Meta’s $2 Billion AI Acquisition Is Now Pushing Get-Rich-Quick Ads

Remember when Meta dropped $2 billion on Manus last year? The AI company was supposed to be the next big thing. Now it’s running ads that look like they belong on a late-night infomercial.

The pitch: find local businesses with bad or non-existent websites, use AI to build them a shiny new one, then call them up and sell it. Quick money, easy work. Just what every small business owner needs—another middleman pushing automated junk.

But here’s where it gets sketchy. Manus was paying content creators to build Instagram, YouTube, and TikTok accounts promoting the tool as a lucrative gig. The creators’ TikTok accounts conveniently disappeared after The Verge started asking questions. Coincidence? I doubt it.

Some of those videos showed up as official Manus ads. But the posts on the paid creator accounts? They conveniently forgot to mention they were sponsored. That’s the kind of transparency I expect from a company that’s supposedly building the future of AI.

Look, I get it—Meta needs to show returns on that $2 billion bet. But pushing get-rich-quick schemes under the guise of AI innovation is a bad look. It’s the same playbook we’ve seen from countless snake oil salesmen, just wrapped in a machine learning package.

If Manus’s AI is actually good, it should sell itself. Running shady affiliate campaigns that hide their origin screams desperation. I’ve seen this approach tried before with crypto, with dropshipping, with every other “passive income” scam. The results are always the same: a lot of noise, a few suckers, and eventually the FTC gets involved.

Meta should know better. Or maybe they just don’t care anymore.