Meta told Chinese microdrama apps where its "red lines" were. More than 100,000 explicit ads crossed them.

Content warning: This article contains quotes and descriptions of explicit sexual content, sexual violence, and abuse.

"Just wait for the gang rape after that drug takes effect," says a woman in a 16-minute animated video ad for MoboReels, a Chinese-owned microdrama app. 

In the ad, a man the woman loves drugs her so that a group of men can rape her. It ran on Facebook, Instagram and other Meta platforms for seven days in July.

It was one of more than 100,000 ads for microdrama and web-novel apps that appeared to violate Meta's advertising policies, according to an analysis of more than 700,000 ads by Indicator and Reset Tech, a nonprofit working to counter digital threats. The ads contained explicit language, nudity, and sexual imagery, and often depicted scenes of rape, violence, and incest. They ran as recently as this month. (Indicator members can access a spreadsheet with the full list of pages, as well as sample ads, at the end of this article.)

MoboReels sells short-form videos that often depict steamy romantic escapades. A sister app, MoboReader, sells web novels, which are text-based stories offering the same dramatic romantic and fantasy narratives.

Both formats started in China and are growing fast around the world. Chinese companies, and some Western ones, spend heavily on Meta ads to get people, mostly women, to download their apps and pay to watch and read stories involving mafia dons, princes, alpha kings, and mythical beasts, among other romantic tropes. The Chinese microdrama market is estimated to be $15 billion — larger than the country’s traditional domestic film industry.

Meta has removed MoboReader's ads before. It has also promoted the company to other Chinese advertisers. In 2022, Forbes identified hundreds of “violent erotica” ads on Meta from Chinese web-novel apps, including MoboReader. The social giant removed roughly 200 ads for violating its policies. One MoboReader ad was for a story in which "a woman's husband tries to kill her by hitting her with a car, and then another man subsequently rapes her." Two years later, Meta published a 107-page Chinese-language white paper that listed MoboReader among web-fiction platforms with "rich experience" overseas. It also included a chart of MoboReels' downloads and revenue.

The white paper is part of Meta's years-long courtship of Chinese microdrama and web-novel publishers. Indicator identified webinars, events, and posts on Meta’s Chinese-language business site and WeChat account. In a 2025 webinar, Meta staff told Chinese advertisers that short-drama ad spending on its platforms had grown 26-fold in a year, and that Meta takes "roughly 70 to 80%" of the industry's ad spend. The session was titled “2025 Short Drama Going Global: Ushering in a New Era of Turbo Charge, Empowering Growth, and Soaring Globally!”

Along with MoboReels’ gang-rape video ads, Meta earned revenue from more than 12,000 ads that included the text "F*ck. Your p*ssy's even tighter than your sister's” and “My husband's d!ck was buried inside my sister.” Many were paired with images or videos showing sexual activity, nudity, and incest. One image appeared to show a muscular older man penetrating a young woman from behind. "Dad…I can't take it anymore," read the text over the image. The ads promoted the web-novel apps NovelBar and Literie, which charge people to read stories. The apps, along with a third called MetroNovel, appear to be linked to the same Chinese parent company.

Meta removed 35 of those ads and disabled the ad accounts behind another 139, according to Indicator's analysis. Overall, Meta removed only a small percentage of the violative ads we identified. Even in cases where Meta flagged and banned a violative ad, it often failed to remove duplicates, a pattern I documented for ProPublica in 2024.

NovelBar, Literie and MoboReader were among the most-promoted apps in the dataset. Their owners did not respond to requests for comment.

Alex Dziedzan, a Meta spokesperson, said the content identified by Indicator and Reset Tech violated the company’s Ad Standards.

"Ads promoting explicit sexual content are prohibited on our platforms, and we're removing the ads and accounts in question,” he said in an emailed statement. “Many of these ads had low impression counts and ran before we deployed new AI technology that better detects and blocks violating ads at upload. We continue to strengthen our enforcement as bad actors evolve their tactics to evade detection — in the last 10 months alone, we blocked 92 million ads for sexual content, a 64% increase over the prior period."

He said the company is still reviewing potential additional enforcement actions against MoboReels and NovelBar/Literie. As of this writing, both have active ads running on Meta platforms.

Aleksandra Atanasova, the OSINT investigations lead for Reset Tech, said Meta’s inability to identify and remove sexually graphic, offensive, and violent ads is an ongoing failure.

“This Facebook campaign has been running unhindered since early 2025, with thousands of anonymous pages pushing identical ads featuring sexual violence and explicit nudity,” she said.

Atanasova added: “Much of the content is highly problematic and violates the platform’s own policies. Nonetheless, for over a year, Meta made no effort to curb these advertising activities. Individual pages were taken down for policy violations, but the paid campaign continued.”