Wired
Over the last nine months, Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta has run dozens of paid ads that include explicit AI-generated child sexual abuse material (CSAM) and images of minors alongside sexually suggestive statements, according to details of the ads shared with WIRED. The ads, which in some cases reached several thousand accounts, were targeted at people living in the United States, United Kingdom, and more than a dozen European countries.
More than 50 image and video ads containing abusive content were recently discovered in Meta’s ad library by researchers at the Tech Transparency Project (TTP), with the listings showing that some ads linked out to so-called nudify or undressing apps. Meta’s ad library—a transparency tool that catalogues ads displayed on the company’s platforms—shows the ads running across Facebook, Instagram, Messenger, and/or Threads. The findings are the second time in recent weeks that paid ads linked to child sexual abuse material have been found on Meta’s platforms.
“These ads made no effort to mask the images or hide what they were promoting,” Katie Paul, the director of the TTP, an independent watchdog group, tells WIRED. “It’s important to point out that this isn’t content posted by third parties on Facebook or Instagram, these are ads that were reviewed, approved, and allowed to run by Meta, never encountering interference while the company collected the ad dollars.”
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