Meta Approved and Profited from AI-Generated CSAM Ads for Nine Months, Investigation Reveals

Meta Ran Ads That Contained AI-Generated Child Sexual Abuse Imagery

Editor's note: This article contains descriptions of imagery depicting child sexual abuse. Reader discretion is strongly advised. 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." The ads discovered by the researchers -- which have now been removed by Meta for violating its policies on child sexual abuse and exploitation material, and adult sexual solicitation and nudity -- were all published between November last year and the start of August. The ads, according to data in Meta's ad transparency library, often ran over a period of several days and some only targeted men. One video ad, the TTP researchers say, used a thumbnail image of a child sitting on the floor with text appearing on top of it saying: "Realizing Deep Fantasies with Generation AI [sic]. There is so much more than what is shown, use your imagination." The researchers say that when the ad was clicked, it played video clips of adults involved in sexual acts and then added the child's face from the thumbnail to a sex act. Another ad the researchers say had been repeatedly posted showed an image of a young girl laying back with her legs spread in a sexual position with text above it saying: "I can show you more." Most of the ads were not actively being shown to users when researchers found them, but they continued to be available, apparently undetected, in Meta's ad library for months. Although many of the ads, according to Meta's data, only "reached" a handful of accounts, at least one reached 2,563 accounts in Europe -- including in France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, the Netherlands, Spain, Sweden, and the United Kingdom. Meta's ad library database does not include details about ad performance in the US or all countries, so the overall reach may be higher. Paul says TTP first discovered the ads last week as its researchers continued to investigate nudify app ads on Meta, after publishing a report about a Chinese advertising partner posting them. Paul says the organization immediately reported the findings to National Center for Missing and Exploited Children's CyberTipline, which allows people to report online child sexual abuse material. A NCMEC spokesperson says it does not comment on reports it receives. After WIRED reached out to Meta, the company removed the ads from its advertising library. "Sexual exploitation is horrific, and we work aggressively to keep it off our platform," a Meta spokesperson says. "The majority of these ads had minimal reach and many were disabled before WIRED shared them. Many of these ads also predate new AI technology we launched recently to better detect and block violating ads at upload -- and we're constantly improving these systems. From removing over 36 million pieces of child sexual exploitation content last year to taking legal action against nudify app developers, we will continue to relentlessly fight this abuse." As the company implies, some of the offending ads got past Meta's new AI technology. Initially, the TTP researchers found around two dozen ads displaying the abusive content. However, hours ahead of publication, the researchers discovered around 30 more. Many of these ads had been published after WIRED first asked Meta about the content, with multiple ads being live and shown to accounts at the time researchers discovered them. Paul says the tranche included some of the worst instances the researchers had seen. One of the video ads, the researchers say, showed a thumbnail of a girl appearing to put on lip gloss, and when it started playing, the video morphed into the child performing a sex act. Meta's policies say that all ads are reviewed before they are published, with the system "primarily" using "automated tools" to check them against its policies. The company's advertising standards stipulate that child sexual and exploitation materials are not permitted, and say that when the company becomes aware of it, it makes reports to NCMEC. Beyond this, Meta's advertising policies say that ads are not allowed to include any "imagery depicting nudity, sexual activity, depictions of people in explicit or sexually suggestive positions, or activities that are sexually suggestive." Meta's ad library now shows that the ads found by the TTP researchers were removed for violating the company's policies, displaying messages saying they violated rules on "child sexual exploitation, abuse and nudity" and "adult nudity and sexual activity." In early July, a BBC investigation found that Instagram had been running ads that promoted the sale of what appeared to be child sexual abuse material in India. According to the reporting, the ads used terminology such as "rape video" and linked to channels on Telegram where the illegal content could be purchased. In response, Meta published a lengthy statement saying it takes a "zero tolerance" approach to child sexual exploitation. The TTP's Paul says that within the cache of ads seen by its researchers, there appeared to be some identical ads that Meta had previously removed due to violations of its policies. "This raises significant questions about how seriously Meta is taking child exploitation in paid advertisements if its own systems can identify identical ads but it does not remove those identical ads for CSAM material," Paul says, adding that there are no ways within the ad library itself to report content that may violate Meta's policies when the ads are no longer running. The ads appear to have been mostly posted by Meta accounts with zero or a tiny number of followers; where paying advertisers were disclosed, they were linked to Chinese companies, Paul says. In one instance -- the ad showing a girl reclining -- the TTP researchers say Meta's data indicates the advertiser was a Chinese firm called Meet Social. At one point, the company was one of Meta's ad resellers, which handle ads in China, where Meta's social media platforms are blocked. According to a 2019 New York Times profile, it published thousands of ads on Facebook per day and expected more than $1 billion in sales. Meet Social did not respond to WIRED's request for comment. Several of the Meta ads found by the TTP researchers linked to an app called MaskAI that appeared in Apple's App Store. The app, which was linked to a Chinese software developer, did not show any nudity before it was downloaded, according to a WIRED review of the app. However, once opened, it exclusively contained AI-generated porn and included features that allow users to upload images and face-swap people into sexual situations. After being contacted by WIRED, an Apple spokesperson says that it has removed MaskAI from the App Store for violating its policies against nudification apps, and the company has "always strictly prohibited apps designed to generate, distribute, or consume pornography." (An email address linked to MaskAI did not respond to a request for comment). Other ads linked to different apps or websites. Since around 2020, as machine learning and subsequent generative AI technology has improved, a large underbelly of dangerous AI nudification and undress services have appeared online -- making millions for their creators and causing untold harms to countless women. They have also been used in the creation of AI-generated child sexual abuse material, which is illegal in countries around the world. After WIRED first contacted Meta about the TTP findings, the company asked two online safety organizations to provide comments to WIRED for this story. Sean Litton, the outgoing CEO of the Tech Coalition, a group that works with tech companies to tackle online abuse, said in a statement that Meta has shared "thousands of violating URLs" to the group's Lantern service, which shares information about abuse content between companies. A spokesperson for the Revenge Porn Helpline in the UK, which works to combat nonconsensual images of adults, also responded with a statement praising Meta's partnership with StopNCII.org and some of its efforts to combat nonconsensual intimate imagery. "We've been clear that nudify apps present a genuinely adversarial problem, not just because of who's behind them, but because of how quickly this ecosystem adapts around any single point of enforcement," the Revenge Porn Helpline said. Alexios Mantzarlis, cofounder of digital deception publication Indicator and a former trust and safety worker at Google, says he has found and reported more than 25,000 ads for AI nudifiers on Meta's platforms in recent years. The company has previously said it has taken down more than 344,000 ads for nudifiers and launched legal action against a Hong Kong company linked to one set of nudifier platforms. (WIRED has previously collaborated with Indicator on reporting about how nudify tech has been used against children in schools around the world). "The actors on the other side are clearly well-equipped to create new advertiser accounts and new domains so that they can keep going, leveraging the same techniques used by scam networks," Mantzarlis tells WIRED. "Unfortunately, this industry of image-based sexual abuse has gone from a novelty to a permanent fixture of our online ecosystem because of timid enforcement from platforms across the stack."

Meta apps displayed ads that contained AI-generated CSAM - Engadget

Researchers identified more than 50 ads that violated the company's policies on child sexual abuse material. Meta ran and hosted "dozens of paid ads" that featured AI-generated child sexual abuse material (CSAM), according to a new report from Wired. The now removed ads reportedly reached thousands of accounts, and ran across Facebook, Threads, Messenger and Instagram. Engadget has asked Meta to comment on Wired's report. We'll update this article if it responds. The ads, which featured images of children with sexually suggestive text and other offensive content, were discovered by researchers with the Tech Transparency Project (TTP) in Meta's ad library. The first-party tool catalogues and indexes the ads that are running across the company's platforms, and is a way of getting an overview of where ads are placed and who they target. All of the ads discovered by TTP were posted between November 2025 and August 2026, and several linked out to "nudify" or undressing apps. "These ads made no effort to mask the images or hide what they were promoting," TTP Director Katie Paul told 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." Meta's advertising standards specifically forbid ads that "contain content that sexually exploits or endangers children," and notes that the company reports any offensive material it finds to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC). Ads with sexually explicit adult content are similarly banned from Meta's ad system. The company catches offenders by reviewing each ad before it's published, but as Wired notes, it relies on "automated tools" as part of the process, which may have been how the more than 50 ads TTP discovered made it through. "Sexual exploitation is horrific, and we work aggressively to keep it off our platform," Meta said in a statement to Wired. "The majority of these ads had minimal reach and many were disabled before WIRED shared them. Many of these ads also predate new AI technology we launched recently to better detect and block violating ads at upload -- and we're constantly improving these systems. From removing over 36 million pieces of child sexual exploitation content last year to taking legal action against nudify app developers, we will continue to relentlessly fight this abuse." This collection of CSAM-related ads is only the latest advertising issue Meta has had to deal with in the last few months. The BBC reported in July that Instagram ran ads advertising child sexual abuse material in India. In April 2026, the Consumer Federation of America also sued Meta for failing to deal with scam ads on its platforms, which are similarly forbidden by the company's ad standards.

Meta served ads containing AI-generated child sexual abuse content, continuing years of child safety failures

Meta's own ad library hosted child abuse imagery for nine months straight. Meta's ad platform did something it has promised, repeatedly, never to allow again. According to a new investigation from Wired, Meta ran dozens of paid ads over the past nine months containing explicit AI-generated child sexual abuse imagery, some of which stayed live even after the company was directly confronted about them. If this feels like a story you've read before, that's because you probably have. Just weeks before this latest report, a separate BBC investigation found Instagram running paid ads promoting child sexual abuse material in India, directing users to Telegram channels selling illegal content. The AI-generated CSAM ads that Meta approved and profited from Researchers at the Tech Transparency Project uncovered the ads sitting inside Meta's own public Ad Library, a tool the company built specifically for advertising transparency. The ads ran between November 2025 and early August 2026, reaching people in the US, UK, and more than a dozen European countries, with at least one ad reaching over 2,500 accounts across Europe alone. Recommended Videos TTP director Katie Paul told Wired the images made no attempt to disguise what they were promoting, stressing that these weren't posts slipping through from outside users, but ads that Meta itself reviewed and approved before collecting ad revenue from them. This wasn't user content. It was advertising Meta accepted. Several ads linked directly to nudifying apps, including one called MaskAI, which Apple removed from its App Store after Wired flagged it. In a particularly troubling detail, researchers initially found roughly two dozen violating ads, but discovered around 30 more in the hours right before publication, several of which had gone live only after Wired had already asked Meta about the problem. Paul also noted that some ads matched content Meta had previously removed for the exact same violation, raising real questions about whether the company's systems can actually recognize repeat offenders. Many of the accounts running these ads had few or no followers, and where advertiser details were visible, several traced back to Chinese firms, including one identified as a former Meta ad reseller. Meta's official response leaned on familiar language, calling the content horrific, noting most ads had limited reach, and pointing to a new AI detection system alongside a claim of removing 36 million pieces of child exploitation content last year. This isn't Meta's first child safety scandal Meta's relationship with child safety failures goes back much further than this week. As far back as 2017, Facebook was already handling more than 50,000 cases of revenge porn and sexual abuse reports every month, prompting the company to recruit thousands of additional content moderators just to keep up. By 2019, internal messages later revealed in court showed Meta had changed how Messenger shared information with law enforcement, affecting roughly 7.5 million child abuse reports. In 2021, whistleblower Frances Haugen leaked internal research showing Meta's own studies found Instagram was harming teenage girls' mental health. That same year, engineer Arturo Bejar personally emailed Zuckerberg about his own daughter's experience being sexually harassed on Instagram. In 2023, a joint investigation by the Wall Street Journal, Stanford, and UMass Amherst found Instagram's algorithms were actively connecting and promoting a vast network of pedophile accounts. Bejar later testified to the Senate that Meta's safety features amounted to nothing more than a placebo in name only. Senators called it damning and vowed to act, yet no binding regulation followed, and Meta's practices continued largely unchanged. A decade of the same broken promise The warnings didn't stay confined to congressional hearings for long. New Mexico's Attorney General also sued Meta after an undercover investigation found a fake profile of a 13-year-old girl was immediately flooded with sexual solicitations from adults. This case that ended in March 2026 with a jury ordering Meta to pay $375 million for endangering children and misleading the public. Testimony during that trial reportedly showed Meta's shift toward AI-driven moderation was flooding the system with low quality reports, making it harder for actual law enforcement investigations to move forward. A $375 million verdict should function as a wake-up call for any company. This entire category of abuse has become a permanent fixture online because platform enforcement has stayed timid for far too long. Has Meta failed to fix this or chosen not to? At some point, calling this a recurring failure gives Meta too much credit. Every one of these incidents follows the same script. Each time independent researchers or journalists find problematic content, and Meta removes it only after being publicly confronted. Later on the company points to a large removal statistic as proof it takes the issue seriously. Then the cycle resets. After nearly a decade of repetition, and with Meta's own data reportedly showing it can identify duplicate violations without acting on them, the conclusion becomes hard to avoid. It seems that Meta has simply calculated that the cost of getting caught is simply lower than the cost of fixing the underlying system. Going forward, users don't need another carefully worded statement from Meta. They needs a system that catches harmful content in the first place. Until that exists, every promise to "take this seriously" is just another placeholder, waiting for the next investigation to prove it wrong again.

Meta ran AI-Generated child abuse ads weeks after India probe

Meta continued to display paid advertisements containing AI-generated child sexual abuse material (CSAM) across Facebook, Instagram, Messenger and Threads. An August 5 WIRED report said this continued even after a July 2026 investigation exposed similar advertisements in India. Researchers at the Tech Transparency Project found more than 50 image and video advertisements in Meta's public ad library. The advertisements contained abusive or sexually suggestive material involving children. Some of the advertisements were still running in early August, while others had remained in the library for months. The ads targeted users in the United States, the United Kingdom and several European countries. Meta's data showed that one advertisement reached 2,563 accounts in Europe. However, the company's ad library does not provide complete reach figures for every country. Ads promoted AI nudify services: Some advertisements directed users to AI "nudify" or undressing services. Others used images of children as thumbnails before showing sexually explicit videos or replacing an adult's face with that of a child. Researchers identified links between several advertisers and Chinese companies or accounts with very few followers. "These ads made no effort to mask the images or hide what they were promoting," Tech Transparency Project director Katie Paul told 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." The researchers first found about two dozen such advertisements. They later discovered around 30 more, including several published after WIRED contacted Meta for comment. Meta removed the advertisements after WIRED raised questions. Its ad library now states that they violated rules on child sexual exploitation, nudity and sexual activity. Meta says detection tools are improving: "Sexual exploitation is horrific, and we work aggressively to keep it off our platform," a Meta spokesperson told WIRED. Meta said many of the advertisements reached only a limited number of users and that it had already disabled some of them. The company also said it designed newer detection tools to block advertisements that violate its policies before publication. However, the findings show that some advertisements passed through those systems. Meta says every advertisement is reviewed before it runs, primarily through automated tools. Human reviewers usually become involved only when the system is uncertain. Report follows India investigation: The latest report follows a BBC investigation published on July 3, 2026. The investigation found that Instagram was serving paid advertisements in India using terms such as "rape video" and "child video." It also found that the advertisements directed users to Telegram channels selling illegal material for as little as Rs 99. The BBC also found that Instagram told a journalist that one reported advertisement did not violate its community standards. Meta removed advertisements and suspended accounts only after the BBC contacted the company directly. Following the investigation, the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology summoned Meta and ordered it to turn off CSAM-related advertisements. The government also asked the company to explain within seven days how the advertisements had passed its review systems. Meta later defended its ad-review process as "robust" while acknowledging that it "may not catch every violation." It did not answer MediaNama's specific questions on whether it had responded to the government notice. It also did not say what changes it planned to make to its ad review process. Nor did it clarify whether its proactive detection systems covered paid advertisements. Questions over Meta's ad systems: The latest findings raise further questions about Meta's ability to stop illegal material before it is approved, paid for and delivered to users. They also show that previously removed advertisements, or identical versions of them, may reappear through new advertiser accounts. Several advertisements identified by the researchers linked to an app called MaskAI, which allowed users to place faces into AI-generated sexual content. Apple removed the app from the App Store after WIRED contacted the company. The Tech Transparency Project reported the material to the US National Center for Missing and Exploited Children. Meta says it also reports apparent child exploitation to the organisation. The repeated appearance of such advertisements suggests that the problem extends beyond individual moderation failures. Unlike ordinary user posts, Meta reviews, distributes and amplifies paid advertisements through its commercial systems, while earning revenue from their placement.