Web novel apps backed by ByteDance and Tencent are running hundreds of Facebook and Instagram ads showing sexual assault, violent erotica, and acts of self-harm
Emily Baker-White / Forbes : Tweets: @violazhouyi , @ebakerwhite , @mashaborak , @katienotopoulos , @iblametom , @ebakerwhite , @ebakerwhite , @ebakerwhite , and @cfarivar See also Mediagazer Tweets: Viola Zhou / @violazhouyi : In China these companies can't do porn bc of state censorship. When they are abroad, free from govt regulations, they promote racism/child abuse/sexual assault. Really important story by @ebakerwhite https://www.forbes.com/... Emily Baker-White / @ebakerwhite : This is the wildest story I've ever written. ‘Web novel’ apps backed by ByteDance and Tencent have been running hundreds of Facebook & Instagram ads featuring violent erotica, many of which contain vivid descriptions of sexual assault and self-mutilation. https://www.forbes.com/... Masha Borak / @mashaborak : This is one of the oddest stories of globalization I have come across. The first time I saw ads for racy werewolf novels was on my Facebook feed this year. But their story starts a long time ago in Japan and spreads beyond tech platforms and countries such as China and the US /1 https://twitter.com/... Katie Notopoulos / @katienotopoulos : I am always surprised by how much of the infrastructure of the modern internet is devoted to werewolf porn https://www.forbes.com/... Thomas Brewster / @iblametom : Dear lord, what is going on here?! Amazing reporting and Meta has taken down 200 ads as a result. https://twitter.com/... Emily Baker-White / @ebakerwhite : I truly cannot imagine working in child safety at ByteDance or Tencent and learning that the company paying me to fight self harm content is paying others to produce it and blast it out on a rival platform. Cannot imagine. (T&S / integrity hive: DM me!!) https://www.forbes.com/... Emily Baker-White / @ebakerwhite : Last Saturday, there were 83 of these ads on FB & IG containing the phrase “His Personal Cum Bucket.” On Wednesday, there were 31 ads featuring romanticized descriptions of teen girls cutting themselves. And those are just the ones I caught. https://www.forbes.com/... Emily Baker-White / @ebakerwhite : Some ads also used public figures' images w/o permission in awful ways. One, for a story about a “night of terror” where a teen girl would be “mated” to a “creature,” mashed up a shirtless photo of footballer Neymar with a stock image of a beaten woman. https://www.forbes.com/... Cyrus Farivar / @cfarivar : “Meta, for its part, has appeared largely incapable of halting this flood of violent fantasy erotica ads that violate its rules.” https://twitter.com/... See also Mediagazer
Context & Ripple Effects
This Forbes investigation lands in the middle of a widening arc about what actually flows through Meta's ad pipes. On one side sits the junk ad epidemic driven by a slowing market, Apple's ATT changes, and weak moderation; on the other, Meta's own enforcement has grown erratic — sex workers and educators report more punitive, less predictable moderation since SESTA-FOSTA even as clearly rule-violating paid content slips through.
The named players here are unusual: web novel apps backed by China's two biggest tech companies, ByteDance and Tencent, are buying Facebook and Instagram inventory with creative showing sexual assault, violent erotica, and self-harm — some using public figures' images without permission. Meta removed roughly 200 ads after Forbes reported, but appeared largely incapable of stopping the flood, a gap that recurs across the related coverage.
First-order effects
- Meta pulled about 200 Facebook and Instagram ads after the report, yet its systems failed to halt the broader flow of violent fantasy erotica that violated its own rules — leaving its ad-review pipeline exposed as the binding constraint, not policy text.
- ByteDance- and Tencent-backed web novel apps lose a cheap, high-volume user-acquisition channel if Meta enforces, and take on brand risk at home and abroad for ad creative their funding helped scale.
Second-order effects
- Legitimate advertisers face a trust problem: when paid slots carry sexual-assault imagery next to brand placements, the junk-ad dynamics already documented in the ad-market downturn get worse, pressuring Meta's pricing and advertiser retention.
- Public figures whose images were used without permission in abusive ads add a legal and PR dimension Meta must handle case-by-case, since automated review missed them.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, enforcement migrates from automated takedowns to litigation and journalism: by 2025 Meta was suing app maker Joy Timeline in Hong Kong to keep the nudify app CrushAI off its platforms — an admission that ordinary moderation cannot police who buys ads.
- The same platforms keep surfacing adjacent harms — the Guardian's reporting on child-trafficking sales on Facebook and Instagram and the 764 extortion network on Discord and Telegram — pointing toward regulatory scrutiny of ad-marketplaces as content-distribution systems rather than neutral commerce.
The trend: Platform ad marketplaces are becoming the weakest link in content moderation, with paid distribution of prohibited material forcing platforms from automated enforcement toward lawsuits and regulator attention.