Meta will use facial recognition to combat fraudulent ads that use the image of celebrities

Meta will use facial recognition technology to identify scams that use the image of public figures in malicious ads and remove them from Facebook and Instagram, a technology it will also use to strengthen the search for accounts that impersonate celebrities.

Scams that use celebrities to attract their victims are not new and operate in a context in which public figures themselves star in legitimate advertisements, making it difficult for review systems to discern between the real ones and the misleading ones.

To combat this type of scam, Meta has announced that it will use facial recognition technology to identify misleading ads, which usually take users to malicious websites from where data or money is stolen.

This technology will complement the automated systems that currently review “the millions of ads that are published on Meta platforms every day.” Specifically, if the ad is suspected to be fraudulent, a comparison of the faces in the ads will be made with the Facebook and Instagram profile photos of the public figure, and if it is detected to be a scam, it will be automatically blocked.

This is an optional feature for celebrities, and the information generated from this comparison is deleted “immediately,” the company says in its official blog post.

This technology will also be used to detect accounts that impersonate celebrities, with which cybercriminals seek to “trick people into interacting with fraudulent content or sending money.”