On June 11, Meta announced new measures to prevent AI nudifiers from advertising on its platforms. Prior to that, Indicator’s sustained reporting had identified more than ten thousand Meta ads promoting nudifier tools, which allow people to upload an image of a person and remove their clothing or place them in a sexually explicit video.
In June, Meta said it had stepped up its enforcement efforts and “developed new technology specifically designed to identify these types of ads.”
But since the company announced its countermeasures, it has allowed thousands of new AI nudifier ads to run on Instagram and Facebook, according to new reporting from the American Sunlight Project (ASP) and Indicator.
We also found that Meta’s implementation of European Union transparency requirements has allowed the companies behind the ads to hide behind gibberish aliases like “ddd,” “Potozmgz,” and “111.”
The EU’s Digital Services Act requires major online platforms to display the entity that paid for and benefits from an ad that was shown to users in the region. Meta’s system appears to allow advertisers to easily use fake or nonsense names, thereby concealing their identity and effectively defeating the DSA’s transparency requirements.
Our analysis found that the disclosures for Meta ads shown in Singapore and Taiwan were more accurate, potentially offering a model for the EU and other jurisdictions to follow.
ASP and Indicator found that Meta ran 4,215 ads for 15 AI nudifier services since June 11.1 While the company deleted many of the ads before we reached out, hundreds went undetected by the company, including 163 that were actively running on Facebook and Instagram as recently as Thursday. The company removed hundreds of ads and at least twenty related pages and accounts after our inquiry.
While reviewing the takedowns before publication on Wednesday morning, we discovered that even as Meta had blocked ads for one of the websites we identified, the same operator had already run 330 more ads through other pages and accounts. Those ads are currently visible in the Meta ad library.
The ads reached 359,547 users in the EU and the UK, two regions where Meta shares data on reach. Based purely on relative population numbers, we estimate the global reach of the ads to be comfortably in the seven figures. Most advertisers pointed to web-based nudifiers, while three led to apps in the Apple and Google Play stores.
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