Social Media Platforms Host and Profit from Scams Using AI and Fake News Websites

Executive Summary

Since the beginning of the 2025 Canadian election campaign, researchers observed a large number of Facebook ads impersonating legitimate news sources such as CBC, CTV, and the Toronto Sun while promoting fraudulent investment schemes. These ads, often featuring fake news articles or deepfake videos styled as news segments, are being bought even though news content is banned from Meta's platforms in Canada. Fake news websites are increasingly sharing political content to deceive and scam Canadians: since the start of the campaign, the team identified over 40 Facebook pages sharing AI-generated ads masquerading as legitimate news sources and linked to cryptocurrency scams. While similar schemes circulated earlier in the year, the ads have shifted during the campaign, becoming more sophisticated and more politically polarizing, and increasingly relying on videos designed to look like real news coverage.

Canadians are seeing this content at scale: about a quarter of Canadians (24%) indicate that they have encountered a social media post or webpage that falsely presented itself as a legitimate news source by imitating its name, logo, or design over the past month. Canadians are skeptical but vulnerable: about three quarters of the comments on the ads flag that the content is fake, and about 60% of Canadians who believe they have seen them say they immediately recognized them as false. The remaining 40% admit that they only recognized this deception later and may have believed or uncritically engaged with the content.

The report calls for immediate action: social media platforms need to dramatically scale up their ad moderation and transparency practices to detect and remove deepfakes and imposter news content. To profit from deceiving and scamming Canadians during an election is deemed unacceptable, and regulators and lawmakers are urged to respond immediately in the absence of dramatic action by the platforms. The analysis draws on a qualitative investigation of the ads and fake websites, a systematic analysis of 770 comments on the ads, and findings from a nationally representative survey of Canadians, focusing primarily on Facebook while noting similar ads have circulated on YouTube, Instagram, and X.