YouTube and X funnel users to nudify apps, Wired reports

The interesting piece of the Wired story is not that AI "undress" apps exist, that has been the situation for a couple of years now. It is that the platforms most people think of as the mainstream, safe end of the internet, YouTube and X, are now the places where these tools find their customers.

According to Wired, one nudify app paid for sponsored content on Google's YouTube such that it appears first when a user searches the word "nudify." Since the beginning of 2023, links advertising undressing apps have grown by more than 2,400 percent on social platforms including X and Reddit. The "gateways" framing comes from a report by Indicator, which found ten different nudifier services had a foothold on Apple, Google, Meta, Telegram and X in the two weeks after the Take It Down Act passed. Indicator also reports that X is taking money from one popular nudifier in exchange for a blue badge.

Why this matters if you are not staffing a trust and safety team: the Take It Down Act was signed into law in May 2025 and gave businesses one year to comply, and the FTC has already begun enforcement, sending warning letters to 15 major platforms including Alphabet, Meta and X. The distribution market for these apps has been built on top of infrastructure operated by companies now legally obligated to police it. That is a compliance and reputational exposure the ad-selling side of these businesses has not fully priced in.

The honest caveat is that "gateway" is Indicator's framing and Wired does not spell out what YouTube or X knew about the paid placements, or when, or how much money changed hands. Common targets of these apps, per the reporting, are current and ex-girlfriends and relatives such as sisters and cousins, but the piece does not put a number on victims or on platform revenue from the promotions. What the reporting does make clear is that the chokepoints, ad networks, app stores, verified-badge programs and payment processors, are where enforcement will have leverage if the FTC decides to escalate, and it is the trust-and-safety vendors and the advocacy groups now routing complaints through the new takeitdown.ftc.gov portal who benefit first if regulators actually move.