Fraudsters are often more cunning and certainly more motivated than the people tasked with stopping them. Time and again, they outmaneuver platform protection mechanisms. Let’s be honest — transparency is the main tool we have at our disposal to fight cybercrime. Advertising transparency protects our rights and freedoms while helping to maintain a level playing field for businesses. So don’t be distracted by Elon Musk’s straw-man arguments — here are the key reasons why transparency works in your favor as well:

Fraudsters constantly invent new ways to steal from users, while platform safety teams struggle to keep pace. They deploy deepfakes featuring celebrities and politicians. They push fake gaming apps. To appear legitimate, they create doppelgängers that mimic the branding of reputable media outlets. Meanwhile, very large online platforms continue to profit from advertising, even as fraudulent ads cause billions of euros in damage. Authorities, banks, and insurance companies are left to deal with the fallout. If platforms cannot stop fraud on their own, the least they should do is provide transparent data, enabling companies and citizens to defend themselves.

Non-transparency benefits those with something to hide far more than those who genuinely have something to offer. Imagine someone placing a billboard across the street from your business, advertising services under your brand name. It is illegal — and plainly outrageous. Yet authorities can quickly determine who owns the billboard and who paid for it. Online, without transparent ad libraries, you may never know such an ad exists unless it is targeted directly at you. In the US, Meta’s Ads Library shows only active campaigns. The shorter the campaign, the higher the likelihood that fraud slips through unnoticed. So why all the secrecy? And who, exactly, profits from it? A fair market environment and competitiveness should be the priority, not the quiet flourishing of a fraud market.

Why should we tolerate conditions that favor a fraudulent market over a fair one? We all know that non-transparency might cost less than transparency — fewer restrictions, more revenue. This year has brought a series of rather unsettling revelations about Meta’s business model. In January 2025, Mark Zuckerberg announced that, starting in the United States, Meta would end its third-party fact-checking programme and shift instead to a “Community Notes” model. The move was justified as a return to freedom of expression. Critics, however, were quick to note that abandoning the fight against hoaxes looked less like a principled stand for free speech and more like an effort to curry favour with US President Donald Trump.

Even more surprising disclosures emerged towards the end of the year. According to leaked documents, Meta derives up to 10% of its income from fraudulent advertising. Moreover, additional leaked materials revealed that 19% of Meta’s total income from the Chinese advertising market — more than $3 billion — came from ads for scams, illegal gambling, pornography, and other banned content. In 2024, Meta introduced an anti-fraud team to reduce scams originating from China. Using a range of stepped-up enforcement tools, it cut the volume of problematic ads by roughly half during the second half of 2024. But a drop from 19% to 9% of total advertising revenue coming from China represented a great deal of money, so China’s ads enforcement team was “asked to pause.” By mid-2025, fraudulent ads had climbed back to approximately 16% of Meta’s China revenue.

It’s not only about Meta. Fraudulent advertising thrives across all platforms. The less transparent their ad libraries are, the less we know about the true scale of the problem. TikTok has a long list of issues it still needs to fix in its ad library. Google’s Ads Library is not full-text searchable and displays essential data with a delay of up to 90 days (for more details, see the SMT report here). Elon Musk also undoubtedly has his reasons for resisting a transparent advertising library. But don’t be fooled. There is no right to scam, and there is no justification for engineering an environment in which a fraudulent economy can flourish. If you make money from scams, responsibility comes with the revenue — and ad transparency is the bare minimum. Fraudsters will always search for new ways to profit, and without transparency, we lose the ability to keep track.

Let’s not confuse a lack of transparency with freedom of speech. This debate is not about lofty principles; it’s about profit. Transparency strengthens democracy. Transparency supports a fair and competitive business environment. And transparency only harms those who prefer to operate in the dark.

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