (ASIC), investment scams are on the rise, accounting for roughly half of the $3 billion lost last year, which has led to the Australian regulator to ask Meta and other social media platforms that sell financial goods to have a licence. The ASIC says that so far, their requests have been disregarded.
Alongside the ASIC, the Albanese Government is working on new regulations and is reviewing the minimum requirements for embedded industry-specific programming for financial institutions, digital platforms and telecommunication providers.
ASIC deputy chair Sarah Court said that Google had observed ASIC requests, while others, such as Meta’s Facebook have not.
“Australia is one of two jurisdictions in the world as I understand it where we have managed to persuade Google to take that approach. It took quite a piece of work but that is a significant outcome. Unfortunately, we haven’t had any success with Facebook and some of the other social media platforms,” she said.
Since the ASIC requests were made, Google has added an authentication procedure for financial service advertisers in Australia that mandated an ASIC approval.
Because Facebook and others have yet to meet the demands of the ASIC, Albanese’s administration now needs to introduce “some kind of mandatory obligations to deal with those issues,” Court stated.
The new codes the ASIC is working on introducing are said to increase security in the three main aspects of the scam supply chain and would likely involve social media platforms to authenticate their advertisers, Assistant Treasurer Stephen Jones said.
“The right thing to do would be, for example, verify your advertiser. Verify the content so that it complies with the local laws of the jurisdiction – I don’t think that’s too much to ask,” Jones said. “So that’s a clear obligation that you can very confidently foretell will be in our codes of practice.”
Jones said the code for social media platforms would involve a standard they would need to follow and that all social media platforms would need to comply. He said, “It’s a no-brainer!”
“We want to work with all industry in a partnership approach but I don’t think it’s too much to ask some of the platforms that they do those two basic things,” Jones said. “Whether you are a Meta, a Google, or any other platform, it will apply equally across all of them.”
According to a Meta spokesman, he stated that scams and fraudsters “presented a challenge in many environments, including social media” but that the tech giant turns to tech to thwart scams, “such as new machine learning techniques and specially trained reviewers, to identify content and accounts that violate our policies”.
“We are currently also working across industries and with the government to identify new ways to stop scammers.”
Last month, the ASIC was granted the capacity to turn off fake sites in a push to safeguard individuals and since then, has shut down over 2100 dodgy investment websites.