{"id":530331,"date":"2026-01-20T17:42:20","date_gmt":"2026-01-20T17:42:20","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/530331\/"},"modified":"2026-01-20T17:42:20","modified_gmt":"2026-01-20T17:42:20","slug":"meta-turning-a-blind-eye-to-illegal-gambling-ads-uk-gambling-commission-says","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/530331\/","title":{"rendered":"Meta ‘turning a blind eye’ to illegal gambling ads, UK Gambling Commission says"},"content":{"rendered":"

Britain’s Gambling Commission<\/a> said on Monday that Meta Platforms<\/a>, the owner of Facebook and \u2060Instagram, was turning a blind eye to illegal online casinos advertising on its sites, indicating it was happy to continue taking money from criminals.<\/p>\n

The independent regulator’s executive \u200cdirector Tim \u200cMiller said that anyone who has spent even a little time on Meta<\/a>‘s platforms would more \u200cthan likely have seen ads in their feed for illegal online casinos.<\/p>\n

Most notably, many of the ads were for sites that did not participate in Britain’s “GamStop” self-exclusion scheme for online gambling, he said.<\/p>\n

Meta’s assertion that it did not know about such ads until it was notified was “simply false”, he said in a speech at \u200cthe ICE Barcelona \u200dtrade show, according to the text on the \u200dGambling Commission’s website.<\/p>\n

“It could leave you with the impression \u200cthey are quite happy to turn a blind eye and continue taking money from criminals and scammers until someone shouts about it,” he said.<\/p>\n

When asked for comment, Meta said it enforced strict advertising policies regarding online gambling and gaming ads, and any ads that violated these policies were promptly removed once identified.<\/p>\n

“We’ve been working \u200dclosely with the Commission to identify and remove all the flagged ads found in violation of our policies, and \u200dwe’re using \u2060this intelligence to \u2060further improve the proactive detection tools we already have in place,” a spokesperson said. “We would encourage the Commission to continue to collaborate with us to ensure users and legitimate advertisers are protected from these bad actors.”<\/p>\n

Miller said in his speech Meta’s searchable ad library showed which advertisers said their sites were “Not on GamStop”. “If we can find them then so can Meta,” he said. “They simply choose not to look.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Britain’s Gambling Commission said on Monday that Meta Platforms, the owner of Facebook and \u2060Instagram, was turning a…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":530332,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[36],"tags":[235148,141617,235145,210,235144,563,235146,517,340,7062,235147,235143,67,132,68],"class_list":{"0":"post-530331","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-mental-health","8":"tag-facebook-ads","9":"tag-gambling-commission","10":"tag-gamstop-scheme","11":"tag-health","12":"tag-illegal-gambling-ads","13":"tag-instagram","14":"tag-instagram-ads","15":"tag-mental-health","16":"tag-meta","17":"tag-meta-platforms","18":"tag-tim-miller","19":"tag-uk-gambling-commission","20":"tag-united-states","21":"tag-unitedstates","22":"tag-us"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/115928666242648032","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/530331","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=530331"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/530331\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/530332"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=530331"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=530331"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=530331"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}