Facebook parent company Meta Platforms Inc. will start using facial recognition technology to crack down on scams that use pictures of celebrities to look more legitimate, a strategy referred to as “celeb-bait ads.”

Scammers use images of famous people to entice users into clicking on ads that lead them to shady websites, which are designed to steal their personal information or request money. Meta will start using facial recognition technology to weed out these ads by comparing the images in the post with the images from a celebrity’s Facebook or Instagram account.

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“If we confirm a match and that the ad is a scam, we’ll block it,” Meta wrote in a blog post. Meta did not disclose how common this type of scam is across its services.

With nearly 3.3 billion daily active users across all of its apps, Meta relies on artificial intelligence to enforce many of its content rules and guidelines. That has enabled Meta to better handle the deluge of daily reports about spam and other content that breaks the rules. It has also led to problems in the past when legitimate accounts have been unintentionally suspended or blocked due to automated errors.

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Meta says it will also start using facial recognition technology to better assist users who get locked out of their accounts. As part of a new test, some users can submit a video selfie when they’ve been locked out of their accounts. Meta will then compare the video to the photos on the account to see if there is a match. 

Meta has previously asked locked-out users to submit other forms of identity verification, like an ID card or official certificate, but says that the video selfie option would only take a minute to complete. Meta will “immediately delete any facial data generated after this comparison regardless of whether there’s a match or not,” the company wrote in a blog.

The social networking giant has a complicated history with facial recognition technology. It previously used facial recognition to identify users in uploaded photos as a way to encourage people to tag their friends and increase connections. Meta was later sued by multiple U.S. states for profiting off this technology without user consent, and in 2024 was ordered to pay the state of Texas $1.4 billion as part of the claim. Several years earlier, it agreed to pay $650 million in a separate legal suit filed in Illinois.

The company will not run this video selfie test in Illinois or Texas, according to Monika Bickert, Meta’s vice president of content policy. 

Meta Platforms Inc. Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg alleged that Facebook was “pressured” by the U.S. government to censor content related to COVID-19 during the global pandemic and that he regrets the company’s decision to accede to the demands.

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“In 2021, senior officials from the Biden Administration, including the White House, repeatedly pressured our teams for months to censor certain COVID-19 content, including humor and satire,” Zuckerberg wrote in a letter to the Committee on the Judiciary of the U.S. House of Representatives. And while it was Meta’s decision whether to remove content, he continues, “the government pressure was wrong, and I regret that we were not more outspoken about it.”

During the pandemic, Facebook officials drew ire from critics of lockdowns, vaccines and masking mandates because it removed certain posts, saying they contained misinformation related to the virus or otherwise went against its policies. In all, Facebook took down more than 20 million pieces of content in just over a year. Zuckerberg joins other social media executives, including Jack Dorsey, former CEO of blogging platform Twitter, in lamenting past instances of content moderation that, in their view, went too far.

There’s a growing global debate over how far social media companies should go in policing the comments, images and other content posted by their users. Some platforms believe they should be hands off when it comes to telling users what they can and can’t say online, while some governments say that an overly laissez-faire stance can beget criminal behavior. French officials arrested Telegram co-founder Pavel Durov during the weekend, alleging that the company failed to adequately combat crime on the messaging app, including the spread of child sexual abuse material.

On the eve of the U.S. presidential election, pitting Vice President Kamala Harris against former President Donald Trump, Zuckerberg is also taking pains to appear non-partisan. “My goal is to be neutral and not play a role one way or another—or to even appear to be playing a role,” Zuckerberg wrote in the letter, the contents of which were posted to the Facebook page of the House Judiciary Committee and confirmed by Meta. He was writing in reference to contributions made in the last presidential cycle to support electoral infrastructure.

Instagram parent Meta Platforms Inc. will let users create their own AI-powered chatbots and add them to their profiles, an effort to court creators and further integrate the company’s artificial intelligence software into its most popular consumer products.

The feature, called AI Studio, lets creators with professional accounts make a custom AI chatbot that is “an extension of themselves” and can answer common questions from fans or followers. People can tell their bot what types of questions to answer, or which topics to avoid, Meta wrote in a blog post.

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The broader universe of Instagram users will be able to make a themed chatbot for their profile, for example a bot focused on mixed martial arts, dining or pets. 

Both features will roll out more broadly in the coming weeks.

Meta first announced AI Studio last September. On Monday, the company started shipping the features for some users, timing that will coincide with Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg’s appearance alongside Nvidia Corp. CEO Jensen Huang at the ACM SIGGRAPH conference in Denver this week.

Meta has been spending aggressively on AI in recent years, and Zuckerberg has been open about his expectation that the company will develop some of the best chatbots in the world. It already offers its own AI chatbot, called Meta AI, inside Instagram, WhatsApp and Facebook.

Meta released its most recent large language model, the technology used to power chatbots, earlier this month. That new model can solve complex math problems and analyze entire books almost instantly, and also allows users to generate new images of themselves in various scenarios using only a text prompt.