The American Apparel and Footwear Association (AAFA) has nominated five platforms — Facebook, Instagram, Alibaba.com, AliExpress and DHGate — to the Office of the US Trade Representative's 2026 Review of Notorious Markets for Counterfeiting and Piracy (NML), escalating its campaign against online counterfeiting channels that it says now threaten both brand value and consumer safety.

The Washington, D.C.-based trade group submitted its comments to USTR on Thursday. It built the recommendations on data collected from its membership of 1,100 brands and retailers across the fashion sector, making the filing a supplier-side compliance action rather than a consumer advocacy move.

What did AAFA's brand-protection data show?

The nomination file draws on members' direct enforcement experience across the nominated platforms. Steve Lamar, AAFA's president and CEO, framed the core compliance risk in blunt terms.

"Counterfeiters increasingly use online platforms to deceive consumers with fraudulent listings that mimic trusted brands to sell products that fail to meet basic safety standards and may contain hazardous chemicals or other dangerous substances," Lamar said. "Consumers deserve to know that the products they purchase are authentic, safe and compliant with the law."

Members reported two operational problems that compound the enforcement burden:

• Counterfeit output now moves at near-real-time speed, with fakes appearing within days or weeks of a product launch and marketed through ads that lift a brand's own product photography and marketing content.
• Enforcement remains a "game of whack-a-mole": brands must monitor and communicate with marketplaces continuously, and many lack the internal bandwidth to run enforcement on their own.

AAFA also flagged the volume one member absorbed. A single company reported 120,000 fraudulent product listings removed from Meta's platforms over the first six months of this year.

How serious is the product safety exposure?

The safety dimension anchors the filing to hard test data. In February, AAFA published results from a study conducted during the 2025 holiday season: 41 percent of 39 lab-tested products failed to comply with international safety standards.

Many of the tested goods were purchased on online platforms. A share were counterfeit items containing dangerous levels of:

• phthalates
• lead
• formaldehyde
• nickel
• other hazardous substances

That failure rate turns the NML nomination from a brand-protection issue into a regulated-substance compliance issue for anyone sourcing, selling or policing apparel and footwear in the US market.

Why are Facebook and Instagram back on the list?

Meta's platforms earned an AAFA nomination for the seventh consecutive year. The trade group notes the two platforms collectively engage 3.6 billion consumers each day and are increasingly functioning as shopping venues, which widens the exposure surface for counterfeit listings.

Members identified three escalating abuse patterns on the platforms:

• significant brand impersonation, including fake ads, fake products and even counterfeit profiles of company staff;
• an uptick in fraudulent advertising promoted by bots and unverified accounts;
• AI-generated content built on brand IP — a vector AAFA expects to grow as generative AI spreads across consumer digital channels.

Jennifer Hanks, AAFA's senior director of brand protection, tied the nomination to the cost brands now carry.

"Counterfeiters and fraudsters are increasingly impersonating America's favorite brands to lure consumers into purchasing fake and dangerous products, creating significant harm for both businesses and consumers," Hanks said. "This has become an incessant and costly burden to brands working to protect consumers online, even as technology advances create consumer confusion across platforms."

AAFA also argued that counterfeit proliferation is now hampering brand innovation and investment, undercutting the value of genuine products and diverting enforcement budgets away from development.

What decision does this force?

For sourcing and compliance teams, the nomination signals where enforcement attention will concentrate ahead of the 2026 NML report. Brands selling through, monitoring or advertising on Facebook, Instagram, Alibaba.com, AliExpress and DHGate should audit their takedown workflows, staffing for marketplace enforcement, and product safety testing documentation now — the 41 percent failure rate in AAFA's testing shows the liability sits not just with counterfeiters, but with any platform ecosystem where non-compliant goods reach consumers. Suppliers that cannot police listings themselves will need either expanded in-house brand-protection capacity or outsourced monitoring before USTR's review puts these channels under a brighter spotlight.