{"id":45145,"date":"2025-12-17T01:40:19","date_gmt":"2025-12-17T01:40:19","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/eduzim.co.zw\/news\/?p=45145"},"modified":"2025-12-17T01:40:19","modified_gmt":"2025-12-17T01:40:19","slug":"meta-tolerates-rampant-ad-fraud-from-china-to-safeguard-billions-in-revenueutm_sourcerss1-0mainlinkanonutm_mediumfeed","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/eduzim.co.zw\/news\/2025\/12\/17\/meta-tolerates-rampant-ad-fraud-from-china-to-safeguard-billions-in-revenueutm_sourcerss1-0mainlinkanonutm_mediumfeed\/","title":{"rendered":"Meta Tolerates Rampant Ad Fraud From China To Safeguard Billions In Revenue"},"content":{"rendered":"<p> <script data-jetpack-boost=\"ignore\" async src=\"https:\/\/pagead2.googlesyndication.com\/pagead\/js\/adsbygoogle.js?client=ca-pub-1669381584671856\"\r\n     crossorigin=\"anonymous\"><\/script>\r\n<!-- Africa tv video display -->\r\n<ins class=\"adsbygoogle\"\r\n     style=\"display:block\"\r\n     data-ad-client=\"ca-pub-1669381584671856\"\r\n     data-ad-slot=\"3579572842\"\r\n     data-ad-format=\"auto\"\r\n     data-full-width-responsive=\"true\"><\/ins>\r\n<script data-jetpack-boost=\"ignore\">\r\n     (adsbygoogle = window.adsbygoogle || []).push({});\r\n<\/script><br \/>\n<\/p>\n<div id=\"fhbody-180399787\">\n<div id=\"text-180399787\" class=\"p\">\n<p>\t\t\t\tA Reuters investigation found that Meta knowingly tolerated large volumes of scam and illegal ads from China worth billions in revenue. Reuters reports: <i>Though China&#8217;s authoritarian government bans use of Meta social media by its citizens, Beijing lets Chinese companies advertise to foreign consumers on the globe-spanning platforms. As a result, Meta&#8217;s advertising business was thriving in China, ultimately reaching over $18 billion in annual sales in 2024, more than a tenth of the company&#8217;s global revenue. But Meta calculated that about 19% of that money &#8212; more than $3 billion &#8212; was coming from ads for scams, illegal gambling, pornography and other banned content, according to internal Meta documents reviewed by Reuters.<br \/>\n<\/i><\/p>\n<p>The documents are part of a cache of previously unreported material generated over the past four years by teams including Meta&#8217;s finance, lobbying, engineering and safety divisions. The cache reveals Meta&#8217;s efforts over that period to understand the scale of abuse on its platforms and the company&#8217;s reluctance to introduce fixes that could undermine its business and revenues. The documents show that Meta believed China was the country of origin of roughly a quarter of all ads for scams and banned products on Meta&#8217;s platforms worldwide. Victims ranged from shoppers in Taiwan who purchased bogus health supplements to investors in the United States and Canada who were swindled out of their savings. &#8220;We need to make significant investment to reduce growing harm,&#8221; Meta staffers warned in an internal April 2024 presentation to leaders of its safety operations.\n<\/p>\n<p>To that end, Meta created an anti-fraud team that went beyond previous efforts to monitor scams and other banned activity from China. Using a variety of stepped-up enforcement tools, it slashed the problematic ads by about half during the second half of 2024 &#8212; from 19% to 9% of the total advertising revenue coming from China. Then Meta Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg weighed in. &#8220;As a result of Integrity Strategy pivot and follow-up from Zuck,&#8221; a late 2024 document notes, the China ads-enforcement team was &#8220;asked to pause&#8221; its work. Reuters was unable to learn the specifics of the CEO&#8217;s involvement or what the so-called &#8220;Integrity Strategy pivot&#8221; entailed. But after Zuckerberg&#8217;s input, the documents show, Meta disbanded its China-focused anti-scam team. It also lifted a freeze it had introduced on granting new Chinese ad agencies access to its platforms. One document shows that Meta shelved yet other anti-scam measures that internal tests had indicated would be effective. The document didn&#8217;t detail the specifics of those measures.\n<\/p>\n<p>Meta took these steps even as an outside consultant it hired produced research that warned &#8220;Meta&#8217;s own behavior and policies&#8221; were fostering systemic corruption in the Chinese market for ads targeting users in other countries, additional documents show. The upshot: Within a few months of Meta&#8217;s brief crackdown, a new crop of Chinese advertising agencies was flooding Facebook and Instagram with prohibited ads. By mid-2025, banned ads climbed back to about 16% of Meta&#8217;s China revenue. Rob Leathern, who was a senior director of product management at Facebook until 2020 and is no longer at the company, said the scale of predatory advertising revealed in the documents represents a major breakdown in consumer protections at the social media giant. &#8220;The levels that you&#8217;re talking about are not defensible,&#8221; he said of the percentage of abusive ads. &#8220;I don&#8217;t know how anyone could think this is okay.&#8221; <\/p>\n<\/div><\/div>\n<p><script data-jetpack-boost=\"ignore\" async src=\"https:\/\/pagead2.googlesyndication.com\/pagead\/js\/adsbygoogle.js?client=ca-pub-1669381584671856\"\r\n     crossorigin=\"anonymous\"><\/script>\r\n<!-- Africa tv video display -->\r\n<ins class=\"adsbygoogle\"\r\n     style=\"display:block\"\r\n     data-ad-client=\"ca-pub-1669381584671856\"\r\n     data-ad-slot=\"3579572842\"\r\n     data-ad-format=\"auto\"\r\n     data-full-width-responsive=\"true\"><\/ins>\r\n<script data-jetpack-boost=\"ignore\">\r\n     (adsbygoogle = window.adsbygoogle || []).push({});\r\n<\/script><br \/>\n#Meta #Tolerates #Rampant #Fraud #China #Safeguard #Billions #Revenue<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>A Reuters investigation found that Meta knowingly tolerated large volumes of scam and illegal ads from China worth billions in&hellip;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":40566,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[32],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-45145","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-mzansi"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/eduzim.co.zw\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/45145","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/eduzim.co.zw\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/eduzim.co.zw\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/eduzim.co.zw\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/eduzim.co.zw\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=45145"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/eduzim.co.zw\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/45145\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":45146,"href":"https:\/\/eduzim.co.zw\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/45145\/revisions\/45146"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/eduzim.co.zw\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/40566"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/eduzim.co.zw\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=45145"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/eduzim.co.zw\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=45145"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/eduzim.co.zw\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=45145"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}