Meta deepfake porn lawsuit

by Tim Official: Meta

Fr tho the app was literally sitting in the App Store while Meta ran a deepfake porn campaign targeted exclusively at men. Kromix marketed itself as an image styler, but paid users could upload a photo of anyone and place them into scenarios. Wired reported one listed option was rape. The ads opened on beaches, mountains, and waterfalls to pass review. Then a voiceover claimed the tool has no restrictions and that characters are real people, calling it "the AI that men actually use." One ad showed a woman resembling a prominent US politician standing before an American flag under a caption asking what would happen if she moved. The video cuts to a pornographic scene using the same face. Apple pulled the app within hours of being asked about it. Apple stated prohibited features were added after the app passed review. Meta's account states the advertiser ran 32 ads over a window of 5 to 46 hours. Meta states most of those 32 ads drew fewer than ten impressions. But Meta admits to removing 344,000 ads for products that undress real women. Every one of the 344,000 ads cleared review before human intervention. In June 2025, Meta filed a lawsuit in Hong Kong against Joy Timeline HK. Joy Timeline HK is the developer behind an app called Crush AI. According to Meta's complaint, that developer ran more than 87,000 violating ads. The ads were run through a network of at least 170 business accounts across 135 Facebook pages. Researchers found roughly 90% of Crush AI's web traffic arrived from Facebook and Instagram. It's being called the largest consumer protection lawsuit in American history, bigger than cases brought against big tobacco more than two decades ago. If the lawsuit goes through, it will have a huge impact on the company. Unlike other thousands of lawsuits, this one alleges Meta and other tech companies knowingly profited from harm. The outcome might make social media boring because users might not be trapped in loops quite so often. US states say we need to regulate or change the design of platforms, not just the content. More controls would definitely make things better. Opening statements began Tuesday in Oakland federal court, in front of Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers. A deputy attorney general for California told the jury Meta's business model comes down to four words: hook, hold, harvest and hide. Meta says the states could theoretically pursue as much as $1.4 TRILLION. The states have pointed the judge toward a figure nearer $200 billion. In March a New Mexico jury already returned the first verdict of this kind and hit the company with $375 million. Meta has a real defense here though. It sued a developer, it has handed thousands of violating links to other platforms, and no automated system on Earth catches every bad actor operating at that volume. The trouble is that the courtroom and the ad auction are running the same argument at the same time. One of them is where Meta describes how well it enforces its rules. The other is where the rules get enforced by Wired. The next campaign is already sitting in the auction. It will run until somebody outside the company finds it and makes a phone call, and then Meta will remove it and add it to the total it reports later.