The goal is to help Facebook and Instagram crack down on so-called ‘celeb-bait ads,’ but facial-recognition tech will also be available for those looking to recover lost accounts.
Meta is preparing to harness facial recognition once again, but this time, the goal is to combat scammers without breaking privacy laws.
The social network aims to help Facebook and Instagram detect and crack down on so-called « celeb-bait ads », which exploit a celebrity’s image to trick users into visiting a scam website.
Meta’s advertising system already performs a routine check before it publishes an ad. The problem is that numerous legitimate ads rely on celebrity images, making it hard for the company’s machine learning models to spot fraudulent ads, Monika Bickert, Meta’s VP for content policy, said during a press briefing.
To fix this, the company wants to tap facial-recognition technology to compare faces in the celeb-bait ads against the Facebook and Instagram profile pictures of public figures.
« If we confirm a match and that the ad is a scam, we’ll block it », Bickert says. “Early testing with a small group of celebrities and public figures shows promising results in increasing the speed and efficacy with which we can detect and enforce against this type of scam.
