Meta said they removed 1.60 lakh accounts in India in the last six months using AI tools to detect suspicious links, child exploitative activity signals
Amid the Indian government issuing a stern notice to Meta on Child Sexual Exploitative and Abuse Material (CSEAM) in paid advertisements on Instagram, the company on Tuesday said it is categorically inaccurate to suggest that it knowingly and deliberately target ads featuring children to people based on an inappropriate interest in children.
“Quite the opposite; we use technology to identify accounts that have shown potentially suspicious activity related to children, and we automatically removed over four-million of these accounts last year,” Meta said via a blog post adding that the company removed 1.60 lakh accounts in India in the last six months using AI tools to detect suspicious links, child exploitative activity signals.
The blog post came after the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) on Friday (July 4) issued a notice ordering Instagram to disable all ads and content promoting and facilitating access to CSEAM and demanded a detailed explanation within seven days.
“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,” Meta said in the post.
Before these cases were brought to the company’s attention, its enforcement systems had already identified and disabled several of the violating ads and the accounts behind them, Meta said.
“Our subsequent investigation led to additional action, including removing further ads, disabling accounts, and blocking URLs linked to policy-violating content,” it said.
Meta also noted that it was a constant battle with criminals who hide among our 3.5 billion users and try to evade its detection. The over four-million suspicious accounts were removed from Facebook and Instagram, on top of the 36 million pieces of content it removed for child exploitation, the blogpost mentioned.
“Globally when we become aware of apparent child exploitation, we report it to local law enforcement authorities through the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC) in compliance with applicable law. In India, in compliance with the Protection Of Children from Sexual Offences (POCSO) Act, 2021 and accompanying Rules, Meta ensures that such content is reported by NCMEC to the national cyber-crime reporting portal on behalf of Meta,” the company said.
Global transparency
The Mark Zuckerberg-owned company also explained it publishes its Community Standards Enforcement Report (CSER) regularly — a global transparency report to enforce its policies across Facebook and Instagram. The report covers multiple policy areas, including child nudity and sexual exploitation, and provides data on the volume of violating content actioned, proactive detection rates, and prevalence, it said.
“Between October and December 2025, we removed 13 million pieces of child sexual exploitation content from Facebook and Instagram — over 96 per cent of which we found and proactively addressed, before anyone reported it,” Meta noted.
The company also said it publishes monthly transparency reports in India too, as required under Information Technology (Intermediary Guidelines and Digital Media Ethics Code) Rules, 2021 (“IT Rules 2021”).
“We’ve been publishing these reports since June 2021. This report covers multiple policy areas, including child nudity and sexual exploitation and provides data on the volume of violating content actioned, and proactive detection rates,” the blogpost said.
The report contains information on actions taken against violating content on Facebook, Instagram and Threads for content created by users in India and proactive detection rates; information on grievances received from users in India via the grievance mechanisms and; orders received from Grievance Appellate Committee (GAC), it noted.
Published on July 7, 2026
