Meta is facing new criticism after researchers found thousands of AI-powered “nudify” advertisements running across Facebook and Instagram despite the company’s policies banning sexually exploitative content.

According to a report from the Tech Transparency Project (TTP), a Chinese advertising partner called GatherOne placed more than 7,500 ads promoting services that digitally remove clothing from images of women. Researchers said one promoted app had previously been linked to child sexual abuse material, yet users could still access it through Meta’s platforms.

The findings add to growing scrutiny over whether Meta’s AI moderation and advertising systems can keep pace with increasingly sophisticated generative AI abuse.

“While Meta has removed a large number of the network’s ads, it appears to have made an intentional choice to continue to do business with GatherOne,” said the TTP in a blog post outlining its findings. “This may reflect the company’s desire to keep tapping into the massive Chinese advertising market, regardless of the impact on users.”

Although exact figures are impossible to determine, TTP reported that GatherOne may be spending upwards of $70 million per year on Meta ads, making it a prominent advertising partner.

TTP has focused several of its recent campaigns on the failure of major advertising networks to tackle sexual and illegal ads on their platforms. Apple and Google have also been found to have failed significantly in policing their own networks, with thousands of ads slipping through automated testing systems and remaining live even after reports and user feedback. Advertising partners that routinely flout the rules also appear to avoid bans, particularly when they operate larger accounts.

GatherOne told TTP that it had halted the creation of new advertising accounts for services relating to nudify and face-swap tools, although it did not say it would stop campaigns that were already running.

Meanwhile, in a statement to Bloomberg News, Meta said the company said it takes “aggressive steps” against nudify apps. Meta added that advertisers who violate its policies may face ad removals, financial penalties, and the suspension or termination of their advertising accounts.

Meta has suffered several PR nightmares relating to AI, both through its own internal models and the activities of its advertising partners. It was forced to pull a feature from Muse Image just days after launch that allowed users to reference public figures and place their faces on other bodies or into prompted scenarios.

The Screen Actors Guild of America and other organisations pushed back against the feature being automatically enabled for public Instagram and Facebook accounts. Meta dropped the feature shortly afterwards, potentially in response to mounting legal pressure.

It was not the first time Meta had created AI systems featuring celebrities without permission. Last year, its chatbot allowed users to chat with AI characters resembling celebrities such as Taylor Swift, Anne Hathaway, and Scarlett Johansson. These chatbots could be given flirtatious personalities, and could create scantily clad images of the celebrities they were imitating.

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May lead to stricter bans in the future

It seems unlikely that Meta will stop testing the limits of AI involving famous people and measuring how users respond. It just launched an AI mode that pulls from public posts, public groups, and Reels. The company is ultimately competing with several major rivals for AI adoption, and Meta and CEO Mark Zuckerberg have staked heavily on AI becoming the next major computing platform.

However, its apparent lack of care around AI deployment and social media more broadly may push regulators and other officials towards further restrictions or outright bans for selected groups of users.

Meta has already faced several lawsuits over allegedly addictive systems targeting children, including one in New York and another that was fortunately for Meta dropped a week before trial. The European Union is reportedly considering a similar investigation.

Australia, Malaysia, and France have already introduced social media bans for children, with France setting the threshold at under 15 and the other two countries at under 16. Turkey, Spain, and the United Kingdom have passed legislation, while five other countries are currently preparing similar measures. The EU may also introduce its own social media ban for children, potentially removing a significant number of Instagram and Facebook accounts.

Whether Meta changes its advertising enforcement remains to be seen. However, the TTP findings are likely to intensify questions from regulators and safety advocates over how effectively the company detects AI-enabled abuse and whether repeat advertisers face meaningful consequences for violating its policies.

Related News: Meta recently faced backlash over its AI tools after pulling a Muse Image feature that allowed users to place public figures’ faces into AI-generated images.

Spur Intelligence, a cybersecurity startup based in Lake Mary, Florida, has raised a $200 million round led by Insight Partners.

Spur, founded in 2017 — five years before ChatGPT’s public launch — was prescient. The startup’s tech helps enterprises distinguish legitimate human users from increasingly well-hidden bot traffic to help identify fake users and threats.

“As sophisticated criminal VPNs, residential proxy networks, and anonymization infrastructure proliferate, organizations are increasingly operating with a critical blind spot: they can see the activity, but not the infrastructure behind it,” Insight’s Thomas Krane said in a written statement.

Detecting malicious traffic has, of course, been a hill corporate security teams have been climbing for eons. But nothing compares to the onslaught facing them today. As of mid-2026, bots are now more active on the internet than humans are, Cloudflare reported last month.

“Thought it would be end of 2027, then early 2027, but agentic traffic growing so fast that bots have now passed human traffic online for the first time in the Internet’s history,” Cloudflare founder and CEO Matthew Prince posted on X last month, pointing to his company’s latest traffic report.

Meta is drawing a new line on how its AI-powered smart glasses can be used on Instagram.

According to Business Insider, the company is removing videos recorded with Meta’s Ray-Ban smart glasses when they are used to harass or exploit strangers, with repeat offenders facing potential account bans. The move follows growing criticism of creators who built large audiences around covert recordings of unsuspecting members of the public.

The policy doesn’t target smart glasses themselves. Instead, it reflects a broader effort to curb a style of content that has raised new questions about privacy, consent, and wearable AI.

According to Instagram chief Adam Mosseri, videos that harass people while using Meta’s smart glasses are no longer welcome on the platform. Business Insider also reported that Instagram set a precedent by removing the accounts of two creators who engaged in such activity. The creators each had over a million followers.

Whether Meta relies primarily on automated moderation or user reports could determine how consistently the policy is enforced.

Why smart glasses changed the equation

Recording someone in public is nothing new, but AI-powered smart glasses have changed how easily and how discreetly it can happen.

Unlike smartphones, which typically require users to raise a device and point it at someone, Meta’s Ray-Ban smart glasses let wearers capture media hands-free while appearing to be doing nothing.

That subtle difference has made the technology attractive to creators producing prank, pickup, and social-experiment videos. Although the glasses include an indicator to signal recording, critics argue many bystanders either fail to notice the light or don’t immediately recognize the eyewear as a recording device.

That has also resulted in New York imposing a ban on the use of smart glasses in its courts. That decision, coupled with this recent explosion in abuse of the Meta glasses, could spell trouble for Meta if other states and regions do the same, and perhaps even more than New York had done.

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A different privacy headache

Until now, much of the discussion around Meta’s smart glasses has centered on the company’s handling of user data, from what the built-in cameras capture to how that information could be processed, stored, or used to improve AI systems.

Instagram’s latest enforcement action, however, highlights another side of the privacy debate: the growing ability of everyday users to turn wearable technology into tools for unwanted surveillance.

Previous privacy debates centered on what Meta collected. This controversy instead focuses on what users can do to one another using AI-powered wearables.

That shift suggests future privacy conversations may no longer focus solely on what technology companies know about users, but also on how their products reshape interactions between people.

While Meta’s latest policy attempts to discourage harassment on Instagram, it does little to prevent recordings done with the wearable from being shared elsewhere.

Meta’s enforcement may reduce some abusive content on Instagram, but the broader challenge remains unresolved. As AI-powered wearables become more common, platforms, regulators, and device makers will likely face increasing pressure to define where public recording ends and digital harassment begins.

Related News: Apple is reportedly delaying its first AI smart glasses until 2027 as it develops new privacy protections, including greater on-device processing and possible camera restrictions.