Ads Trust and Safety: Year review—2024

Over the past year, Microsoft Advertising has remained steadfast in providing a safe and a trustworthy platform for its advertisers, consumers, and publishers alike. In a digital landscape where change is constant and threats evolve rapidly; we’ve faced both familiar challenges and emerging risks. Yet, through it all, our commitment to safety has remained steadfast.

In 2024, we observed a notable rise in financial scam attempts, with increasing risks that bad actors could leverage Generative AI to create deepfake content—potentially deceiving and exploiting consumer trust. These scams often involve sophisticated imagery and video manipulation techniques, such as fake celebrity endorsements and meticulously constructed phishing sites. The sophistication and scale of these tactics posed a significant challenge that surpassed the capabilities of conventional detection methods; thereby creating an urgent need for advanced, AI-powered countermeasures. To combat these threats head-on, we adopted a comprehensive strategy: Blending forward-thinking policies, cutting-edge moderation tools, AI first defences, and dynamic algorithms.

In October 2024, we proactively revised our policies to specifically address deepfake technology, ensuring that fraudulent endorsements and deceptive claims are quickly identified and removed. We also improved our moderation capabilities by substituting opaque, black-box risks, with transparent, LLM-generated explanations. This empowers our reviewers with clear, actionable insights, enabling them to tackle emerging threats with precision. Our investment in advanced agentic workflows further strengthens our ability to detect phishing attacks and new scam patterns, with LLMs quickly deciphering context and nuance to pinpoint novel tactics ranging from get-rich-quick schemes disguised as celebrity endorsements to zero-day phishing attacks.

A key focus area has also been in combatting advertiser fraud using early signals, such as suspicious business credentials, impersonation patterns, and anomalous payment activity. These insights help us take swift action before violations occur, all while minimizing friction for legitimate advertisers who trust our platform to grow their businesses.

We recognize that true trust comes from empowering our community. To that end, we have introduced robust brand suitability controls that allow advertisers to customize the placement of their ads. This ensures ads aren’t placed next to sensitive topics, such as political or children’s content. Additionally, we expanded feedback options for Native ads, which makes it easier than ever for customers to report or hide advertisers that they may find irrelevant, repetitive, or misleading. These personalized, consumer-driven controls help foster a more respectful environment, protecting both brand integrity and trust.

Our story in numbers

We acted decisively to protect our platform. We removed or restricted over one billion ads that violated our advertising policies, with the most common infractions involving misleading content, brand infringement, and gambling. Further, more than 475,000 accounts were suspended for abusing our ad network and endangering our consumers. To protect our advertising community, we proactively removed ads from publisher pages that hosted content violating our guidelines, such as sexually explicit material or dangerous products, which impacted over 250,000 publisher pages last year.

Our review teams are committed to fairness by offering a clear path for appeal should any advertiser or publisher feel an enforcement action was made in error. We continuously use these insights to refine our systems, ensuring that they become more effective over time. Similarly, when consumers or other entities escalate concerns, we act swiftly to remove the violating content. Throughout the year, we acted on rejecting nearly 245,000 ads and 5,000 accounts in response to 70,000 complaints, along with the overturn of over 1.5 million ad rejections and 20,000 accounts in response to 72,000 appeals.

Road ahead

As we look to the future, we remain anchored in our founding principles, ensuring that trust and safety remain at the heart of everything we do. The regulatory landscape and threat environment are unprecedented and constantly evolving. But at Microsoft Advertising, we thrive on change; we remain agile, as we continuously evolve our policies, strengthen our enforcement systems, foster cross-industry collaboration, and empower consumers, publishers, and advertisers with greater control over their experiences.

Despite our best efforts, some scams may still slip through. If you come across a suspicious or harmful ad, please report it using the Microsoft Advertising Ad Quality Escalation Form.

We truly value your partnership and feedback. Our commitment to maintaining a safe, trusted Microsoft Advertising ecosystem remains steadfast as we continue working to build a secure and resilient platform for our community.