"First, they identified the top keywords and celebrity names that Japanese Ad Library users employed to find the fraud ads. Then they ran identical searches repeatedly, deleting ads that appeared fraudulent from the library and Meta’s platforms."

That doesn't sound like cloaking. They really are deleting the ads. They're just concentrating on the ads that the regulators are most likely to see based on what they usually search for.

> The scrubbing, Meta teams explained in documents regarding their efforts to reduce scam discoverability, sought to make problematic content “not findable” for “regulators, investigators and journalists.”

This seems to be the "smoking gun"... but it's unclear from the article what the source or context of the quotations are.

Not quite. The ads themselves aren't deleted but only not displayed for a subset of keywords. If the ads were deleted no keyword would be able to show these.