Meta's Ad System Ran Deepfake Porn Ads Targeting Female Politicians

Meta's advertising platforms recently ran promotions for an AI tool called Kromix that explicitly encouraged users to generate nonconsensual pornographic deepfakes of real people, including a prominent female US politician. One ad showed a woman closely resembling the politician standing before US flags before cutting to a pornographic video featuring the same face. The ads were exclusively targeted at male users under the tagline 'Unleash Next-gen AI Magic' and ran for between five and 46 hours before being pulled — only after journalists flagged them to the company. In total, 32 ads ran from a brand-new account with zero followers, the kind of red-flag signals that Meta's own review guidelines might be expected to catch.

The Kromix app, which had been available in Apple's App Store, offered paid users the ability to upload photos and place them into AI-generated scenarios, including one explicitly labeled 'bedroom rape.' Apple removed the app following a press inquiry, saying it appeared the developer had added prohibited content and features after passing initial review. This follows San Francisco's city attorney sending Apple a cease-and-desist letter earlier this summer demanding removal of 13 specific nudify apps and accusing the company of 'aiding and abetting' the distribution of explicit deepfake imagery.

Meta's own numbers reveal the scale of the problem: the company says it removed 344,000 ads promoting nudify services between November 2025 and January 2026 alone — yet the category keeps flooding back. Researchers from the Tech Transparency Project have documented thousands of violating ads the platform failed to catch, and just days before this story, the same researchers found more than 50 Meta ads containing AI-generated child sexual abuse material, some of which reached thousands of users across the US, UK, and at least a dozen European countries. Some of those CSAM ads continued appearing even after Meta claimed it had deployed new AI detection technology.

Meta's head of women's safety described the space as 'highly adversarial,' noting that bad actors disguise pornographic content behind innocuous cover images of beaches or mountains to evade automated detection. Critics, however, point to a structural problem: Meta has increasingly leaned on AI to police its ad library while cutting human moderation staff. The Tech Transparency Project's director argues that ads are Meta's core product, yet the platform shows little meaningful quality control — a tension made sharper by Meta's repeated public assurances that its AI systems are becoming more sophisticated at stopping exactly this kind of abuse.