In 2024, Meta had to calculate with an ugly conclusion about its Chinese advertising customers. They were defrauding Facebook, Instagram, as well as WhatsApp users globally.
Beijing allows Chinese companies to advertise to foreign consumers on Meta’s global platforms. This happens even though the authoritarian Chinese government restricts its citizens from using Meta social media. As a result, Meta’s advertising business thrived in China, reaching over $18 billion in annual sales last year. This accounted for more than a tenth of the company’s global revenue.
However, according to internal Meta documents reviewed by Reuters, Meta calculated that more than $3 billion or about 19% of that money, was coming from ads for scams, illegal gambling, pornography, as well as other restricted content.
Cache has revealed recently unreported documents that Meta’s finance, lobbying, engineering, and safety teams generated over the past four years. The documents show that Meta studied the scale of abuse on its platforms but hesitated to implement fixes that could hurt its business and revenue.
The documents show that Meta believed China was the source of roughly a quarter of all ads for scams and restricted products on its global platforms. Victims included shoppers in Taiwan who bought fake health supplements. They also included investors in the United States and Canada who lost their savings. In an internal April 2024 presentation to safety operations leaders, Meta staffers warned that the company needed to make significant investments to reduce growing harm.
Meta created an anti-fraud team to go beyond its recent efforts to monitor scams and other restricted activities from China. The team cut problematic ads by about half in the second half of last year. They used a range of stepped-up enforcement tools. This reduced the share of total advertising revenue from China from 19% to 9%.
