Forbes reported on 7 October that TikTok relaxed its advertising rules in autumn 2025, cutting the number of violation types for which an advertiser is banned immediately from 37 to 13. Non-delivery scams, weapons, risky financial products and fake GLP-1 drugs were among those taken off the list.
According to Forbes, complaints to the Better Business Bureau that mention TikTok rose 142% in the six months after the change, while complaints about goods never delivered rose by more than 200%.
Forbes spoke to insiders, who said the apparent reason for the relaxation was more ad revenue. TikTok has called the allegations false.
If the insiders are right, this is the worst form of irresponsible ad selling, where what is advertised, and who advertises it, is of no consequence to the seller.
Nick Manning recently wrote about fraudulent advertising in The Media Leader, singling out The Times and Sky News as examples of news-led titles that report on scams while carrying advertising for them.
Nobody is suggesting that premium news brands do what Forbes describes. But scammers probe their defences in numerous ways, trading on the brands’ reputations to reach prosperous subscribers.
Proposed regulations
One aspect mentioned but not explored in Manning’s column was the Online Safety Act, which gives Ofcom the power to hold the largest social media and search services (category 1 and category 2A under the act) accountable for the fraudulent ads they carry.
There are nearly 40 measures proposed by Ofcom. These include checks on who an advertiser is when an account is opened, bans that keep repeat offenders off the service and an assessment of the fraud risk of ads and accounts, backed by fines of up to £18m or 10% of worldwide revenue (whichever is greater). No doubt the scammers will be watching with interest.
Ofcom’s consultation on the planned rules closed on 2 October, with its final statement due by mid-2027. What those services will have to do is not yet settled. But who carries the duty is already settled: the platforms, not the advertisers, adtech intermediaries or publishers.
The rules are intended for platforms that sell their own advertising to advertisers they have signed up themselves. They do not reach the programmatic open marketplace; a demand-side platform (DSP) or supply-side platform (SSP) serving a news publisher is outside the act.
Nor do the act’s duties extend to the scam advertisers themselves or to the publishers carrying them. It will not solve this problem for publishers.
The nature of the adtech daisy chain enables scam advertisers to cover their tracks and avoid being identified.
If the Ofcom rules work, scammers will increasingly aim to fly below Ofcom’s radar and target publishers through the programmatic open marketplace, taking advantage of its opacity.
This could lead to a vast increase in scam advertising across an even wider range of publications via the open marketplace, with AI making it faster, easier and cheaper to dupe publishers and the public.
Responsible media titles should prepare for this.
Brand safety from the media owner’s side
In its reply, Times Media invited Manning to work with it to monitor fraudulent and deceptive advertising. But the responsibility lies with reputable titles to protect their paying audiences and provide a safe environment that people trust.
Keeping scams and fraud away is important, but so is reassuring advertisers that they will not appear alongside low-quality, low-value, cheaply designed ads.
High-quality editorial content should provide an environment for brands of a similar stature, not ads for bizarre industrial machinery or “unbranded” ads, both of which Manning has posted on LinkedIn.
This is brand suitability and safety from the media owner’s side. If the public judges a brand by the company it keeps, it’s best to carry trusted, high-quality ads alongside equally high-quality editorial, as both contribute to the suitability of the environment.
What responsible selling means
So what is the “responsible selling” that Manning cites me for?
Responsible selling means the media owner decides what it sells, and to whom, before the sale, instead of scanning what it has sold afterwards or conveniently relying on technology that is not infallible and then blaming it for bad ads slipping through the net.
I have made the case for know-your-customer checks as the first layer of that decision.
Times Media is right to point out, in its reply to Manning’s column, that open-web news publishers “sit at the receiving end of a complex ad ecosystem”.
I have worked with media owners for more than two decades. That includes News UK, of which Times Media is a part, where I ran audience and advertising systems from 2013 to 2016 and which is full of great professionals who truly care. So I can say out loud that for premium media brands, sitting in that chair, in that specific position, is a choice, not a necessity.
The choice is to sell in the programmatic open marketplace at all; everything Times Media’s reply lists is the management of that choice. The open marketplace is part of programmatic advertising, but programmatic advertising is not only the open marketplace.
Why the four safeguards miss the buyer
The reply’s description of the programmatic supply chain, of cloaking and of the four safeguards The Times runs, is accurate.
These four safeguards do what they are built for. Two of them, the ads.txt file and price floors, protect advertisers and The Times‘ yield; they decide who can sell and at what price, not who can buy.
The other two, verified partners and creative scanning, are the only ones meant to protect the reader. The ad in Manning’s piece fooled both. None of the four checks assesses who is ultimately buying that slot.
In programmatic advertising, “verified partners” are the intermediaries, not the advertiser. The scammer is the customer of a DSP or of an ad network that buys through one, and that DSP is the counterpart of an SSP: at least two steps away from the media owner.
Cloaking is the example the reply gives to explain the ads that slip through. It is a correct explanation of one thing: how a creative passes a scan. It does not explain why an advertiser is allowed to bid without anybody having checked them in the first place.
The check that cloaking cannot fool is the one made before the transaction happens, on the buyer’s identity rather than on the creative. It is not among the four safeguards.
Programmatic without the open auction
Times Media says that “switching off programmatic advertising is neither realistic nor a solution”.
Nobody asked for that.
Manning asked media owners to cut the scams off “by not hosting them via their adtech systems or widgets” — a decision about what to host, not about programmatic advertising as a whole.
Direct deals bought programmatically, private marketplaces where the media owner decides who is invited and marketplaces run by alliances of media owners on shared standards all remain. What should have been abandoned 15 years ago, after a few years as a trial, is the open auction, where anyone with a seat on a DSP can buy.
The reply says that programmatic revenue funds journalism, but leaving the open auction does not mean giving up that revenue; the same inventory is redirected to other programmatic buys.
I agree with the reply on one more point: when a scam ad slips through, it is “not due to a lack of care or oversight”.
We should also consider a myth driven by the self-interested narrative of adtech companies: the delusion that sophisticated and effective advertising can only exist with the use of personal data. The power of context and contextual targeting in premium media deserves a standalone piece.
It is commendable that News UK removed external content-recommendation widgets from its pages and replaced them with its own engine for recirculating its own content. I have championed this as an example of what a premium media brand should do and it clearly shows care for its readers and their relationship with the brand.
The same decision applies to the open auction.
Time to take sides
The reality is that premium media owners do not belong in the open marketplace — full stop.
In 20 years of stubbornly trying to square a circle, behaving like ugly ducklings when they are swans, they have, with their mere presence and name, legitimised environments like the programmatic open marketplace, its long tail and everything it brings, while diluting their own value and damaging the trust they hold among their audiences and advertisers.
The Forbes report on TikTok shows how big the stakes are. According to Forbes‘ sources, TikTok relaxed its advertising rules because there is huge money to be made. That is a choice.
Reducing fraud is another.
Reputable titles should offer brands an environment where cheap, irrelevant and crooked ads don’t appear.
“Responsible selling” shouldn’t be optional for media brands that care about how they are perceived by their audiences and advertisers.
It’s time to take sides.
