The Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) has received Meta’s response to its notice on ads and content allegedly promoting or facilitating child sexual exploitation and abuse material (CSEAM) on Instagram and is reviewing the company’s submission, a government official familiar with the matter said on Sunday.
“We have received a meta response and are reviewing it,” the official said.
MeitY on July 4 directed Meta, on the insistence of Union IT Minister Ashwini Vaishnao, to immediately disable all Instagram ads and content allegedly promoting or facilitating CSEAM, after a BBC Eye The investigation reported finding around 30 unique ads allegedly promoting child sexual abuse material on the platform.
The ministry also gave the company seven days to explain how to allow such ads to appear on Instagram. The deadline for Meta to respond was July 11.
Before filing its response to MeitY, Meta in a July 7 blog post rejected suggestions that it had deliberately targeted users with ads related to CSEAM in India.
“It is grossly inaccurate to suggest that we knowingly and intentionally targeted ads depicting children to people based on an inappropriate interest in children,” the company said. “Quite the opposite; we use technology to identify accounts that showed potentially suspicious activity related to children, and we automatically removed more than 4 million of these accounts in the past year.”
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Meta said it automatically removed more than four million suspicious accounts from Facebook and Instagram globally last year, along with 36 million pieces of child exploitation content. It also said that AI-based detection tools led to the removal of 160,000 accounts in India in the last six months.
At the time, a MeitY official said the blog post was not the explanation the ministry requested and that MeitY was still required to provide a detailed response by July 11.
According to a BBC investigation, Instagram ran ads containing phrases such as “rape video” and “children’s video” which directed users to Telegram channels that allegedly sold child sexual abuse material. The BBC said Meta removed several ads, disabled multiple accounts, and blocked offending URLs after the results were reported.
Meta said its enforcement systems had identified and disabled many offending ads and accounts even before the BBC’s issues were brought to its attention. The company said its subsequent investigations led to more ads being removed, accounts being disabled, and URLs linked to content violating the policy being blocked.
The company also acknowledged limitations in its enforcement systems, saying “no system is perfect” and that criminals continue to try to exploit its platforms, including its advertising systems.
