Awatchdog group says Meta ran thousands of advertisements for apps that digitally undress women, and that the network placing them traces back to a single company in China. The finding lands on a platform that has spent more than a year insisting it is winning this fight, even as it fields separate lawsuits over scam ads elsewhere on its services.
The Tech Transparency Project published its findings identifying 210 Facebook pages tied to a Chinese firm it calls GatherOne. Together those pages ran roughly 30,800 ads for face-swapping and AI tools, and 43 of them ran more than 7,600 ads for apps built to produce non-consensual imagery of women, according to the report.
GatherOne, which the group links to entities registered in Beijing and Hong Kong and to a controlling shareholder named Wang Hao, sits at the centre of the operation. After the report appeared, the company said it would suspend new ad applications for its AI nudify services.
Meta’s own enforcement record tells the rest of the story. Of the 210 pages, 179, or 85%, ran ads the company itself later removed for breaching its standards on adult sexual exploitation, sexual solicitation, and nudity, many of them showing women simulating sex acts.
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Meta removed ads and disabled accounts during the investigation, but the group found parts of the network still live. A spokesperson said the company takes “aggressive steps” against such apps, and did not answer the group’s specific questions.
In early 2025 it shared more than 3,800 URLs for nudify apps with other technology firms through an industry programme called Lantern, and it says it has since built detection tools aimed at this category of ad. The report suggests those tools are not keeping pace with the advertisers gaming them.
None of this is new. In June 2025 Meta sued Joy Timeline HK Limited, the Hong Kong maker of an app called CrushAI, after it ran more than 87,000 ads across at least 135 Facebook pages. The company said it had been acting against the advertiser since 2023, echoing an Indian order last year to pull child abuse ads from Instagram.
Those ads were not subtle. Many promised users the ability to “erase any clothes” from a photograph, and the tools were marketed mainly at people in the US, Canada, the UK, Australia, and Germany. CBS News had surfaced hundreds of them months before Meta filed suit.
The lawsuit did not stop the ads. Researchers at the American Sunlight Project and Indicator counted 4,215 more nudify ads in the three months after Meta announced new detection technology, ads that reached an estimated 359,547 users in the EU and UK alone. Even when the company blocked the ads for a flagged website, the operators had often already run hundreds more through fresh pages and accounts.
Some advertisers had registered under names such as “ddd” and “111”, which researchers said breaches the transparency rules in the EU’s Digital Services Act, the law that requires platforms to disclose who is paying for each ad. That gap matters, because a network hidden behind nonsense names is one regulators cannot easily follow to a bank account.
The reports arrive as regulators close in. The TAKE IT DOWN Act, signed into US law in May 2025, requires platforms to remove non-consensual intimate imagery within 48 hours of a valid request and gives the Federal Trade Commission the power to enforce it, with the main compliance deadline falling this year.
UK, meanwhile, is moving to criminalise the creation of sexually explicit deepfakes, part of a wider reckoning that turned the Taylor Swift deepfake deluge into a wake-up call for lawmakers. The through line in all of it is the same: the ads keep running because automated review keeps waving them through, and the money keeps arriving from somewhere Meta says it cannot fully see.
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