Meta Put a Politician’s Body in the Ad Slot

Meta ran advertisements for Kromix, an app marketed as an unrestricted AI image tool, including a video that used a pornographic deepfake closely resembling a prominent female US politician. Meta’s ad library showed 32 ads from the campaign, aimed exclusively at men and active for periods ranging from five to 46 hours. Meta removed them after WIRED asked questions; Apple, which had hosted Kromix in its App Store, also removed the app after the publication contacted the company.

The app maker’s conduct is direct. Kromix advertised the conversion of recognizable women into sexual material and invited paying users to upload photographs for scenarios that included sexual violence. Its promotional language presented the absence of boundaries as a masculine benefit. The social code was not subtle: women’s faces were raw material, and male access to their simulated bodies was the upgrade.

The approval is part of the product

Meta did not make the deepfake described by WIRED, and Apple did not design Kromix. Each company nevertheless supplied a necessary room in which the transaction could appear respectable. Meta placed the pitch inside an advertising system with targeting and distribution; Apple placed the software inside a store whose review process signals that an app has cleared institutional rules. The app sold permission. The platforms sold legitimacy.

Most of the Meta ads received 10 or fewer impressions, which limits the known audience but not the importance of the approval decision. A small campaign is still a test of the gate. If review catches sexual exploitation only after a journalist presents the evidence, compliance becomes an aftercare service rather than a condition of entry.

Female politicians are especially useful inventory for this business because their faces are already abundant, professionally photographed and publicly recognizable. Visibility, which political work requires, becomes the vulnerability the tool monetizes. The woman does not have to pose, consent or participate. She merely has to be visible enough for someone else’s product demonstration.

This is also why the distinction between content moderation and advertising review matters. An abusive post may be uploaded by a user faster than a platform can inspect it. An advertisement enters a paid system built to classify the buyer, choose the audience and deliver the message. A company capable of targeting only men can reasonably be asked why the same machinery did not recognize a campaign selling synthetic sexual humiliation.

Removal closes the listing; it does not answer how the listing opened. The next useful facts are procedural: what Meta’s reviewers saw, whether automated checks examined the video rather than its mild tagline, what Apple tested before approval, and whether either company will search for related campaigns without waiting for the next exposed woman—or reporter—to do the inspection.