Meta is fighting the scourge of celebrity investment scam ads with facial recognition technology to detect those who most often have their images used.

The parent company of Facebook and Instagram announced on Monday it would begin trialling the use of facial recognition technology with a select pool of 50,000 celebrities or public figures worldwide on an opt-out basis in December.

If Meta’s existing systems suspect an ad may be a scam, it would compare the images in the ad against the public figure’s Facebook and Instagram profile pictures and, if it’s a match and the ad is a scam, it will be deleted.

“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,” David Agranovich, director of global threat disruption at Meta, told reporters on Monday.

The celebrities must have a Facebook or Instagram profile in order to participate in the system.

Meta will also use the same facial recognition technology to allow users to upload a video selfie to reclaim their account when it has been hijacked by scammers.

In 2021, Meta stepped back from facial recognition use, particularly around the suggested tagging of users in photos, citing privacy concerns. Agranovich stressed that the facial data generated will be immediately deleted once the match test is completed for both the scam ads and account hijacking, regardless of whether there is a match, and it’s not used for any other purpose.

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The company said early testing with a small group shows “promising results” in the speed and efficiency in detecting scam ads. Celebrities in the initial rollout will see a notification in their app notifying that they have been enrolled, and they will be able to opt out anytime, Meta said.

Meta 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 Martin Lewis, 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 its alleged failure to tackle scams using his image, and is also facing a lawsuit from the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission.

Agranovich said the facial-recognition tool was one of several used by the company to detect scams, but admitted some were likely to slip through the cracks.

“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.”