Anti-Social Advertising, Facebook Style

I am used to seeing advertising schemes on Facebook.  Ads that say things like “5 of your friends are smarter than you” or “Sarah Palin has a 120 IQ, what’s yours”.  Tonight however, I saw this.

Maybe this has been showing up for a while and I never saw it.  I don’t pay too much attention to ads.

An ad like this begs the question “who would click on it anyway?”  But before the words are even out of my mouth, I already know the answer.  But I do wonder about the filtering that Facebook does for ads.  If they are not filtering them, they should be.  They could find themselves being sued like Classmates.com.

Personally, I hope Classmates.com loses the court case.  And if Facebook allows this sort of advertising to continue, someone should get a piece of them too.  This sort of advertising is just plain wrong.  In reality, it is no different that the Nigerian Lottery.

While this sort of thing isn’t a concern for me personally, I do worry about the less tech savy users who fall for this stuff, time and time again.

I would expect this from a flash-in-the-pan site.  But come on Facebook, your are big enough and old enough to know better.