Key Points
- Thailand’s digital ministry is looking for a way to work with Meta and TikTok to be able to identify and take down online gambling adverts and websites.
- The speed of platform-assisted removals actually went up by around 300% in the last part of last financial year.
- Although Meta already has a rule in place banning gambling ads in Thailand, the real issue is actually getting them to be enforced rather than coming up with new rules.
Thailand Wants a Hand From Meta and TikTok to Police Online Gambling Sites
Meta already has a blanket ban in place when it comes to gambling adverts in Thailand, so why on earth is the Thai government asking for their help now?
The answer lies in a new plan from Thailand’s Ministry of Digital Economy and Society (DES). The Ministry has announced that it wants to start working with Meta and TikTok to monitor the online space for gambling activity, and then pass on any findings to the Royal Thai Police. The Police then have the power to act under their own laws.
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What The Ministry Has Pledged?
It was all laid out in a meeting on the 5th October between DES Minister Chaichanok Chidchob and groups fighting to stop gambling in Thailand. We’re talking about groups like the Anti Gambling Foundation, The Youth Network Against Gambling, The Youth Health Promotion Network and The Children, Youth and Family Foundation.
The Ministry says it’s working on four key areas to tackle online gambling. Firstly, it wants to make it easy for people of all ages to report any gambling activity they see online. That’s still just a plan, but the existing 1111 hotline can already deal with online threats.
Then there’s a working group to sort through all the reports and check them out with the likes of TikTok and Meta. If it looks like there’s a case, it would get passed over to the police. Search engines are also in the Ministry’s sights, as is awareness work in schools by the Education and Interior Ministries.
Chaichanok was clear that no single agency can win this fight alone. He said the plan relies on tips from the public to feed into a monitoring system that the Ministry will set up with other agencies and platforms like TikTok and Meta.
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945,075 Blocked Links and a Small Detail
Thailand’s digital Ministry has a track record to back up its plan. They managed to block 945,075 gambling-related URLs between October 2025 and September 2026. Of these, 835,207 came about through court orders, while 109,868 were taken down with the help of digital platforms.
Now, here’s the thing, a single online gambling site can have dozens of websites or addresses, so this number is really a measure of how hard the Ministry is trying to keep up with online operators, rather than a sign that the market is shrinking.
The breakdown also shows something interesting, the vast majority of blocks ordered by the court came from proactive checks by the Ministry’s AI team, who are on the hunt for gambling sites. Police data supplied only around 1 in 10 of the blocks ordered by the court.
Platform Removals Step Up
Previous statistics provide additional information. As the government of Thailand reported, during the first eight months of the fiscal year, 673,699 blocked items were registered by the block policy of the authorities. 37,982 removals were carried out by platforms.
As compared to annual figures, platform-assisted removals grew to 71,886 during the last four months. The amount is equivalent to 18,000 per month, compared with 4,750 previously. The number increased almost 3.8 times.
The reason behind the increase cannot be determined precisely. The FIFA World Cup started on 11 June, and the ministry had already asked for stricter monitoring measures prior to its beginning. Platform cooperation had also been used before.
Police Have Already Worked With Meta
Thai police had started cooperation with Meta regarding gambling pages back in December 2025. By April 27, 2026, Meta blocked 158,365 Facebook pages upon request of the Thai police force. Cooperation has extended to scam networks and the “Digital Citizenship 101” program in 437 pilot schools.
The above-mentioned figure cannot be compared to the figure from the ministry report (109,868 platform removals), as the former refers to Facebook pages, and the latter to URLs on a number of platforms. The involvement of two institutions using two systems of counting is one practical justification for joint monitoring.
A Legal Suit and Long Memory
Cooperation is growing amidst active confrontation. In June 2026, Thailand’s Consumer Council announced that a lawsuit would be filed against Facebook regarding scam advertisements. The organisation claims 3,793 Facebook-linked cases between 2024 and 2026 out of an estimated 51 million Thai Facebook users.
“The case is based on both legal and ethical concerns about Facebook’s involvement in the fraudulent activities,” said the Consumer Council Chairman Saree Ongsomwang.
Frustration is much deeper than one lawsuit. In 2023, the very same digital ministry promised to take Facebook to court because of scams affecting over 200,000 people.
Rules on a Page, Ads Sneaking Past the Feed
Meta’s online gambling ads policy has Thailand listed as an unsupported market, that means even licensed advertisers aren’t allowed to run gambling ads on the platform. But the reality is that the rules just don’t seem to be getting enforced very well. We found that a Thai language casino site had three linked pages up, running over 500 ads in a single day.
Regulators elsewhere have been pretty vocal about their frustration with Meta. The UK’s Gambling Commission, for instance, pointed out that Meta’s own Ad Library was exposing some pretty shady casino advertisers. “If we can spot them, then Meta should be able to too,” said the executive director, Tim Miller. Meta responded by saying they pull any ads that are found to be breaking the rules, and that they’re working on improving their tools to spot these kinds of issues before they happen.
But the real mystery behind all these ads is how much money they’re raking in. In November 2025, Reuters reported that one of Meta’s own internal revenue estimates said that roughly 10% of 2024 revenue, that’s a whopping US$16 billion, came from scams and banned goods. Meta dismissed this estimate as a bit rough and overly broad, saying it included a lot of legit ads and that later figures turned out to be lower.
Expert Analysis: Bangkok is Telling Meta Nice and Nicely, Whereas Taiwan Used a Bit More Muscle
We think Bangkok is right to be pushing Meta to be more accountable, but we can’t help but wonder if just being nice to the company is going to get the results that being tougher in Taiwan did.
Taiwan makes for a pretty useful comparison, it’s the one place that has really put the screws on Meta. Reuters reported that Taiwan threatened to fine the company a pretty significant US$180,000 for each unverified scam ad it ran, and Meta was suddenly in a big hurry to verify the advertisers. Taiwan’s digital ministry then claimed that stricter rules like these had cut down on investment scam ads by a whopping 96%. This package included a few different things: verification, AI scanning of ads, and a public reporting portal, so it’s hard to say exactly what did the trick.
The same Reuters report dug up an internal Meta “playbook” that showed how they slow-roll mandatory verification, and Thailand is one of the markets covered. Meta denied ever stalling regulators, and their spokesperson Andy Stone said that “chasing scammers is an ongoing job and never really ends”.
Our view is that Thailand’s plan still treats Meta like a partner to be won over rather than a company that needs to be held accountable. Hotlines, working groups, all that kind of thing, they’re all well and good, but they mostly just help chase down ads after they’ve been shown to the user, while Meta’s rules say they can’t run those ads in the first place.
Defenders of the partnership approach will say it’s faster than going through legislation, and the numbers do look a bit positive. But we still need to ask: if Meta’s own rules already say these ads aren’t allowed, why should the Thai authorities be the ones to have to find and take them down?
Measuring how well this partnership thing is working is going to be a bit tricky too. Reuters found out that Meta cleaned up their act in the Ad Library when it came to searches regulators were looking for. So Bangkok needs to start publishing some data on how fast they’re able to get ads taken down and how often repeat advertisers keep showing up. Just slapping up the occasional snapshot of the Ad Library isn’t enough.
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