Child exploitation a horrific crime, we fight such abuse on, off our platforms: Meta blog after govt's notice

New Delhi, Jul 7 (PTI) Meta on Tuesday published a detailed blog outlining measures it has taken to combat child sexual abuse material across its apps, including ad review systems, AI tools, and enforcement action, after the government slapped a notice on the social media giant over reports of Instagram ads promoting such content. Terming child exploitation as a horrific crime, Meta said every day, it works aggressively to fight this kind of abuse on and off its platforms. "We're aware of recent news reports about Instagram ads in India that violated our policies against child exploitation. And 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," it noted. Meta said it was categorically inaccurate to suggest that it knowingly and deliberately targets ads featuring children to people based on an inappropriate interest. "Quite the opposite; we use technology to identify accounts that have shown potentially suspicious activity related to children, and we automatically removed over 4 million of these accounts last year," Meta said. The Menlo Park, California-headquartered technology giant Meta owns popular social media platforms Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp. Meta said that before the cases were brought to its attention, its enforcement systems had already identified and disabled several of the violating ads 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. Globally, last year alone, improvements to its technology led to automatic removal of more than 4 million suspicious accounts from Facebook and Instagram, on top of the 36 million pieces of content it removed for child exploitation, according to the social media company. "We have advanced AI detection tools set up to identify when individuals post suspicious off-platform links in coordination with other signals indicating child exploitative activity. In the last six months alone, this led to the removal of 1,60,000 accounts in India," Meta said. Last week, the government issued a stern notice to Meta on Child Sexual Exploitative and Abuse Material (CSEAM) in paid advertisements on Instagram. MeitY (Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology) ordered Instagram to disable all ads and content promoting and facilitating access to CSEAM, and has also demanded a detailed explanation within seven days. The action came after IT Minister Ashwini Vaishnaw directed MeitY officials to summon Meta over Instagram ads allegedly promoting child sexual abuse material. The regulatory scrutiny from the ministry came amid a BBC report that alleged Meta's recommendation algorithm had been promoting videos containing child sexual abuse material, exposing serious gaps in the safeguards. The BBC investigation had also allegedly found advertisements of this nature appearing on Facebook and Instagram, despite Meta's advertising policies explicitly prohibiting nudity and sexually explicit content. Instagram is alleged to have shown paid advertisements with terms like 'rape video' and 'child video', which directed users to Telegram channels where such content was reportedly on sale. PTI MBI BAL BAL