Meta Platforms Under Fire for Running Ads Promoting AI Porn-Generation Tool Targeting Female Politicians
San Francisco, CA – Meta Platforms, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, is facing renewed scrutiny after running advertisements for an AI porn-generation tool that seemingly encouraged users to create deepfaked videos resembling prominent female US politicians. This incident marks the latest in a troubling series of failures by Meta to prevent the promotion of tools that facilitate the creation of nonconsensual intimate imagery on its platforms, directly violating its own policies against sexually explicit material in advertisements.
The AI tool in question, named Kromix, markets itself as an “AI image styler.” However, an investigation by WIRED revealed a disturbing promotional video that explicitly states the tool has "no restrictions," boasts that "all the characters are real people," and describes it as "the AI that men actually use." One particularly egregious ad depicted a woman closely resembling a prominent female US politician in front of national flags, with the caption "What if she moved?" The ad then transitioned to a scene of a woman with the same facial features engaged in a pornographic video.
Further investigation into the Kromix app, which was hosted on Apple’s App Store until WIRED’s inquiries, exposed its functionality for paid users. The app explicitly invited users to upload photos for use in various scenarios, including deeply concerning categories like “bedroom rape” and “Disney love.” Additionally, the app featured AI-generated pornographic videos of women in Spider-Man costumes. Attempts to contact the app’s listed contact went unanswered.
Apple itself has struggled to consistently enforce its policies against nonconsensual intimate imagery, nudifying apps, and sexually explicit content within its App Store. Earlier this summer, the San Francisco City Attorney sent a cease-and-desist letter to Apple, demanding the removal of 13 specific apps and accusing the company of "aiding and abetting" the sale of explicit deepfake images.
The controversial ads on Meta’s platforms were exclusively targeted at male users, according to Meta’s ad library, and promoted with the tagline "Unleash Next-gen AI Magic." These ads were promptly removed after WIRED’s inquiries. In total, the account linked to the campaign ran 32 ads, active for durations between five and 46 hours, though most garnered fewer than 10 impressions.
Katie Paul, director of the Tech Transparency Project, which uncovered these ads, expressed profound concern: “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.”
This incident highlights a growing and alarming trend of politicians and elected officials, overwhelmingly women, being targeted by nonconsensual deepfake images and videos. In January, the AI tool Grok was used to create approximately 3 million sexualized images of women and girls, with officials in Sweden, England, and Northern Ireland being among the targets. These attacks often leverage official images as a starting point, underscoring the vulnerability of public figures to this emerging form of digital abuse.
Benjamin Shultz, lead researcher at the American Sunlight Project, who is actively investigating the ecosystem of harmful deepfake technology targeting politicians, commented: “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.”
Despite Meta’s public documentation stating that every ad undergoes a "review" against its policies before publication, this latest incident raises serious questions about the effectiveness of their automated review systems. Meta’s ad standards claim that their system "relies primarily on automated tools to check ads and business assets against our policies." The page running the Kromix advertisements was created on August 3rd, shortly before the ads began, and notably had no followers – factors that should have raised red flags within Meta’s systems. This repeated failure to detect and prevent the promotion of such harmful tools continues to expose significant loopholes in Meta’s content moderation and advertising policy enforcement.
