Meta is officially no longer part of IAB Sweden. After the organization expelled the company as a member due to concerns about the company’s handling of fraudulent advertisements, Meta did not appeal the decision at an April 15 meeting.
The decision to boot Meta from the group was more than a year in the making, and the action comes after a report from Reuters late last year found that Meta was “earning a fortune on a deluge of fraudulent ads”; a consumer watchdog group is now suing Meta over the findings. But it remains to be seen how much effect the move will have on Meta’s credibility with other IAB chapters and within adland as a whole.
Don’t expect other IAB chapters to kick Meta to the curb anytime soon, one expert told Marketing Brew.
“The leadership move by IAB Sweden puts a lot of pressure on not just other IAB chapters locally, [but also] the IAB global parent,” Arielle Garcia, COO of the industry watchdog Check My Ads Institute, said. “I’m honestly not optimistic that we will see other IAB chapters or other trade associations taking a stand.”
How we got here: The lead-up to the IAB Sweden–Meta breakup began over a year ago and stemmed from frustration on the part of Swedish publishers around what they said were scam ads on the tech giant’s platforms, Thomas Mattsson, senior advisor of IAB Sweden member Bonnier News, told Marketing Brew. Some of the ads, he said, sought to impersonate prominent news brands; others falsely depicted journalists or celebrities advocating for crypto for consumers to invest in.
“We’ve had a long, long discussion in Sweden about the fact that Meta is distributing these scam ads,” he said. “This situation has increased over the last couple of years, with more fake ads using prominent media brands, using prominent journalists, TV anchors, celebrities, etc.”
So began a series of meetings between Meta Sweden and the Swedish publishers’ association Utgivarna, of which Mattsson is vice chair and of which Bonnier News is a member. Those meetings, he told us, predated discussions with IAB Sweden that eventually led to Meta’s expulsion.
One such meeting took place with Meta in June 2024, where Mattsson said Meta “stated what we already know, that they have basically no influence over the algorithm, no influence over the ad library, and we would need to escalate this issue in their chain of command.
Ultimately, Utgivarna escalated matters to Meta “on the European level,” he said, where more meetings continued. By the time spring 2025 rolled around, Utgivarna began to plan more aggressive action, which Mattsson said was prompted by a November 2024 meeting at Meta’s headquarters in London in which he came to the conclusion that the conversations alone “would take us nowhere.”
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Meta did not provide comment.
In November 2025, Utgivarna filed a police complaint in Sweden that named CEO Mark Zuckerberg directly and accused him and the company of fraud. In February, the organization filed another complaint, this time with the European Commission, claiming the company violated the EU’s Digital Services Act.
After IAB Sweden voted to expel Meta, Bonnier News and fellow Swedish publishers Schibsted and Aller Media publicly backed the decision.
The aftermath: The IAB Sweden–Meta breakup generated a lot of headlines, but few other IAB chapters have sounded off on the issue, let alone taken similar steps.
The IAB declined to provide comment from a named representative. In March, the UK’s national IAB chapter reaffirmed Meta’s membership status to the Media Leader, stating that its “aim is to work with the broadest possible membership,” a sentiment that is shared by the leadership of IAB Canada.
Sonia Carreno, president of IAB Canada, provided Marketing Brew with a statement that said, in part, “IAB Canada respects that each IAB chapter operates independently and makes decisions based on the realities of its own market. In Canada, our role is to keep the full digital advertising ecosystem at the table…Our position is not about any single company.”
What happens now? Some of the IAB chapters’ statements on the IAB Sweden–Meta breakup aren’t sitting well with certain industry figures.
“I find it to be disingenuous, and it would be a lot more honest to say that they’re serving as mouthpieces for the Big Tech membership that pays them not only high membership fees, but also sponsorship fees,” said Garcia, who has been a vocal critic of Big Tech.
IAB annual dues for technology companies are calculated by annual domestic digital revenue, according to dues information published by the organization; a company like Meta, with more than $200 billion in annual revenue last year, could owe $550,000 in dues for 2025, with increases in 2026 and 2027 “based off the prior year’s industry growth percentage,” according to the document.
Whether there’s further industry or government action against Meta is anyone’s guess, but Mattsson noted that the EU has scrutinized Meta before, including opening an investigation into Meta in April 2024 around election disinformation and fraudulent ads. But that was “pre-Trump,” he said.
“The European Commission has been very strong in [its] wording against the tech giants,” he said. “But we also know that the White House is very protective of its tech companies.”
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