New Delhi, Oct 7 (PTI) Facebook and Instagram owner Meta on Wednesday said it has deployed new AI tools to crack down on ads that covertly lead users to child abuse material, as it disclosed that it acted on 5.3 million pieces of child sexual exploitation content in India during the first half of 2026.
More than 98 per cent of the content on Facebook and Instagram in India was found and addressed before anyone reported it, the company said in a blog post.
Globally, it actioned 33.2 million such items on the two platforms between January and June, with over 97 per cent found proactively.
“Today we’re sharing the additional measures we’ve put in place to strengthen our efforts to combat child sexual exploitation on our platforms,” it said.
These measures include new AI tools to address the identified adversarial tactics and improve the efficacy of systems for detecting ads that either feature child sexual abuse material or that direct people to violating activity off-platform.
“Keeping young people safe on our apps is among the most important work we do, and it never stops,” Meta said.
It further noted that predators have shifted tactics to advertising, where an ad can look harmless on its own while leading people to illegal material hosted off its platforms.
After identifying the scheme, it widened its investigation beyond the ads reported to it, disabled the accounts behind them and blocked the off-platform links involved, according to the company.
The new measures include a large language model system to detect “signposting”, meaning ad content that appears benign but is strongly suspected of directing people to illegal content. Meta said it has also improved how it assesses where an ad leads, not only what it shows, and added AI-driven sweeps to surface material that earlier systems missed.
It is also using a red-teaming AI agent that probes its own defences for weaknesses, and has strengthened detection of banned users who create new accounts.
Besides this, Meta said it continues to use PhotoDNA and other image and video matching technology, which it has deployed across its apps since 2011, along with behavioural signals and rules-based systems.
It shares hashes of identified material with other companies through the Tech Coalition’s Lantern programme, and blocks links to external sites that host such content, deleting other posts, comments or ads containing them.
Meta said it reports confirmed material to the US-based National Center for Missing & Exploited Children. In September, Meta had announced it would report child safety cases directly to the National Cyber Crime Reporting Portal run by India’s Indian Cybercrime Coordination Centre.
The company said its investigators, who include former FBI personnel, work to disrupt networks of predatory accounts rather than act account by account.
“We’re consistently working with the authorities to hold the people behind these crimes accountable,” Meta said.
India has stepped up scrutiny of social media platforms over harmful and illegal online content, including child sexual abuse content and deepfakes.
In July, the government issued a notice to Meta on child sexual exploitation and abuse material in paid advertisements on Instagram. The Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) immediately ordered Instagram to disable all ads and content promoting and facilitating access to such material, demanded a detailed explanation from the company, and summoned its global executives to India.
Multiple and intense rounds of discussions with Meta’s top executives followed, in which the Ministry made it unequivocally clear that such content constitutes a violation and cannot be covered by safe-harbour protection.
The National Commission for Protection of Child Rights (NCPCR) also summoned the Managing Director and Head of Meta India in connection with its inquiry into advertisements featuring such material; the child rights body took suo motu cognisance of a BBC Eye media report on the alleged advertisements and sought an explanation from Meta.
BBC Eye investigation, published in early July, had alleged that Instagram carried paid advertisements promoting such material, some of which directed users to Telegram channels hosting sexually explicit content involving children. The investigation also found that Meta’s recommendation systems were amplifying videos containing such material. PTI MBI MR
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