Jan 09, 2025 14:00:00

Instagram and Facebook are showing a lot of nuisance and fraudulent ads, including explicit pornography, while Meta is deleting even posts that are not related to pornography as 'policy violations'

Meta's

advertising policy states that 'ads must not contain content related to adult nudity or sexual activity. This includes nudity, depictions of people in explicit or sexually provocative positions, or sexually provocative conduct.' However, it has been pointed out that many ads that violate this policy are posted on Instagram, Facebook, and Threads. Meanwhile, foreign media 404Media reports that articles and images that do not violate the policy are being deleted on Facebook and other platforms.

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Algorithm auditing company AI Forensics

reported on Meta's pornographic advertising practices on social media on January 8, 2025. The published report stated that more than 3,000 pornographic ads containing explicit adult content were approved and published through Meta Advertisement in 2024.

According to AI Forensics, the pornographic ads used audio, images and video to promote questionable sexual enhancement products, as well as AI-generated media, including deepfakes of celebrities, and generated more than 8 million impressions per year in the EU alone.

In addition, AI Forensics posted the exact same content as the pornographic ad on Instagram and Facebook. Meta then deleted the post for violating community standards. AI Forensics pointed out that 'this suggests that Meta has technology to automatically detect pornographic content, but does not apply it to ads. This is not a temporary bug, but has been ongoing since at least December 2023.'

There have also been cases where posts that did not contain sexual content have been deemed sexual and deleted. Foreign media outlet 404Media reported that 'as a result of one article being deemed sexual, unrelated articles have also been restricted as having sexual content.'

On October 31, 2024, 404Media posted an article about 'in transitu,' a project by artist Ada Ada Ada , in which she takes nude photos of herself every week while taking female hormones and uploads them to Instagram, gradually becoming more feminine, to examine at what point Instagram will delete the images for 'violating community guidelines.'

404Media immediately shared the article on Facebook, but Facebook notified 404Media's official account, 'We have removed your photo because it violates our community standards regarding nudity and sexual activity. In addition, when 404Media co-founder Jason Kebler shared the article on his personal Threads account, the post was removed for the same reason.

After the posts were removed, Facebook began removing 404Media posts that didn't even involve nudity or sexual activity. In fact, when 404Media shared articles like '

Man Charged by FBI for Cyberstalking ' and ' AI Generates Fake Images of Natural Disasters ,' Facebook restricted users from viewing those articles and the page in general.

Additionally, some content has been removed for 'containing nudity or sexual acts.'

According to 404Media, none of these articles or the images contained in them violated Facebook's policies. Therefore, 404Media filed a complaint with Facebook. However, most of the complaints were not accepted, with some exceptions.

404Media said, 'It is extremely upsetting to see our journalism being removed as pornographic or harmful while Meta's social networking sites are accepting money from advertisers, including adult content, to create non-consensual content and to deceive users.'