San Francisco City Attorney Issues Cease-and-Desist Order to Meta Over Unchecked AI-Generated Child Sexual Abuse Advertisements

San Francisco’s city attorney David Chiu has formally served Meta with a cease-and-desist letter demanding the company immediately stop permitting paid advertisements containing AI-generated child sexual abuse material to run across its platforms, and provide full, transparent explanation for how these harmful ads repeatedly evaded its moderation systems.

In a Tuesday WIRED exclusive report, it was confirmed that Meta hosted more than 350 of these offending ads in recent months. The ads take static images of minors — some of whom are verified real public individuals, including a member of a European royal family — and warp them into short video clips depicting the children performing explicit sexual acts. Clicking the ads redirects users to download third-party AI image and video generation apps, many of which are built to digitally undress people without consent or create other nonconsensual intimate explicit imagery.

First uncovered by researchers at the Tech Transparency Project (TTP), many of these ads were uploaded multiple times by bad actors, reaching more than 29,000 accounts across European Union countries. The same harmful ads, run across Facebook, Instagram, and Threads, also targeted users in the U.S., Australia, and India. WIRED first broke news of a batch of 53 of the ads in early August, but more than 250 new offending ads were still published and run on Meta’s platforms after that initial public report.

“Meta has failed to address a known issue of AI-generated child sexually explicit ads, while profiting from them,” Chiu told WIRED in an official statement. “These ads are deeply disturbing and cause harm to real children. Meta claims to have zero tolerance for child exploitation, yet the scale and persistence of these issues suggest current efforts are woefully inadequate. This is unacceptable, and Meta must do better.”

“No company — particularly one that claims all advertisements are reviewed and approved prior to distribution and then accepts payment for that distribution — should permit its advertising systems to be used in this manner,” Chiu wrote in the four-page official letter sent to Meta’s legal team. The document raises a long list of detailed questions about how Meta’s ad policies and child safety infrastructure operate, and requests that Meta’s legal, child-safety, and advertising teams open prompt collaborative discussions with the San Francisco City Attorney’s office.

“These findings are especially troubling because they do not appear to reflect an isolated failure that Meta corrected when first alerted to the problem,” Chiu added.

Meta has pushed back on the city’s authority to take action, claiming there is “no indication” the ads were ever displayed to users located within San Francisco city limits, and that the issue falls outside the city attorney’s jurisdiction. Meta’s public ad library, a central repository for its published ad inventory, includes limited data on ads served to U.S. users, but does not provide granular breakdowns of which specific regions within the U.S. any given ad was run to.

In response to Meta’s jurisdictional argument, City Attorney’s Office spokesperson Alex Barrett-Shorter told WIRED that because “San Francisco consumers can access the unlawful ads through Meta online spaces,” the matter is fully within the city’s regulatory purview.

“We find Meta’s response astonishing. Meta appears less concerned about whether they’re guilty of exploiting children than whether San Francisco should say anything about it,” Barrett-Shorter said. “Meta has bigger problems to solve here than determining our jurisdiction.”

Meta previously told WIRED that most of the ads flagged by TTP researchers had already been removed before the organization formally reported them, and all of the identified ads have since been taken down for violating platform policies, with the vast majority earning fewer than 200 total impressions.

“We don’t tolerate nudify apps or any kind of child exploitation, whether real or AI-generated,” a Meta spokesperson said in prior comments, noting that the total combined ad spend for all 300+ offending ads found by the researchers was less than $5,000.

The cease-and-desist letter, which confirms the City Attorney’s Office has reviewed a large sample of the ads uncovered by TTP, lays out four explicit demands for Meta:

1. Immediately block all similar harmful ads from running on its platforms permanently

2. Provide a full explanation of how these abusive ads repeatedly evaded its content moderation systems

3. Detail its official protocols for escalating and reporting detected abusive ads to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC)

4. Disclose how it takes action against the advertisers behind this harmful content, including its policies for penalizing repeat bad actors.

The letter adds that the pattern of repeated failures points to far broader systemic gaps in Meta’s ability to detect child sexual abuse content in its ad inventory, raising significant unaddressed legal liabilities for the company.

“My Office’s objective is not simply to identify past failures but to ensure that Meta puts systems in place that prevent children from being sexually exploited through advertisements Meta is paid to distribute, and that Meta reliably satisfies the legal obligations that arise when it becomes aware of apparent child sexual exploitation,” Chiu wrote in the letter.

TTP’s research documents that in multiple instances, Meta failed to respond to formal reports of abusive ads for more than a full week, during which time hundreds of additional users were exposed to the harmful content. TTP tracking and a separate WIRED audit of Meta’s public ad library also found that when many of the ads were finally removed, they were never marked as containing child sexual abuse material.

“The scale, persistence, and nature of the problems documented here suggest that Meta’s isolated takedown efforts are woefully inadequate,” Chiu’s letter notes, requiring Meta to submit a full formal response to the City Attorney’s Office within 28 days.

| Have a tip to share? |

|---|

| If you have information about Meta you wish to disclose securely, you can contact reporter Matt Burgess on Signal at mattburgess.20, using a non-work connected device for maximum privacy. |

Meta’s public community guidelines and advertising policies explicitly ban all forms of child sexual exploitation, abuse, and nudity, alongside adult non-consensual exploitation and explicit content, and prohibit the promotion of all nudify-style apps. The platform states it reviews every submitted ad against its policies via automated tools, with additional human manual reviews for high-risk content, and has previously removed hundreds of thousands of nudify app ads, even suing a Hong Kong-based operator linked to a network of nudification platforms and partnering with other major tech firms to crack down on the harmful tools.

But despite these stated actions, researchers continue to identify thousands of active ads on Meta’s platforms that redirect users to these harmful apps and feature explicit sexual activity and nudity. During WIRED’s reporting on TTP’s findings, its reporters independently identified hundreds of active “nudification” ads still running across Meta’s services.

Katie Paul, director of TTP, confirmed that as of Wednesday, new ads containing child sexual abuse content were still appearing on Meta’s platforms.

“Meta has claimed it takes a hard stance against child sexual abuse material, but since TTP’s September 8 report published, more brand-new ads have run featuring some of the same children TTP sent to Meta,” Paul said. The organization has already reported these new ads to both Meta and NCMEC, and noted only a portion of the new ads had been taken down as of press time. Meta did not immediately respond to WIRED’s request for comment on the ongoing wave of new offending ads.

“The findings are clear,” Paul added. “Meta is not effectively addressing this issue.”

Updated 9/9/2026 at 6 pm ET: Additional comment from the San Francisco City Attorney's Office has been added to this report.