• Australia legislates to enforce financial advertising rules for businesses on Meta.
• Deep-fake ads lost citizens millions.
• Self-policing by social media companies ineffective, for solid yet unpleasant reasons.

As of February 2025, Meta will make Australian and non-domestic businesses advertising financial products on its platforms prove their identity, and make it clear in ads’ content just who is behind it. Advertisers will have to declare who the beneficiaries are of each ad, and who’s paying the bill for Meta’s services.

The move comes as Meta faces pressure from politicians and celebrities in the country after a slew of deep-fake ads purporting to feature well-known faces selling dubious schemes to Meta’s users in 2022. The company is also among those who will be subject to the country’s new regulations later in 2025 preventing under-16s from having social media accounts.

Under the new financial advertising rules for the financial sector, businesses will have to upload an Australian financial services licence number to post ads on Meta, and the person uploading will also need to prove they do indeed work for the company or organisation. Individuals wishing to advertise will need to supply a government-approved form of ID.

The new methods of verification will come into place in February and March 2025.

It’s supposed that the same types of KYC (know your customer) verification will be used when and/or if the underage social media ban comes into place late 2025 in Australia, in which both applicants and, if relevant, their parent(s) will need to officially prove their age using the same kinds of documentation.

Financial advertising is already under similar strictures in Taiwan and the UK. In Britain, advertisers pay around 10 per month for a verified advertising badge, similar to that found on Twitter, although the efficacy of badging on that platform is debatable, more so since the social platform’s change of name and owner. In the UK, subscribers get access to “a real person” at Meta in the event of account hijacking or possible misuse of the channel.

The Australian government’s clampdown on scam advertisements appearing on Meta comes after public figures’ likenesses were used in advertising without their knowledge or approval. Among those whose images were hijacked included mining magnate Andrew Forrest, who’s suing the platform in a claim that states Meta did not act to tackle fake adverts featuring faux Forrest. Meta is also battling a lawsuit from Australia’s consumer regulating body, the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC), over the same issue on broader terms.

Meta’s policing of its advertising policies leaves a great deal to be desired, at least in Australia. According to the BBC, of the 10,294 ads reported to the ACCC in the 13 months between January 2023 and February 2024, 433 were reviewed by Meta and taken down. Even allowing for a generous margin of error, the ratio of take-downs to complaints was around 1:20.

Such statistics go some way to explain why Australian lawmakers feel that the state needs to take action to defend its citizens against financial or social injury. Self-policing by social media giants and a common lack of coherent points of human contact mean that addressing any issues with a multinational company like Meta is hugely time-consuming and at best, only partly effective in resolving issues around contentious content.

The dichotomy for social media networks is the dependence on as many users as possible engaging with a platform, plus at least being seen to be acting in the public interest. Outside of Australia and a scant few other territories, unfettered social media is allowed to make up its own rules. On distributed platforms such as Mastodon, individual instance owners can apply their own rules as to what and what isn’t permitted, creating networks of like-minded individuals who socialise digitally. On centralised platforms such as Meta and Twitter, the onus remains on monetisation at all costs and its dependence on maximun ‘engagement’ – that is, keeping as many users as possible doom-scrolling for as long as possible.