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On Monday Reuters published a report based on internal documents they obtained from the social media giant Meta (the parent company of Facebook and Instagram) which revealed that Chinese advertisement firms are conducting ad fraud on their platforms. Reuters claims that the documents show Meta tolerated this fraud, which consists of “ads for scams, illegal gambling, pornography and other banned content.”
“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,” Reuters said.
The internal documents were created by Meta’s teams within their finance, lobbying, engineering and safety divisions and were generated over the last four years. They reveal that Meta believes a quarter of all ads for scams and banned items were generated in China.
Meta temporarily took action to curb this ad fraud following the revelations of the internal documents. The company created an anti-fraud team to monitor scams and banned activity coming out of China. This effort had reduced the fraudulent activity by about half in the second part of 2024, “from 19% to 9% of the total advertising revenue coming from China.”
Reuters claims that after then-Meta Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg weighed in, the China fraud monitoring was paused:
“As a result of Integrity Strategy pivot and follow-up from Zuck,” a late 2024 document notes, the China ads-enforcement team was “asked to pause” its work. Reuters was unable to learn the specifics of the CEO’s involvement or what the so-called “Integrity Strategy pivot” entailed.
But after Zuckerberg’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’t detail the specifics of those measures.
Meta took these steps even as an outside consultant it hired produced research that warned “Meta’s own behavior and policies” were fostering systemic corruption in the Chinese market for ads targeting users in other countries, additional documents show.
Within months of the short-lived Meta crackdown, new Chinese advertising agencies were again flooding Meta’s platforms with prohibited ads, which by mid-2025 accounted for about 16% of Meta’s China revenue. But Meta spokesperson Andy Stone told Reuters that the China fraud-combatting team was always supposed to be temporary and that Zuckerberg did not order the team to be disbanded.
As part of its normal enforcement processes, Stone said, Meta’s automated systems over the past 18 months have blocked or removed 46 million ads submitted through its Chinese business partners, usually before users saw them. Stone said Meta has severed relationships with unspecified Chinese agencies over misbehavior in the past and that the company docks commissions for Chinese partners that run too many violating ads.
“Scams are spiking across the internet, driven by persistent criminals and sophisticated, organized crime syndicates constantly evolving their schemes to evade detection,” Stone wrote. “We are focused on rooting them out by using advanced technical measures and new tools, disrupting criminal scam networks, working with industry partners and law enforcement, and raising awareness on our platforms.”
Reuters was not satisfied with the response they got from Meta however, going on to say that the tech company did not answer its questions.
“The statement [from Meta] didn’t address many of the questions Reuters asked Meta about the documents, the policy discussions reflected in them, or the business decisions the company took as a result,” Reuters said.
Meta’s advertising business reached $18 billion in annual sales in 2024, over one-tenth of their global revenue, “But Meta calculated that about 19% of that money – more than $3 billion – was coming from ads for scams, illegal gambling, pornography and other banned content, according to internal Meta documents reviewed by Reuters.”
In November Reuters reported that Meta had internally estimated that its social media platforms show users 15 billion scam ads a day.
While China has been a major player in the fraudulent ad creation, Chinese residents are not the target of the nefarious marketing. This is due to Meta’s social media platforms being banned in China, as the communist nation maintains strict internet censorship – often referred to as “Chinese-style net censorship” and “The Great Firewall of China.”
Alex Jones reported in 2009 how Chinese style net censorship is being pushed in the U.S. to arrest people for “hate speech” and a 2019 Infowars article by Kit Daniels detailed the merger of social media censorship, an internet ID and the social credit score.
Perhaps most ironic however is that Facebook itself was pushing for Chinese-style net censorship in 2015.
On the June 1, 2009 Alex Jones Show, Jones detailed how permitted digital fraud and online theft will be used to further enslave the population in a technocratic dictatorship through the “problem, reaction, solution” dialectic.
