Reuters’ investigation alleges Meta made money from fraudulent Chinese advertisers

A new investigation shared by Reuters, a global media outlet, has suggested that Meta has profited from advertisers, based in China, who promoted allegedly fraudulent and prohibited activities, such as pornography, illegal gambling, and products of questionable quality.

The net revenue from Chinese companies hit over $18bn in 2024 alone, accounting for more than 10% of Facebook Group’s overall income. Reuters’ investigation suggests that Meta itself estimates that $3bn of this figure is derived from advertisements that may be tied to harmful content, as the aforementioned categories. Among the harmful content that appeared, Reuters, citing internal Meta documents, said that consumers were harmed by purchasing bogus health products or participating in gambling websites that did not use a Random Number Generator (RNG) verification technology, or purposefully changed the theoretical outcomes of games, leading to more harm in the process. Reuters, though, acknowledged that Meta did not turn a blind eye to the issue and suggested that Meta insiders have been raising an alarm with their higher-ups, explicitly calling for action against such harmful content that percolated the network. Meta is both aware of the issue, but there are financial considerations as well. In November, the group confirmed that it considers about $7bn of its advertising revenue to be derived from high risk vendors.

The buck stops with Meta, too, as the platform needs to balance the issue on its own, as the Chinese government, while often in the habit of reaching overseas to stamp out illegal gambling that targets its own citizens, does not consider it in its own best interest to interface with scams that target other nations and are hosted locally. While Reuters’ reports suggest a clear issue at the heart of Meta and one that the company is potentially well aware of, there is also an ongoing effort to limit the firm’s exposure and even dependence on such vendors.