Meta Platforms, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, will fight celebrity scam ads with facial recognition technology.

“Celeb-bait ads” use images of famous people to lure users into clicking on links that lead to websites designed to steal personal information or hoodwink them into sending money. Meta said “celebrities are featured in many legitimate ads” but “because celeb-bait ads are designed to look real, they’re not always easy
to detect”.

Meta has started trials of using facial recognition technology with a small group of celebrities and public figures with “promising results in increasing the speed and efficacy with which we can detect and enforce against this type of scam”.

In the coming weeks, the company will show in-app notifications to a larger group of public figures whose images have been used in celeb-bait ads, letting them know “we’re enrolling them in this protection”. Public figures enrolled in the programme can opt out from their Accounts Centre anytime.

“If we confirm a match and determine the ad is a scam, we’ll block it,” Meta said without disclosing how common this type of scam is across its services.

With nearly 3.3 billion daily active users across all of its apps, Meta relies on AI to implement several content rules and guidelines, helping the company deal with a large number of daily reports about spam and other content that break the rules.

The social media company has been in the crosshairs for failing to stop scammers misappropriating famous people’s faces in ads around dubious crypto investments.

Meta is also testing the use of facial recognition to spot celebrity impostor accounts by using AI to compare profile pictures on a suspicious account against a public figure’s Facebook and Instagram profile pictures.

It remains to be seen how the company goes about tackling celeb-bait ads involving personalities who don’t have a social media presence, like George Clooney and Jennifer Lawrence.

The Mark Zuckerberg-led company has also said that it would start using facial recognition technology to better assist users who get locked out of their accounts. As part of a new test, some users can submit a video selfie when they’ve been locked out of their accounts. Earlier, the company asked such users to submit other forms of identity verification, like an ID card.

Meta has had a complicated history with the technology. Earlier this year, Texas announced a settlement with the company over the use of facial recognition on Facebook, resolving a lawsuit filed in 2022 claiming that the Tag Suggestions feature on photos uploaded to Facebook violated the state’s Capture or Use of Biometric Identifier (CUBI) Act and Deceptive Trade Practices Act. Meta agreed to pay $1.4 billion over five years to settle the suit.

Australian Competition and Consumer Commission accused Meta in a 2022 lawsuit of failing to stop the dissemination of cryptocurrency ads that used images of celebrities like Mel Gibson, Russell Crowe and Nicole Kidman.