In recent days the Tech Transparency Project has traced a network of 210 Facebook pages which conveyed approx 30,800 advertisements on Facebook and Instagram for face swap applications and other AI tools. The intermediary is called GatherOne and is one of the agencies that Meta authorizes to place ads on behalf of Chinese clients. Of those pages, 43 have spread further 7,600 ads for applications that the organization has verified can digitally undress a woman or insert her face into a pornographic video.
The data is obtained from the advertisement archive that Meta itself maintains on the advertising it hosts. The survey focuses on the European Union because the Digital Services Act forces platforms to declare who benefited from an ad and who paid for it: in those forms all pages indicate GatherOne or its Hong Kong company name, Hongkong Gather Wisdom Network Technology. On 160 of them, ads were still available with women undressing or simulating sexual acts, synthetic images of people kissing and texts promising applications for adults.
Of the 210 pages, 179, 85%released ads that Meta then removed from its archive for violating the rules on sexual exploitation, solicitation and nudity. At least two dozen continued to buy advertising after their ads were flagged and deleted. During the investigation, the company’s systems eliminated many adverts and deactivated several accounts, although part of the network was still active.
How Meta sells advertising in China
Facebook and Instagram are blocked in China, and a Chinese company that wants to reach overseas audiences must go through one of the eleven top-tier retailers selected by Meta. The Tech Transparency Project describes the mechanism as a tacit compromise with Beijing: the group’s applications remain outside the country, the money from Chinese advertisers arrives anyway. GatherOne is one of those retailers and claims to generate more than 30,000 ads per month.
Meta’s Chinese advertising revenue rose from $13.69 billion in 2023 to 18.35 billion in 2024, around a tenth of the group’s annual revenues. An internal estimate reported by Reuters in December 2025 based on company documents weighs on that figure: approximately 19%, more than $3 billion, came from ads for scams, illegal gambling, pornography and other prohibited content. According to the same reconstruction, the accounts of Chinese retailers end up on an exemption list, and the reports produced by the automatic systems do not translate into immediate intervention.
Inside one of the advertised applications
A series of ads linked to GatherOne showed women in lingerie and linked to BAfteran application distributed on Google Play by a developer from the Guangxi region of China. By downloading it with a VPN that simulated a user in the Netherlands, the researchers found in the opening a shared gallery of face swaps produced by other usersall explicitly pornographic, and a feature called One-Click Undress that promised to remove all clothing from the person depicted in an uploaded photo. At least six public reviews on the Play Store reported that someone had generated sexual images of minors, and one openly discussed child pornography.
The reserved functions required a subscription ranging from 6.99 euros per week up to 169.99 euros for lifetime access, and on the Play Store the application was classified as suitable for all ages. BAfter disappeared from the store in late July 2026, after having been available since December 2024 according to data from analytics firm AppMagic, and Meta said it has now banned it. The Facebook page that bought the advertising, registered to a Lynda Jefferson with no followers and no content, shares a profile image and location with hundreds of identical pages.
Countermeasures already attempted
Meta claims that it does not allow non-consensual intimate images or applications to undress people, and that it takes aggressive measures to combat them; those who do not respect the rules, he adds, risk having their adverts canceled, financial sanctions and the closure of their advertising account. GatherOne, after the publication of the report, announced that it had suspended new account opening requests for nudify servicesface swaps and virtual girlfriends, and that we have initiated an overall compliance update to respond to the technical evolution of synthetic content. In January 2026, the same agency was at Meta’s Agent Summit in Hong Kong, where it received four awards for its commercial performance.
The group had already taken a similar provider to court: in June 2025 it sued Joy Timeline HK Limited, the Hong Kong company behind the CrushAI application, which had circulated more than 87,000 ads on at least 135 Facebook pages. By early 2025 it had shared more than 3,800 site addresses for stripping people with other tech companies through the industry program Lantern, jointly announcing new detection tools. In the three months following that announcement, researchers from the American Sunlight Project and Indicator counted another 4,215 adverts of the same type, seen by approximately 359,547 users between the European Union and the United Kingdom.
In the United States the TAKE IT DOWN Acteffective May 2025, requires the removal of non-consensual intimate images within 48 hours of a valid request and turns enforcement over to the Federal Trade Commission, while the UK is working to criminalize the creation of sexually explicit deepfakes. In the meantime, this network is measurable above all thanks to the European transparency obligation, which forced the pages to declare who was paying. “Meta appears to be giving one of its major Chinese advertising partners a free pass on these ads,” said Tech Transparency Project director Katie Paul.
