GoKawiilThousands of ads for “nudify” apps on Meta-owned Facebook and Instagram have been traced back to GatherOne, one of Meta’s 11 Chinese advertising partners, according to a report published on Sunday by the Tech Transparency Project.
Nudify apps give users the AI tools to digitally remove clothing from photos of people, typically women and children, placing their faces in nonconsensual, pornographic images and videos. One of the advertised apps had Google Play reviews alerting others to what one reviewer called “illegal child porn.”
The ads themselves featured women simulating sex acts.
Meta’s community standards state that it doesn’t allow the promotion of nudify apps. Its advertising standards say that objectionable content includes ads that contain nudity, sexually suggestive activities or depictions of people in explicit or sexually suggestive positions.
TTP’s research also found that many of these ads appeared to come from fake accounts. This further violates Meta’s ad standards, which prohibit advertisers from using “inauthentic assets” to deceive Meta or its users about their identity.
Meta and GatherOne’s responses
Because Facebook and Instagram are banned in China, the Chinese government and Meta reached a compromise: Chinese advertisers must use a handpicked third-party agency, such as GatherOne, to run ads on these social media platforms.
While TTP was investigating the ads and the accounts behind them, it noticed that Meta had removed many of them.
“We do not allow non-consensual intimate imagery or nudify apps on our platform and we take aggressive steps to combat them: blocking links to sites that host this content, restricting related search terms, removing over 340,000 violating ads late last year alone and, when appropriate, taking legal action,” Cindy Southworth, Meta’s head of women’s safety policy, said in a statement provided to CNET. “Because confronting these persistent bad actors is an industry-wide challenge, we also proactively share information through Lantern so other platforms can act.”
Lantern is a Tech Coalition program that allows tech companies to share signals about child sexual abuse material, grooming manuals and other illegal content.
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