India: Instagram running ads promoting child sexual abuse material, BBC finds

In total, about 30 unique adverts appeared promoting child sexual abuse, although some of these were shared by multiple accounts.

The alias account was also shown about 20 ads featuring adult pornography.

The distribution of both child sexual abuse material and adult pornography are criminal offences in India, while Meta’s policy states that ads must not contain adult nudity, genitals or content that sexually exploits or endangers children. The BBC has reported all of the ads and the Telegram channels to the Indian authorities.

One ad showed a boy and girl, both of whom appeared to be about 12 years old, engaging in a sexual act.

Another showed a man with his arm around a girl, with text saying he was 52 and the girl was 12. “Click to watch more,” it said, linking out to a Telegram channel.

The BBC reported an advert to Instagram showing a very young girl in tears, with wording indicating that she had been sexually assaulted.

But 24 hours later, Instagram replied saying it hadn’t removed the advert because “our review team found that the advertiser’s ad does not go against our community standards”.

Meta later told the BBC that “no system is perfect, and our review process may not detect all policy violations”.

“We continue to run proactive detection technology on ads once they’re live, and anyone can report an ad to us that they think breaks our rules,” Meta said.

It added that when it becomes aware of apparent child exploitation it reports it to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC), in compliance with the law. The NCMEC is the centralised global reporting system for the online sexual exploitation of children.

We reported two channels to Telegram for selling child sexual abuse videos.

One of them was subsequently taken down and replaced with a message saying: “This group can’t be displayed because it violated Telegram’s Terms of Service,” but the other continued to post new videos for sale.

Critics have previously accused the platform of not doing enough to prevent the sharing of criminal content.

The Dubai-based company is not a member of either the NCMEC or the Internet Watch Foundation, which also works with most online platforms to find, report and remove such material.

Telegram told the BBC that the company uses both automated and human moderation to eradicate child sexual abuse material (CSAM) from the app, and as a result it says it has “virtually eliminated the public spread of CSAM from its platform”.