Meta’s Instagram showed paid ads promoting escort services and sex work, CBS News investigation finds
Meta has removed paid advertisements for channels on the Telegram messaging app that promoted escort and sex work services in the U.S. and other countries from its Instagram platform.
CBS News found multiple paid advertisements on Meta’s Instagram stories feature that promoted opportunities to meet women alongside URL links that led to the Telegram platform. Several such ads were promoted by an Instagram account with over 100,000 followers called Royal Garden Club that marketed itself as a “premium dating agency for wealthy men” alongside a link to both a website and a Telegram channel.
Meta spokesperson Erin Logan told CBS News the company had removed the accounts associated with the advertisements and disabled the ad accounts for violating Meta’s content moderation policies.
Meta also confirmed to CBS News that it had banned the administrators of the ad accounts from advertising on the company’s social media platforms.
Logan pointed to the company’s human exploitation policy, which includes removing “content where a third-party actor recruits for, facilitates or benefits from commercial sexual activity,” as well as the company’s adult sexual solicitation policy which, amongst other things, removes “content that offers, asks or provides methods of contact for prostitution.”
Royal Garden Club’s Telegram channel explicitly offered potential clients access to “over 7,000 girls worldwide for fun dates, relationships and hot sex.” That included advertising a “VIP lifetime” offer of $8,000 of “top models, bloggers, actresses, athletes, magazine cover girls, adult stars.”
Royal Garden Club claimed on its Telegram that it is a “full-service escort agency operating legally,” pointing to the fact that the business, R GARDEN LLP, is registered in the United Kingdom. A CBS News review of public business records in the U.K. found the company R GARDEN LLP registered to a London address.
Reached on Telegram, an anonymous moderator for the Royal Garden Club channel declined to comment when asked how it was able to promote ads on Instagram, and what type of service the company offers.
Another paid Instagram ad was promoted by an account called men.s_dreams, which appeared to be a shell account with very little content and very few followers. That advertisement promoted “meeting beautiful girls” and included a link to a Telegram channel. The Telegram channel in question, called “Meeting with Girls,” had messages written in both Russian and English promoting “girls ready to fly with you anywhere in the world.”
That channel posted profile pictures of hundreds of women and noted their nationalities. CBS News could not independently verify the identity of the women, nor verify if they had consented to their images being shared by the channel. The anonymous moderator of the account repeatedly posted messages on the public channel asking prospective clients to send private messages if they wanted to “know something about girls, sex or anything.”
CBS News has also sought comment from this account about how it was able to pay for ads on Instagram.
While Meta has strict content moderation policies, Telegram is known for its hands-off approach. The platform’s content moderation policies outlined on its website do not include anything beyond banning “illegal pornographic content on publicly viewable Telegram channels,” or engaging in “activities that are recognized as illegal in the majority of countries.” CBS News has sought comment from Telegram as to whether the channels in question violate the platform’s policies or will cause Telegram to review its policies.
In recent months, Meta has struggled to combat a rise in sexualized paid advertisements appearing for some users, despite such ads violating its terms of use. A CBS News investigation last month uncovered hundreds of ads on its platforms promoting “nudify” apps — AI tools used to create sexually explicit deepfake images of real people.
Many of these ads targeted male users between the ages of 18 and 65, in the United States and the European Union.
Later in June, Meta sued one of the most prominent nudify app makers, filing a lawsuit in Hong Kong against Joy Timeline HK Limited, the entity behind the app “CrushAI,” to prevent it from advertising the app on Meta platforms.
