Billionaire Wins Court Battle Against Meta Over His Image in Deepfake Ads

Rafal Brzoska in 2018.

Polish billionaire Rafal Brzoska says he has won his court battle against Meta over the use of his image in AI-generated deepfake ads.

Brzoska, the billionaire founder and CEO of parcel company InPost SA, took legal action against Meta after discovering deepfake ads using images of him and his wife Omena Mensah on Facebook in Poland.

In a complaint to Poland’s Personal Data Protection Office in July, Brzoska identified “as many as 263 ads” featuring images of him or his wife, who is a TV host, to lure people into fraudulent investment platforms.

In August, Poland’s Personal Data Protection Office imposed a three-month ban blocking Meta from publishing deepfake ads using images of Brzoska and Mensah.

However, Brzoska later told Bloomberg that the Polish Personal Data Protection Office’s three-month ban had not stopped new deepfake images of him and his wife surfacing on Meta’s platforms.

The billionaire said he was considering further legal action against Meta, believing that the company should be held responsible for the ads. Brzoska said that he was also waiting on Ireland’s Data Protection Commission, which oversees Facebook’s European headquarters in Dublin, to impose a similar ban.

“It will be the long battle, and I want to find out how big are revenues from ads that use deepfakes for fraudulent purposes,” Broska told Bloomberg at the time.

According to reports by Polish news outlets, Brzoska says that the court has sided with him in his lawsuit against Meta. The billionaire says that Meta would incur fines for every future deepfake image of him and his wife shared on its platforms for one year.

“We applied for security, so that each subsequent deepfake with our image would result in an immediate financial penalty on the owner of Facebook,” Brzoska writes in a post on X (the platform formerly known as Twitter) on Thursday.

“The court fully agreed with us and granted us security for the maximum possible time, i.e. one year.”

Brzoska also asked his social media followers to send any screenshots and links to deepfake ads of him and his wife that they might see online.

Brzoska said that he was confident the ruling from the Polish court, although limited to Poland, could set a wider precedent for protecting individuals’ rights in the digital age. He also called on other public figures to share their experiences with deepfake ads and join his campaign against Meta profiting from such content.

Meta is facing increasing pressure around the world to stop the proliferation of deepfake ads and scams. A U.S. judge this year ruled that Australian billionaire Andrew Forrest could sue Meta over deepfake Facebook ads that show him promoting fake cryptocurrency and other fraudulent investments.

 
Image credits: Header photo via Wikimedia Commons/ CC BY-SA 4.0.