Hacker News Reader

That's called a broken system and implies either incompetence or malicious intent by the ad platform.

The fact the ad platforms are multi-billion dollar companies leans my opinion towards malicious intent.

You can change the link target, but you cannot change the media afterwards without a new check.

So the ad review system is just requesting the ad from the advertiser, and not ever bothering to disguise itself? Didn't we have this shit figured out for brick-and-mortar restaurant reviews decades ago?

As far as I understood, the problem happens when the ad has a link to a website. I can't imagine that happening with static images or videos that don't link a website (that could be solved quite trivially...)