The City Attorney’s Office has asked Meta to explain how the harmful ads repeatedly ran on Facebook and Instagram. The company claims the ads are not under the city’s jurisdiction.
San Francisco’s city attorney has hit Meta with a cease-and-desist letter telling the company to stop “allowing” paid advertisements that include AI-generated child sexual abuse content and asked it to explain how the ads repeatedly ran on its platforms.
On Tuesday, WIRED reported that Meta has run more than 350 ads in recent months that transformed still images of minors—some of them confirmed as real individuals, including a member of a European royal family—into short videoclips that can depict them performing sexual acts. When clicked, these ads would direct people to download AI image- and video-generation apps, some of which could be used to digitally undress people or create other nonconsensual intimate imagery.
The ads, which were discovered by researchers at the Tech Transparency Project (TTP), included some identical ads that had been uploaded multiple times, and in total they reached more than 29,000 accounts in countries in the European Union. The ads that were shown across Facebook, Instagram, and Threads also targeted accounts in the US, Australia, and India. WIRED initially reported on a batch of 53 of the ads at the start of August, but more than 250 of the total number of ads ran on Meta’s platforms after this initial report.
Chris Hayes on How Your Attention Gets Monetized
“Meta has failed to address a known issue of AI-generated child sexually explicit ads, while profiting from them,” San Francisco city attorney David Chiu says in a statement to WIRED. “These ads are deeply disturbing and cause harm to…