SOURCE :- SIASAT NEWS
Hyderabad: Instagram carried paid advertisements that promoted child sexual abuse material in India, directing users to Telegram channels selling such content for as little as Rs 99, a BBC investigation has revealed.
The report said the advertisements had cleared Instagram’s own moderation systems before going live, raising fresh questions about the adequacy of content checks on the Meta-owned platform.
According to the BBC, its reporters created a test account in India and began following several women whose posts on food, weather and everyday life used suggestive language and imagery. Within days, the account started receiving advertisements offering explicit adult content, including ads featuring women offering video calls and visuals of naked couples.
Soon after, the platform began surfacing ads that sexualised children, some explicitly indicating the ages of those depicted, with links directing users to Telegram groups.
One advertisement showed a boy and girl, both appearing to be around 12 years old, engaged in a sexual act. Another showed a man with his arm around a girl, with text stating he was 52 and she was 12, urging users to click through to a Telegram channel. A separate ad flagged by the BBC showed a young girl in tears, with wording suggesting she had been sexually assaulted.
The BBC said around 30 distinct advertisements promoting child sexual abuse material appeared on the account, alongside roughly 20 ads for adult pornography. Both these categories breach Meta’s advertising policies and are criminal offences under Indian law. The broadcaster said it had reported all the advertisements and the Telegram channels to Indian authorities.
The BBC said that when it flagged one advertisement to Instagram, the platform responded after 24 hours, saying its review team had found the ad did not breach community standards. It was only when the BBC separately approached Meta for comment that the company acknowledged the issue, saying it had disabled several advertisements and suspended the accounts posting them.
Meta later said it had gone further after reviewing the BBC‘s findings, removing additional ads, disabling more accounts and blocking URLs linked to violating content. The company said that no system was perfect and its review process might not detect every policy violation, adding that it ran proactive detection technology on live ads and that users could report content they believed broke the rules.
It said it referred apparent cases of child exploitation to the US-based National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, as required by law.
Meta said it was “categorically inaccurate” to suggest it knowingly and deliberately targeted such advertisements at users with an inappropriate interest in the material, and denied prioritising revenue over safety. It said more than 4 million accounts were automatically disabled last year for showing signals of suspicious behaviour, and that it worked with other companies to share intelligence against predators.
How Telegram responded
Telegram told the BBC it relied on a mix of automated and human moderation and had removed over 274,000 groups and channels linked to child sexual abuse material this year, adding that it had “virtually eliminated” the public spread of such content on its platform.
Of the two channels the BBC flagged directly, one was taken down for violating Telegram’s terms of service, while the other continued to post content.
Indian officials cited in the investigation said Meta’s platforms accounted for the highest volume of tipline alerts on child sexual abuse material received by law enforcement, though they cautioned this reflected the platforms’ detection capabilities rather than necessarily the scale of the problem.
India received 1.9 million such reports last year, the second highest after the United States, the BBC reported citing tipline data.
Owaisi reacts to report
All India Majlis-e-Ittehadul Muslimeen (AIMIM) chief Asaduddin Owaisi, reacting to the BBC report, said, “An extremely concerning report about how Instagram is running ads promoting child sexual exploitation material in India, and making money from it.”
He added that social media platforms should proactively stamp out such activity. “Mere lip service is not enough,” he said on X.
Meta earned nearly 98 per cent of its USD 200 billion revenue last financial year from advertising, according to the BBC, with analysts estimating ads account for more than 90 per cent of Instagram’s income.
SOURCE : SIASAT
