Meta Platforms Inc. has run more than 300 advertisements on Instagram and Facebook containing suspected child sexual abuse material this year, according to a report Tuesday by the nonprofit Tech Transparency Project.
The ads collectively reached more than 29,000 people and typically used artificial intelligence to depict young children being molested, TTP said. Many served to promote deepfake “nudify” apps, which were the subject of an earlier report by the group, which tracked their source to app developers and a Meta advertising partner in China. TTP is a research arm of the Washington, DC-based nonpartisan corporate and government watchdog Campaign for Accountability.
The failure to prevent such material appearing on Meta’s services, used by billions globally, comes as the company faces unprecedented scrutiny for social media’s alleged harms to children. The ads violate Meta’s own policies prohibiting child exploitation, abuse and nudity, along with US federal laws. TTP said it reported the ads to the Congressionally mandated National Center for Missing & Exploited Children.
“Content involving child sexual abuse is among the most serious that can be found online,” said Katie Paul, TTP’s director. “But this content isn’t hiding in dark corners of the internet. It’s being used in paid ads on Meta platforms.”
In one instance, TTP said it found ads that used a photo a young girl had posted to her Instagram account in which she was wearing a sports uniform. The ad animated her image into a video in which she is depicted performing a sex act, TTP said. Another ad showed a preteen girl removing her shirt, with accompanying text promising “dark” content.
“We don’t tolerate nudify apps or any kind of child exploitation, whether real or AI-generated,” Meta spokesman Andy Stone told Bloomberg News. Many of the ads flagged had already been removed, he said. Those behind such activity frequently shift tactics to circumvent Meta’s systems, and the company continues to strengthen its detection and enforcement, he added.
TTP in July reported Meta had shown thousands of sexually suggestive ads for nudification apps, which are designed to digitally remove clothing or place photos of real people into graphic images of videos. The new findings pertain to ads that are more graphic, TTP says.
Meta as of Sept. 1 had removed about half the offending ads from its ad library, TTP said. The company removed the remaining ads after TTP shared its findings, it said.
Such content is often called child pornography, but law enforcement and experts also refer to it as child sexual abuse material, or CSAM, because it’s evidence of a non-consensual crime.
TTP’s report comes not long after Meta agreed to a landmark settlement to pay up to $18 billion to resolve claims from US states over the alleged harms its apps caused to young people. Australia and more than two dozen countries are implementing or pursuing bans on under-16s accessing social media like Instagram.
Beyond Meta, law enforcement groups in the US are struggling to deal with the proliferation of AI-altered explicit images and videos, due in large part to tools that make it simple to create illegal content.
The 332 ads TTP found reached those who may have been scrolling Instagram and Facebook in the European Union, the UK, the US, India and Australia. Some of the individual ads reached just a handful of users, some reached hundreds, and two reached more than 2,500 in the EU alone.
Wired last month reported that Meta had run more than 50 ads containing CSAM. TTP’s new research includes newly discovered material not previously reported.
Most of the ads flagged to Meta had fewer than 200 impressions, and the total ad spend was under $5,000, Stone said. Meta in the second quarter posted revenue of $60.8 billion, and its services had an average of 3.6 billion daily active users as of June.
While Instagram and Facebook aren’t available in China, businesses based in the country use them as promotional platforms for reaching global audiences. Meta has several advertising partners in China, some of which TTP said placed ads containing CSAM.
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(This story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
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