Meta continues to run ads promoting child sexual abuse material in India - report

Meta continues to run ads promoting child sexual abuse material in India - report

Tech Transparency Project (TTP) says it found 332 adverts with CSAM that ran on Facebook and Instagram

Meta ran hundreds of paid ads featuring artificial intelligence-generated child sexual abuse imagery, including several in India, over the past 10 months, according to a new report by US-based campaigners.

The report was released two months after the Indian government ordered Meta to remove all ads and content promoting child sexual abuse material (CSAM) on Instagram. That order followed a BBC Eye investigation that found Instagram was running paid adverts promoting CSAM in India.

When the BBC contacted Meta about those findings, the company said in a statement: "We don't tolerate nudify apps or any kind of child exploitation, whether real or AI-generated. These criminals constantly shift tactics to evade detection, which is why we keep strengthening our detection and enforcement."

The TTP report, published on Tuesday, says it identified several photos of real children, including a member of a European royal family, that were used in the ads and then altered using AI. It says more than a dozen ads appeared on Meta platforms even after TTP alerted the company to its findings.

Roughly a quarter, or 84, of the ads ran in India, and 78 of those were published after the Indian government's order to remove CSAM and its meeting with senior Meta officials.

Following the BBC investigation, several Indian agencies, including the National Commission for Protection of Child Rights and the National Human Rights Commission, said they were looking into the matter.

The distribution of CSAM is a criminal offence in India, while Meta's policy says ads must not include content that sexually exploits or endangers children.

But Bhuwan Ribhu, founder of Just Rights for Children, a network of more than 250 organisations working to prevent violence against children in India, says that is not sufficient.

"Social media companies are clearly flouting Indian laws by not reporting child sexual abuse content to Indian law enforcement agencies as mandated by our child protection laws," said Ribhu.

According to TTP, nearly all the ads it found begin with a photo of a child and, as the video plays, the image is manipulated by AI to show the child engaging in a graphic sexual act.

TTP described one ad that ran in India as: A photo of a preteen girl animated so that she performs a graphic sex act, with a voiceover that says, "There are no restrictions. All the characters are real people and there are many options. This is the AI men actually use." The BBC has not seen this ad.

According to TTP, the ad was posted by more than 50 different handles in India over a fortnight in August this year.

"Anyone on our platforms can report ads if they believe they violate our policies," it said.

TTP said it tried reporting ads through Meta's own reporting system and that, of the 84 ads that ran in India, it was able to report 55. Meta only allows ads to be reported while they are live.

For 43 of those, TTP received a reply saying, "We've taken a look and found that this ad doesn't go against our Advertising Standards."

For 11 ads, it was told the content had already been removed. It has not yet received a response for one ad.

TTP said that when it contacted Meta for a response, all the ads it reported were removed.

This mirrored what happened during the BBC's investigation. When the BBC used Meta's reporting system to report one of the ads featuring child sexual abuse to Instagram, the platform did not remove it.

Later, when the BBC asked Meta for comment, the company said it had already disabled several adverts and suspended the accounts posting them. It said it had removed additional ads, disabled more accounts and blocked URLs for other content that violated its policies in response to the BBC's findings.

TTP said the vast majority of the 332 ads it found sent users to AI image or video generation apps, mostly from Chinese developers.

The report alleged that by advertising these apps with images of child sexual abuse, the implication is that they can be used to create or view CSAM.

Meta has said it prohibits external promotion of nudify apps, which use AI to create fake non-consensual nude or sexually explicit images.

One of India's top cyber police officers, Shikha Goel, director of the Cyber Security Bureau in the Indian state of Telangana, told the BBC that one of the biggest challenges with CSAM is "the ease with which users can move from one platform to another, making it harder to nab them".

"We are hopeful that the government will be addressing this in its latest interactions with social media intermediaries and direct them accordingly," she added.

The ads the BBC found in its investigation also directed users to another app, the messaging app Telegram, where they could buy the material for as little as 99 rupees [$1.05; £0.80].

Telegram told the BBC at the time that it uses both automated and human moderation to tackle CSAM, and that it has "virtually eliminated the public spread of CSAM" on its platform.

Ads on Meta's platforms are only published after first being approved by its moderation technology. Its review system relies mainly on automation and is designed to check images, video, text and audio, as well as who the ad is targeting and where links send users.

After the BBC's investigation, Meta said that "no system is perfect" and that "determined criminals continue to try to exploit our platform, including through our advertising systems".

But TTP found that several of the ads featuring child sexual abuse were placed by Meta's own ad agency partners in China.

These partners, known as "resellers", channel billions of dollars' worth of Chinese advertising onto Facebook and Instagram. The partners did not respond to TTP's questions.

TTP said new ads continued to appear even after it made Meta aware of its report's findings. It shared details of 17 ads, including 11 that ran in India on 1-2 September.