The Dormant Danger: How Meta Ignores Large-Scale Inauthentic Behavior Networks of Malicious Advertisers
Mapped seven dormant networks totalling about 3.8 million Facebook pages reused for political propaganda and scams, and found Meta consistently removes individual ads while leaving the underlying inauthentic-behaviour networks intact, a systemic DSA compliance gap.
Executive summary
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Reset Tech's OSINT team investigated how malicious advertisers exploit large reserves of dormant Facebook pages, mapping seven distinct networks that together comprised roughly 3.8 million pages held in reserve for political propaganda and scam campaigns.
The study found that Meta's enforcement tends to remove individual offending ads while leaving the underlying page networks, and the coordinated inauthentic behaviour that sustains them, intact and ready to be reactivated. This lets the same operators return repeatedly under fresh assets.
Reset Tech frames the pattern as a systemic-risk failure under DSA Articles 34-35: Meta treats a network-scale problem as a series of isolated ad violations, and calls for enforcement aimed at the networks themselves.
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