GAFAM NewsEssay

Why do scam ads that TV would never air run freely online?

Why TV and newspapers vet every ad while Google, Meta and other platforms carry scam ads: the history, laws like Section 230, and how the ad business is built.

First published in Japanese: August 15, 2025
English edition: November 2, 2026

Read the Japanese original on note「なぜ「テレビならあり得ない広告」がネットではまかり通る？無責任さの裏側を考えた」

Recently, Yusaku Maezawa, the founder of the Japanese online fashion retailer ZOZO, made headlines with a call-out on social media: “I’ll put up the money, the resources and the influence. Want to build a Japanese social network together?” [1]

Behind it were fake ads circulating on social media that used his name and that of KABU&, a company he founded. He seems to have reached the end of his patience.

He sharply criticized foreign social media companies, saying that they chase nothing but ad revenue and leave illegal ads unchecked while fraud losses in Japan keep growing, and that although these ads should be easy to remove with AI and facial recognition, the companies keep running criminals’ ads for profit. “They are completely looking down on Japan,” he said, adding that he wanted penalties severe enough to amount to a business suspension. [2] There are also reports that his lawsuit against Meta is under way. [3]

But hold on. Why are social media ads allowed to make money from something that so plainly helps criminals?

With ads in so-called old media, such as TV and newspapers, a “prior check” is simply taken for granted. So why does that filter not work at all for online ads?

That sense that something is off may be the heart of why responsibility for vetting online ads is taken so lightly. Today, let’s untangle what lies behind it together.

Old media and the internet: where responsibility parts ways

Differences in history and culture

In old media such as TV and newspapers, responsibility for vetting ads clearly sits with the media company. Over their long history, old media have had a huge influence on politics, religion and society, and each time, laws and the industry’s own self-regulation added mechanisms to rein in that power, ads included. Clear responsibility for ads is the result.

Old media also carry a strong sense of being a “public institution”, and they treat ads as part of that role, guarding the trust placed in them. On top of that, within the industry and in society at large, there is a deep-rooted awareness that running an inappropriate ad will make trust collapse. [4] [5]

Online advertising, on the other hand, historically grew out of a culture of “personal responsibility”. In the early days of the internet in the late 1990s, there was almost no regulation, and the internet expanded as a “space for free expression”. Internet companies started from the position that they “just provide the space”, and the dominant logic was that “whether you look or not is up to the user”. Ads were delivered as an extension of that, and the market grew rapidly while the law failed to keep up. [6]

Differences in industry rules and law

Ads in old media go through fact-checking and content review based on legal systems and industry standards such as the Broadcast Act and the Newspaper Advertising Code of Ethics. [5] [7]

Online advertising, on the other hand, rests on the premise of “platform immunity”. Behind this is the strong influence of Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, passed in the United States in 1996. It provides that a platform is not treated as the publisher of content posted by users or advertisers, which largely exempts the platform from responsibility. [8] [9]

In fact, in the US there have been many cases where, even when fraudulent or discriminatory ads ran, courts held that the platform was merely carrying third-party content and found Google, Craigslist and others not liable. [9] [10]

In Japan, for a long time there was no comprehensive law dedicated to advertising. Instead, existing laws such as the Act against Unjustifiable Premiums and Misleading Representations and the Pharmaceuticals and Medical Devices Act were applied. [11] So even when an ad was questioned as illegal, it was usually the advertiser who faced action first, and in most cases the platform bore no direct legal liability. [12]

Structural differences

There are structural differences too. TV and newspaper ads are limited in number, so people can review them by hand.

Online ads, by contrast, are served by the millions in real time, so checking them all with human eyes is essentially impossible. Review is left to AI and automated systems, and some ads slipping through is treated as a given. Online advertising has simply been accepted as “that’s how it works”.

What’s more, online ads involve several businesses (advertisers, agencies, ad delivery networks and site operators), so responsibility gets spread thin. It becomes unclear who checks the content to the very end, and inappropriate ads slip through more easily. [13]

How Big Tech responds, and where it falls short

Of course, the giants of online advertising aren’t doing nothing.

Google removed more than 5.2 billion ads in 2022 alone, and it requires financial services advertisers to verify their licenses. [14] Meta (Facebook) also restricted discriminatory targeting in political ads and housing ads. [15]

Even so, it is hard to stop everything, and fraudulent and false ads keep slipping through. On top of that, each company’s standards for review and for counting removals are hard to see from the outside, so it is unclear whether they are really going as far as they should.

In recent years, countries around the world, Japan included, have tightened regulation of giant digital platforms such as Google, Apple and Meta. [16] But when it comes to responsibility for ads, as the Maezawa case shows, regulation is still playing catch-up.

If you’re making the money, take the responsibility

Looking at all this, it becomes clear that how lightly online media take responsibility for the ads they carry is the result of history, culture, law and structure all tangled together.

But now, in 2025, the online ad market has grown far larger than TV advertising. GAFAM companies in particular keep increasing their influence at an accelerating pace while earning enormous profits from ads.

Old media have vetted ads strictly in order to build trust together with advertisers. Now that online advertising has surpassed them in both scale and profit, isn’t it time it lived up to its responsibility to protect consumers just as they have, or rather, even more so?

Speaking as an owl, I honestly find it a little sad when only the people who play fair end up losing out.