Behind the Blog: Advertising and Aircraft

This is Behind the Blog, where we share our behind-the-scenes thoughts about how a few of our top stories of the week came together. This week, we discuss advertising, protests, and aircraft.

EMANUEL: On Thursday Meta announced that it has filed a lawsuit in Hong Kong against Joy Timeline HK Limited, the company that operates a popular nudify app called Crush that we have covered previously. 

Meta’s position is that it hasn’t been able to prevent Crush from advertising its nudify app on its platform despite it violating its policies because Crush is “highly adversarial” and “constantly evolving their tactics to avoid enforcement.” We’ve seen Crush and other nudify apps create hundreds of Meta advertising accounts and different domain names that all link back to the same service in order to avoid detection. If Meta bans an advertising account or URL, Crush simply creates another. In theory, Meta always has ways of detecting if an ad contains nudity, but nudify apps can easily circumvent those measures as well. As I say in my post about the lawsuit, Meta still hasn’t explained why it appears to have different standards for content in ads versus regular posts on its platform, but there’s no doubt that it does take action against nudify ads when it’s easy for it do so, and that these nudify ads are actively trying to avoid Meta’s moderation when it does attempt to get rid of them.