Meta’s ad platform did something it has promised, repeatedly, never to allow again. According to a new investigation from Wired, Meta ran dozens of paid ads over the past nine months containing explicit AI-generated child sexual abuse imagery, some of which stayed live even after the company was directly confronted about them.
If this feels like a story you’ve read before, that’s because you probably have. Just weeks before this latest report, a separate BBC investigation found Instagram running paid ads promoting child sexual abuse material in India, directing users to Telegram channels selling illegal content.
The AI-generated CSAM ads that Meta approved and profited from
Researchers at the Tech Transparency Project uncovered the ads sitting inside Meta’s own public Ad Library, a tool the company built specifically for advertising transparency. The ads ran between November 2025 and early August 2026, reaching people in the US, UK, and more than a dozen European countries, with at least one ad reaching over 2,500 accounts across Europe alone.
TTP director Katie Paul told Wired the images made no attempt to disguise what they were promoting, stressing that these weren’t posts slipping through from outside users, but ads that Meta itself reviewed and approved before collecting ad revenue from them.
This wasn’t user content. It was advertising Meta accepted.
Several ads linked directly to nudifying apps, including one called MaskAI, which Apple removed from its App Store after Wired flagged it. In a particularly troubling detail, researchers initially found roughly two dozen violating ads, but discovered around 30 more in the hours right before publication, several of which had gone live only after Wired had already asked Meta about the problem.
Paul also noted that some ads matched content Meta had previously removed for the exact same violation, raising real questions about whether the company’s systems can actually recognize repeat offenders. Many of the accounts running these ads had few or no followers, and where advertiser details were visible, several traced back to Chinese firms, including one identified as a former Meta ad reseller.
Meta’s official response leaned on familiar language, calling the content horrific, noting most ads had limited reach, and pointing to a new AI detection system alongside a claim of removing 36 million pieces of child exploitation content last year.
This isn’t Meta’s first child safety scandal
Meta’s relationship with child safety failures goes back much further than this week. As far back as 2017, Facebook was already handling more than 50,000 cases of revenge porn and sexual abuse reports every month, prompting the company to recruit thousands of additional content moderators just to keep up.
By 2019, internal messages later revealed in court showed Meta had changed how Messenger shared information with law enforcement, affecting roughly 7.5 million child abuse reports.
In 2021, whistleblower Frances Haugen leaked internal research showing Meta’s own studies found Instagram was harming teenage girls’ mental health. That same year, engineer Arturo Bejar personally emailed Zuckerberg about his own daughter’s experience being sexually harassed on Instagram.
In 2023, a joint investigation by the Wall Street Journal, Stanford, and UMass Amherst found Instagram’s algorithms were actively connecting and promoting a vast network of pedophile accounts. Bejar later testified to the Senate that Meta’s safety features amounted to nothing more than a placebo in name only. Senators called it damning and vowed to act, yet no binding regulation followed, and Meta’s practices continued largely unchanged.
A decade of the same broken promise
The warnings didn’t stay confined to congressional hearings for long. New Mexico’s Attorney General also sued Meta after an undercover investigation found a fake profile of a 13-year-old girl was immediately flooded with sexual solicitations from adults. This case that ended in March 2026 with a jury ordering Meta to pay $375 million for endangering children and misleading the public.
Testimony during that trial reportedly showed Meta’s shift toward AI-driven moderation was flooding the system with low quality reports, making it harder for actual law enforcement investigations to move forward. A $375 million verdict should function as a wake-up call for any company. This entire category of abuse has become a permanent fixture online because platform enforcement has stayed timid for far too long.
Has Meta failed to fix this or chosen not to?
At some point, calling this a recurring failure gives Meta too much credit. Every one of these incidents follows the same script. Each time independent researchers or journalists find problematic content, and Meta removes it only after being publicly confronted. Later on the company points to a large removal statistic as proof it takes the issue seriously. Then the cycle resets.
After nearly a decade of repetition, and with Meta’s own data reportedly showing it can identify duplicate violations without acting on them, the conclusion becomes hard to avoid. It seems that Meta has simply calculated that the cost of getting caught is simply lower than the cost of fixing the underlying system.
Going forward, users don’t need another carefully worded statement from Meta. They need a system that catches harmful content in the first place. Until that exists, every promise to “take this seriously” is just another placeholder, waiting for the next investigation to prove it wrong again.
