Facebook and Instagram have a problem. Well, they have many, many problems, but one of the ones they feel like addressing is "celeb-bait ads and impersonation." According to a new post from parent company Meta, the way they're going to try solving this is through the use of facial recognition technology. In the lengthy post, Meta explains that the biggest impact of these new tools will be an expanded effort to stop scam accounts from impersonating celebrities. If you've used Facebook in the last year or so, you've probably encountered friend suggestions for attractive celebrities, which are obvious fakes that can be identified by their paparazzi photos and deliberate misspellings of their names.

Facebook and Instagram owner Meta is to introduce facial recognition technology to try and crack down on scammers who fraudulently use celebrities in adverts. Elon Musk and personal finance expert, Martin Lewis, are among those to fall victim to such scams, which typically promote investment schemes and crypto-currencies. Mr Lewis previously told the Today programme, on BBC Radio 4, that he receives "countless" reports of his name and face being used in such scams every day, and had been left feeling "sick" by them. Meta already uses an ad review system which uses artificial intelligence (AI) to detect fake celebrity endorsements but is now seeking to beef it up with facial recognition tech. It will work by comparing images from ads flagged as being dubious with celebrities' Facebook or Instagram profile photos.

Meta is bringing facial recognition tech back to its apps more than three years after it shut down Facebook's "face recognition" system amid a broader backlash against the technology. Now, the social network will begin to deploy facial recognition tools on Facebook and Instagram to fight scams and help users who have lost access to their accounts, the company said in an update. The first test will use facial recognition to detect scam ads that use the faces of celebrities and other public figures. "If our systems suspect that an ad may be a scam that contains the image of a public figure at risk for celeb-bait, we will try to use facial recognition technology to compare faces in the ad against the public figure's Facebook and Instagram profile pictures," Meta explained in a blog post. "If we confirm a match and that the ad is a scam, we'll block it."

Meta, the owner of Facebook and Instagram, has launched its artificial intelligence assistant in the UK, alongside AI-boosted sunglasses modelled by Mark Zuckerberg. Meta's AI assistant, which can generate text and images, is now available on its social media platforms in the UK and Brazil, having already been launched in the US and Australia. Regulatory issues and product testing held up the UK launch, while Meta's AI services remain unavailable in the EU due to the "unpredictable" regulatory environment. Facebook and Instagram users in the UK will now be able to access the Meta AI chatbot by tapping on an icon in their app or by buying a pair of 299 Ray-Ban Meta frames from a UK retailer and accessing its voice assistant. Zuckerberg, Meta's co-founder, sported a pair of the Ray-Bans at a company event last month when he also announced that Meta AI would be able to respond to voice commands and use the voice of celebrities including Judi Dench, John Cena and Keegan-Michael Key.

Australians could see fewer deepfake images of celebrities being hauled off in handcuffs, or promoting a fraudulent cryptocurrency investment on Facebook, after Meta launched a new one-stop shop for banks to share information on scams that has blocked 8,000 pages and 9,000 celebrity scams in its first six months of operation. From January to August 2024, Australians reported 43.4m in losses from scams on social media to Scamwatch, with close to 30m relating to fake investment scams. Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, has faced pressure from politicians and regulators in the past few years to tackle the plague of scams featuring deepfake images of public figures such as David Koch, Gina Rinehart, Anthony Albanese, Larry Emdur, Guy Sebastian and others which are used to promote investment scams. The company is being sued by the mining magnate Andrew Forrest over the company's alleged failure to tackle scams using his image. Meta announced on Wednesday it had partnered with the Australian Financial Crimes Exchange (AFCX) to launch the Fraud Intelligence Reciprocal Exchange (Fire) that provides a dedicated reporting channel for scams between Meta and financial providers of the victims of the scams.

Meta is using the public Facebook and Instagram photos and posts of its users to train artificial intelligence and, while European users have been allowed to opt out of the mass-scraping of their content, Australian users do not have that option, a parliamentary committee has heard. The parent company of Facebook and Instagram paused the launch of its AI product in Europe in July due to the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) privacy rules, and as a result of GDPR law. Meta was ordered to stop training its large language model on data from European users on privacy concerns, and Meta has given European users an opt-out option. Labor's chair of the inquiry examining AI adoption in Australia, senator Tony Sheldon, questioned Meta executives on Tuesday why that option had not been extended to Australian users. "I'll be very frank with you. I'd like to opt out in Australia … and I'd like to have the options similar to Europe, for all Australians, including for myself personally. Why can't I have that option?"

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Kurt "Cyberguy" Knutsson talks about how to protect your social media posts; a toddler getting trapped in a Tesla after the battery died. Meta may have paused its plans to train artificial intelligence models for the lucky ones living in Europe, where laws protect people using Facebook and Instagram better than Americans. Here in the good ole USA, both Facebook and Instagram have already been combing through public posts from U.S. accounts to train and improve its AI capabilities, including its chatbot, since last year. The proposed privacy policy update for European Union and U.K. users, originally scheduled for June 26, would have allowed Meta to use publicly shared content for AI training. However, users and regulatory agencies opposed this plan, leading to its indefinite postponement in those regions.

Meta, owner of Facebook and Instagram, announced major changes to its policies on digitally created and altered media on Friday, before elections poised to test its ability to police deceptive content generated by artificial intelligence technologies. The social media giant will start applying "Made with AI" labels in May to AI-generated videos, images and audio posted on Facebook and Instagram, expanding a policy that previously addressed only a narrow slice of doctored videos, the vice-president of content policy, Monika Bickert, said in a blogpost. Bickert said Meta would also apply separate and more prominent labels to digitally altered media that poses a "particularly high risk of materially deceiving the public on a matter of importance", regardless of whether the content was created using AI or other tools. Meta will begin applying the more prominent "high-risk" labels immediately, a spokesperson said. The approach will shift the company's treatment of manipulated content, moving from a focus on removing a limited set of posts toward keeping the content up while providing viewers with information about how it was made.

Meta is introducing a tool to identify AI-generated images shared on its platforms amid a global rise in synthetic content spreading misinformation. Due to several of systems on the web, the Mark Zuckerberg-owned company is aiming to expand labels to others like Google, OpenAI, Microsoft, and Adobe. Meta said it will fully roll out the labeling feature in the coming months and plans to add a feature that lets users flag AI-generated content. However, the US presidential race is in full swing, leaving some to wonder if the labels will be out in time to stop fake content from spreading. The move comes after Meta's Oversight Board urged the company to take steps to label manipulated audio and video that could mislead users. 'The Board's recommendations go further in that it advised the company to expand the Manipulated Media policy to include audio, clearly state the harms it seeks to reduce, and begin labeling these types of posts more broadly than what was announced,' an Oversight Board spokesperson Dan Chaison told Dailymail.com.