Meta approved and ran dozens of paid ads carrying AI-generated child sexual abuse imagery over the nine months to early August, according to a Wired investigation built on research from the Tech Transparency Project. The ads sat in Meta’s public Ad Library, a transparency tool the company built itself, and reached users across the US, UK, and a dozen-plus countries in Europe, one of them landing on over 2,500 accounts. TTP director Katie Paul said these weren’t posts that slipped past moderation but ads Meta reviewed and cleared before taking the money, and that some duplicated content it had already pulled for the same violation. Researchers counted roughly two dozen, then turned up about 30 more shortly before publication, some posted after Wired had raised the issue with Meta.
