Meta Ran Ads for AI App Promising to Nudify Female Politicians, Apple Pulls Kromix from App Store

Meta Ran Ads for AI Deepfakes Targeting Female Politicians

Meta platforms recently ran advertisements for Kromix, an AI image styling service that appeared to encourage users to create sexual deepfakes of US politicians, specifically targeting female officials1

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. The campaign, which ran 32 ads exclusively targeted at male users with the tagline "Unleash Next-gen AI Magic," operated for periods ranging from five to 46 hours before being removed after WIRED contacted both companies for comment1

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. Most ads received 10 or fewer impressions, but the incident raises serious questions about Meta's ability to detect and prevent nonconsensual intimate imagery from being promoted on its platforms.

One video advertisement featured a woman closely resembling a prominent female US politician standing in front of a US flag and the presidential flag, with the caption "What if she moved?"1

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. The woman then winks before the ad cuts to a scene showing a woman with the same face performing in AI-generated pornographic videos. The voice-over promoted the tool as having "no restrictions," stating "all the characters are real people" and describing it as "the AI that men actually use"1

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Apple Removes Kromix App After Investigation

The Kromix app was hosted on Apple's App Store prior to WIRED's request for comment, after which Apple removed it from the platform1

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. Apple emphasized that Kromix appeared to have added prohibited content and features after passing the App Store's initial review process. The company stated: "We have always strictly prohibited apps designed to generate, distribute, or consume pornography. 'Nudification' apps are against our App Review Guidelines and we aggressively work to identify and remove apps -- as well as the developer accounts behind them -- that attempt to evade our processes and policies"2

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The app invited paid users to upload photos for use in scenarios including "bedroom rape" and "Disney love," and featured AI-generated pornographic videos of women wearing Spider-Man costumes1

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. This isn't an isolated case for Apple—San Francisco's city attorney sent the company a cease-and-desist letter earlier in the summer demanding removal of 13 specific apps and that it stop "aiding and abetting" the sale of explicit deepfake images1

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Pattern of Failures in Platform Moderation Tools

Katie Paul, director of the Tech Transparency Project who discovered the Meta ads, noted: "All of the ads that we've seen so far broadly on the nudify issue are exclusively sexualizing and nudifying and putting women into AI-generated porn. And this raises a lot of questions about how Meta is going to deal with this kind of content, not just broadly but when it comes to female politicians, when the company is actively running ads containing this content on their platform"1

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. The cover images of the ads often showed harmless scenes such as beaches, mountains and waterfalls, while the videos contained sexual material, appearing designed to evade automated detection systems3

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According to Meta's public documentation, each ad is "reviewed" against its policies before publication on platforms including Instagram and Facebook. The company's ad review system relies primarily on automated tools to check ads against policies that specifically prohibit sexual imagery and the promotion of "nudify" or "AI kissing" apps1

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. However, the page running the advertisements was created on August 3, shortly before the ads began running, and had no followers—two indicators that might have flagged the account as suspicious1

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Meta removed more than 344,000 ads on Facebook and Instagram promoting nudify services between November and January, and has filed a lawsuit against at least one firm promoting such services1

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. In a separate investigation, WIRED found that several problematic ads on Meta linked to MaskAI, another Apple App Store app that allowed users to upload photos and face-swap people into sexual situations, which Apple also removed after being contacted2

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Growing Threat to Female Politicians

Politicians and elected officials, overwhelmingly women, have been targets of nonconsensual deepfake images and videos for years. In January, as Grok was used to create around 3 million sexualized images of women and girls, officials in Sweden, England, and Northern Ireland were targeted using the technology, often using official images as a starting point1

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. Benjamin Shultz, lead researcher at the American Sunlight Project investigating how harmful deepfake technology targets politicians, explains: "As the production and distribution of AI-generated content have democratized, formerly benign media -- official portraits, video from a press conference -- have become raw material for low- and no-code tools that anyone with an internet connection can use"1

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Cindy Southworth, head of women's safety at Meta, stated: "Sexual exploitation, including promoting nudify apps, is horrific, and we work aggressively to fight it. This is a highly adversarial space where bad actors constantly evolve their tactics"1

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. The incident underscores ongoing challenges both Meta and Apple face in preventing policy violations related to deepfake pornographic videos and nonconsensual content from reaching users, despite stated commitments to combat such material.