Days after the Indian government pulled up Meta over Instagram advertisements allegedly promoting child sexual abuse material (CSAM), the social media giant said it has taken a series of measures to combat such content across its platforms.
Addressing the controversy directly for the first time, Meta said it had already begun taking action before the issue was flagged publicly.
"We're aware of recent news reports about Instagram ads in India that violated our policies against child exploitation,” the company wrote in a blogpost on Tuesday. “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," Meta said.
Meta said it had already identified and disabled several of the violating ads and the accounts behind them before they were brought to its attention.
"Our subsequent investigation led to additional action, including removing further ads, disabling accounts, and blocking URLs linked to policy-violating content," it added.
The company also rejected allegations that its advertising systems deliberately targeted such content at users with an inappropriate interest in children.
"It is categorically inaccurate to suggest that we'd knowingly and deliberately target ads featuring children to people based on an inappropriate interest in children," Meta said.
"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 it has removed 4 million Instagram and Facebook accounts and 36 million pieces of content linked to child sexual exploitation last year.
The social media giant said it has also expanded artificial intelligence-powered detection systems, strengthened protections for teen users and increased collaboration with law enforcement agencies to combat online child exploitation.
Meta is also experimenting with advanced AI systems covering languages spoken by 98% of people online – far beyond its previous coverage of around 80 languages.
The statement comes days after the Indian government summoned Meta over reports that Instagram was carrying advertisements promoting child sexual abuse material. Union IT minister Ashwini Vaishnaw had directed the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) to seek an explanation from the company and ensure the advertisements were taken down immediately.
