Meta ran ads for app that nudifies female politicians

Meta ran ads on Facebook and Instagram for an app that promised users the ability to generate nude images of female politicians, WIRED reported, and one of the promotions featured a pornographic video with a deepfake closely resembling a prominent US politician. Apple removed the app from the App Store after an inquiry from WIRED.

"We have strict rules against non-consensual intimate imagery; we removed these ads, deleted the Pages responsible for running them and permanently blocked the URLs associated with these apps," Meta said. Apple told WIRED it had removed three of the flagged apps and begun terminating the associated developer accounts.

The story sits inside a longer run of the same problem on the same surface. The Tech Transparency Project has traced some 7,600 nudify ads through Meta's own Ad Library to Beijing-based GatherOne Inc., a reseller that places Chinese advertisers on Meta's platforms, and earlier this month our tracker logged a separate report that Meta approved dozens of ads with AI-generated child abuse imagery. Days later, a suit against xAI added a woman alleging Grok generated 7,000 CSAM images. On July 17, 2026, San Francisco City Attorney David Chiu sent cease-and-desist letters to Apple and Google naming 13 face-swapping and nudify apps, giving the companies 28 days to remove them and cut ties with the developers.

Each takedown has been reactive: a reporter, a watchdog or a city attorney flags a specific bundle of ads, the platform pulls them, another wave surfaces. The American Sunlight Project has identified more than 35,000 instances of deepfake content depicting 26 members of Congress, 25 of them women.