Deepfake nude apps on radar: Meta sues Hong Kong firm over CrushAI ad. What’s next?

Meta Platforms, the company behind Facebook and Instagram, is pressing legal charges on a Hong Kong-based business for allegedly promoting so-called nudify apps.

The move comes as the tech giant attempts to tackle a worrying rise in naked and sexual images created by artificial intelligence, reported Bloomberg.

Nude images without consent

Meta said that it filed a lawsuit in Hong Kong to stop Joy Timeline HK from allegedly advertising CrushAI apps on Meta platforms.

The apps allow people to create AI-generated nude or sexually explicit images of individuals without their permission, Meta said in a post on its website on Thursday and Bloomberg reported.

Battling sextortion, blackmail and abuse

The tech giant’s legal action is part of a broader crackdown on online non-consensual sexual images, which can be used for sextortion, blackmail and abuse. These acts are a serious privacy violation.

Meta plans to share information about ads, accounts and content that have been removed for promoting nudify apps with other tech companies, creating a unified front against the spread of deepfake nudes.

Meta said in a post that it had noticed “concerning growth” in this area. “With nudify apps being advertised across the internet and available in App Stores themselves, removing them from one platform alone isn’t enough,” Meta said.

Why is crackdown happening now?

Meta is facing intense criticism from across the world for not doing enough to protect teenagers and young people on its platform.

Australia became the first country worldwide to ban social media for users under the age of 16, a measure that will be imposed this year.

At the same time, other countries are also tightening content oversight. But while Meta is fighting back against some fake, auto-generated explicit material, it’s pushing deeper into artificial intelligence more broadly, said Bloomberg.

How are deepfake advertisers escaping the hunt?

According to Meta, stopping these apps is a tough challenge. Advertisers promoting nudify apps are changing tactics to avoid being caught.

Some use benign images to evade detection, while others quickly set up new domain names when old ones are blocked. In response, Meta said it has developed technology to identify such ads, even when they don’t include nudity.

In its Hong Kong lawsuit, Meta claims Joy Timeline repeatedly tried to circumvent ad review processes after they were removed for breaking Meta’s rules, reported Bloomberg.