U.S. Sen. Mark Warner, D-Va., wants to know how Meta, the parent company of Facebook, Instagram, Messenger and Threads, allowed more than 50 image and video ads containing child sexual abuse material and non-consensual intimate images to make their way into the company’s ad libraries.
“It strains credulity that Meta was (or is) unknowingly hosting — and profiting from — such blatantly illegal content, when your company explicitly states that it reviews and approves all ads,” Warner wrote in a letter to Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg that the senator’s office made public on Tuesday.
The ads containing abusive content “were paid ads that Meta’s own systems reviewed and approved per Meta’s advertising procedures,” Warner noted in the letter.
“Researchers also found that new ads continued to appear even after Meta was directly notified of the problem, and that that notification followed a July 2026 BBC investigation that found similar CSAM-linked ads running on Instagram in India,” Warner wrote.
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The letter cited a report from Wired detailing findings by an entity called the Tech Transparency Project, which discovered the tranche of abusive content – including one video ad that used a thumbnail image of a child sitting on the floor with text appearing on top of it saying: “Realizing Deep Fantasies with Generation AI. There is so much more than what is shown, use your imagination,” which, when clicked, played video clips of adults engaged in sex acts with the child’s face superimposed.
A second ad showed an image of a young girl on her back with her legs spread in a sexual position with text above it saying: “I can show you more.”
A third featured a thumbnail of a girl putting on lip gloss, and when it started playing, morphed into the child performing a sex act.
These ads were running as recently as last week, and only stopped after Wired reached out to Meta as part of its reporting.
“It is unacceptable that any of this material appears on Meta’s platforms and appalling that your company is seemingly profiting from it,” Warner wrote in his letter to Zuckerberg. “I request specific and detailed answers as to how Meta repeatedly allowed these ads to appear and the corrective action that Meta is taking in response.”
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Chris Graham
