Social media giant Meta is set to use facial recognition technology to fight against celebrity investment scams that use deepfake images to fool Facebook and Instagram users.
The Silicon Valley firm revealed that it will begin trialling the use of facial recognition technology with a curated group of 50,000 celebrities and public figures around the world from December, on an opt-out basis.
If an ad is suspected of being misleading, or an outright deepfake scam, Meta’s systems will compare the images seen in the ad with the celebrity’s Facebook and Instagram profile pictures to rapidly detect and delete it.
The celebrities will naturally need an official Facebook or Instagram profile in order to participate in the trial, which marks a departure from Meta’s decision in 2021 to step away from the technology after automatic photo tagging led to users expressing privacy concerns.
Meta director of global threat disruption David Agranovich stressed however that the facial data generated will be promptly deleted after the match test has taken place, nor will it be used for any other purpose. The tech will also help celebrities reclaim hijacked profiles.
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“This process is done in real time and is faster and much more accurate than manual human reviews, so it allows us to apply our enforcement policies more quickly and to protect people on our apps from scams and celebrities,” Agranovich said.
“It’s a numbers game, and so while we have automated detection systems that are running against ad creative that’s being created and that do remove a very large volume of violating ads before they can be posted or shortly after they’re posted, scam networks are highly motivated to just keep throwing things at the wall in hopes that things get through, and invariably some of them do,” he said.
“Even if it is successful, scammers will probably migrate to other tactics. And so we know we’ll have to keep iterating and building new tooling to get ahead of whatever it is they do next.”
The Mark Zuckerberg-run social network said that results so far have been promising, citing the system’s speed and efficiency. Celebrities selected for the first phase will be notified in-app, with an option to opt-out at any time.
