Meta says it is strengthening child safety measures after government notice

Meta has outlined its efforts to combat child sexual abuse material across its platforms after receiving a government notice over alleged Instagram advertisements. The company highlighted AI-based detection, large-scale enforcement, advertisement review systems and continued cooperation with law enforcement agencies

New Delhi: Meta on Tuesday published a detailed blog outlining its efforts to combat child sexual abuse material (CSAM) across its platforms, citing AI-powered detection, advertisement review systems and large-scale enforcement actions. The statement comes days after the Centre issued a notice to the social media company over reports of Instagram advertisements allegedly promoting such content.

Terming child exploitation a horrific crime, Meta said it works aggressively every day to combat such abuse on and off its platforms.

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“We’re aware of recent news reports about Instagram ads in India that violated our policies against child exploitation. We want to be clear: we take these concerns seriously, we never want this content on our platforms, and we’re committed to improving our efforts to combat it,” the company said.

Meta rejected suggestions that it knowingly and deliberately targeted advertisements featuring children at users based on inappropriate interests.

“Quite the opposite. We use technology to identify accounts that have shown potentially suspicious activity related to children, and we automatically removed over four million of these accounts last year,” it said.

Meta said it has strengthened AI-powered enforcement against child exploitation, with newer systems covering languages spoken by 98 per cent of people online.

Last year, it automatically removed more than four million suspicious accounts and 36 million pieces of child exploitation content globally. In India, AI tools helped remove 1.60 lakh accounts in the past six months for posting suspicious links allegedly linked to exploitative activity.

The company said that even before the cases were brought to its attention, its enforcement systems had already identified and disabled several of the violating advertisements and the accounts behind them.

“Our subsequent investigation led to additional action, including removing further ads, disabling accounts, and blocking URLs linked to policy-violating content,” it said.

Government sources told PTI that Meta’s official response to the notice issued on Saturday is still awaited.

The government’s focus will be on the corrective measures and action taken by the company to address all the concerns, the sources added.

Last week, the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) issued a notice to Meta over Child Sexual Exploitative and Abuse Material (CSEAM) in paid advertisements on Instagram.

The Ministry directed Instagram to disable all advertisements and content promoting or facilitating access to CSEAM and sought a detailed explanation from the company within seven days.

The action followed Union Minister Ashwini Vaishnaw’s direction to MeitY officials to summon Meta over Instagram advertisements allegedly promoting child sexual abuse material.

The regulatory scrutiny came after a BBC report alleged that Meta’s recommendation algorithm had promoted videos containing child sexual abuse material, exposing serious gaps in its safeguards.

The BBC investigation also alleged that advertisements of this nature appeared on Facebook and Instagram despite Meta’s advertising policies explicitly prohibiting nudity and sexually explicit content.

According to the report, Instagram displayed paid advertisements using terms such as “rape video” and “child video”, directing users to Telegram channels where such content was allegedly being sold.

In its blog post, Meta said its advertisement review process combines automated systems with human reviewers to detect and remove policy-violating advertisements while acknowledging that no system can detect every violation.

According to the company, advertisements are screened before publication and remain subject to continuous review and re-review, while users can also report suspected violations.

Meta said it monitors advertiser behaviour in addition to individual advertisements and may reject advertisements or restrict advertiser business accounts, advertisement accounts, pages and user accounts found violating its policies.

The company said it continues to strengthen its advertisement review systems and enforcement to keep bad actors off its platforms and better protect users.

“We’re committed to keeping bad actors off our platforms and are constantly evolving our systems to stay ahead of them. Protecting people who use our platforms remains at the centre of how we build and enforce our advertising standards,” it said.

Highlighting its zero-tolerance approach, Meta said it has robust policies against child nudity, abuse and exploitation, including the sharing or solicitation of child exploitation imagery, inappropriate interactions with teenagers, and the sexualisation of minors.

“As noted in our Ad Standards, all ads must comply with our Community Standards on Child Sexual Exploitation, Abuse, and Nudity. Ads must not contain content that sexually exploits or endangers children,” it said.

Meta said it reports apparent child exploitation cases to law enforcement through the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC), publishes global and India-specific transparency reports, and has appointed statutory compliance officers under India’s IT Rules.

The company said it also works with industry and law enforcement agencies to combat online child exploitation beyond its own platforms.

It highlighted its founding membership of the Tech Coalition’s Lantern programme for cross-platform intelligence sharing on predatory accounts and efforts to block links to third-party websites hosting abusive content.

Meta also said it supports NCMEC’s “Take It Down” tool, which helps prevent the spread of intimate images of young people online.

“In 2019, we played an integral role in establishing India’s relationship with NCMEC by enabling local law enforcement authorities to receive reports and take action on violating activity,” it said.

Meta said it would continue strengthening its technology, blocking violating links, improving advertisement review systems and working with law enforcement agencies to keep young people safe and hold offenders accountable.