Instagram ads promote child sexual abuse material in India, BBC investigation finds

Ads on Instagram are only published after being approved by its moderation technology. The BBC reported one of the ads to Instagram. The social media platform responded 24 hours later, stating that the post did not violate its "community standards." The BBC subsequently sent a request for comment to Meta, which responded that it had already disabled several advertisements and suspended the accounts responsible for the posts. The company said it had removed other ads, disabled more accounts and blocked URLs (web addresses) of other content that violated its policies, in response to the BBC's findings. Telegram declared that it had removed more than 274,000 groups and channels related to material containing child sexual abuse in 2026. The BBC created an account with an alternative name on Instagram, after realizing that the platform was promoting sexually suggestive content, even for users who were not looking for this type of material. This content included women posting about food, the weather and everyday life in India, dressed in revealing clothing and using sexual innuendo in their posts. Created in India, the new account with an alternative name began following these women and other similar people (10 in total) to investigate sexualized content on the platform. In less than a week, Instagram began showing ads in the feed, with women offering video calls and showing clearly naked couples engaging in sexual acts. Days later, the platform began showing ads featuring children with adults in sexually suggestive situations and links to Telegram channels. Retired Supreme Court of India judge Madan Lokur said he feared Instagram was 'making money by participating in criminal activity' BBC Around 30 different ads appeared in total promoting child sexual abuse, but some of them were shared by multiple accounts. Our alternative account also received around 20 ads showing adult pornography. The distribution of material relating to child sexual abuse and adult pornography is a crime in India. And Meta's policy states that ads must not contain adult or genital nudity, nor content that sexually exploits children or puts them at risk. The BBC reported all ads and Instagram channels to Indian authorities. One of the ads showed a boy and a girl, both apparently around 12 years old, engaged in a sexual act. Another showed a man with his arm around a girl. The text said he was 52 years old and the girl was 12. "Click to watch more," the ad said, with a link to a Telegram channel. The BBC reported to Instagram an ad showing a very young girl in tears. The words indicated that she had suffered sexual abuse. But 24 hours later, Instagram responded that it had not removed the ad because "our review team concluded that the ad does not violate 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 apply proactive detection technology to ads when they are published, and anyone can report an ad to us that they believe violates our rules," according to Meta. The company highlighted 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 current legislation. NCMEC is the centralized global reporting system for the sexual exploitation of children on the internet. The BBC reported two channels to Telegram for selling videos of child sexual abuse. One of them was quickly taken down afterwards and replaced with a message saying: "This group cannot be displayed because it violated Telegram's Terms of Service." The other channel continued to post new videos for sale for more than two weeks before it was also taken down. Critics have previously accused the platform of not doing enough to prevent the publication of criminal content. Headquartered in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, the company is not a member of NCMEC. In late 2024, she joined the Internet Watch Foundation, which also works with most online platforms to find, report and remove this type of material. Telegram told the BBC that the company uses human and automatic moderation to eradicate child sexual abuse material from the app. With this, the application "virtually eliminated the dissemination of sexual abuse material to the public on its platform", according to the company. Instagram ads promote child sexual abuse material in India, according to BBC Reuters investigation via BBC The ads are an important source of income for Meta. In January, the company announced that almost 98% of its revenue of US$200 billion (just over R$1 trillion) obtained in the fiscal year ending in 2025 came from advertising. And analysts estimate that ads represent more than 90% of Instagram's revenue. Standard posts are generally not verified by Meta's technology before publication. But the company claims that all ads are analyzed before being authorized on its platforms. Its analytics system relies mainly on automatic technology and is designed to check images, video, text and audio, as well as the ad's target audience and the links it sends users to. This software rejects or approves ads, forwarding uncertain cases for human analysis. In March, Meta announced it was reducing the use of human moderators and increasing the use of artificial intelligence. The company stated that "experts will design, train, supervise and evaluate our AI systems." The BBC described the observed advertisements to retired Supreme Court of India judge Madan Lokur. He fears Instagram was "making money by participating in criminal activity." "This is a serious issue for the Supreme Court of India to take cognizance of on its own [which happens when a court initiates legal proceedings without waiting for a third party to present the case] and make the government take action against any social media platform," according to him. Lokur highlights that although Indian legislation protects social media companies from being held responsible for content posted by users, "the platform cannot escape its responsibility." Former Facebook vice-president Brian Boland declared that Instagram's algorithm was designed to keep users on the platform by showing 'something more extreme, more tempting' BBC A former vice-president of Facebook, as Meta was known until it changed its name in 2021, said the BBC's findings left him "horrified but not surprised". Brian Boland, who worked for the company between 2009 and 2020 and helped it build its marketing and advertising business, says he left because he believed "they didn't have any concern for users." Boland stated that Instagram's algorithm was designed to keep users on the platform by showing them "something more extreme, more tempting." "It's not an algorithm that says 'let's turn people into pedophiles'. But because they don't guide and control it responsibly (it only pursues the goals of clicks and revenue), it will create these results if people don't really and aggressively protect themselves against these systems." Boland says that, between 2009 and 2010, he led a project to remove ads that promoted scams among users. In doing so, he "was allowed, at the time, to suppress a huge portion of the company's revenue, for the sake of security and user experience." “I think it was sad and tragic that over time the balance between profit and user experience became a more central part of discussions,” he says. Boland claims to have deleted his Instagram account in 2025, noting that "if people started saying en masse 'I'm leaving, I'm done, it's over', the company would start paying attention." In a statement sent to the BBC, Meta stated that "child exploitation is a horrible crime and Meta works aggressively to combat it in our applications." The company said the suggestion that Meta deliberately and knowingly targeted ads featuring children to users with inappropriate interest in that material was "categorically inaccurate." Meta denied prioritizing revenue over security and stated that, in 2025, it automatically disabled more than four million accounts, as they exhibited "sufficient signs of potentially suspicious behavior." "Determined criminals try to go undetected, but our teams of experts are constantly working to improve our defenses, developing new technologies to eliminate predators, blocking links to offending websites and sharing intelligence with other companies so they too can take action," says Meta. Boland testified against Meta at a trial in New Mexico earlier this year. The company was accused of misleading users about the safety of its platforms for children. The court ordered Meta to pay US$375 million (about R$1.9 billion) to the State of New Mexico. At the time, a company spokeswoman stated that Meta did not agree with the decision and intended to appeal. Shikha Goel of the Telangana State Cyber ??Security Office in southern India says she has received more alerts from Meta platforms compared to other social networks BBC American social media companies are required to report material relating to child sexual abuse on their platform to the NCMEC reporting line, which forwards reports to the relevant law enforcement agencies in each country where the incidents are believed to have occurred. In 2025, India received 1.9 million complaints, second only to the United States, with two million. Shikha Goel is one of India's leading cybercrime police officers. She is director of the Cybersecurity Office for the southern Indian state of Telangana. She claims that Instagram and Facebook, both owned by Meta, were responsible for most of the complaints received. "But that doesn't mean they're the biggest," she explains. “If they have a good algorithm for tracking child sexual abuse material, obviously more alerts will be generated.” The NGO Rati Foundation, based in Mumbai, runs a help service for children who face dangers on the internet. The entity also stated that the vast majority of reports received about child sexual abuse material come from Meta's platforms. The foundation collaborates with social media platforms to remove harmful content. But its director Siddharth Pillai, who is also one of its founders, claims that "criminals use the integrated navigation between Instagram and Telegram to evade our moderation work and continue to re-upload the content that we helped to take down". Experts say child sexual abuse material in India is typically created by criminal groups such as human traffickers. But sometimes families and community members are also responsible. Bhuwan Ribhu is the founder of Just Rights for Children, a network of more than 250 organizations working to prevent violence against children in India. He states that the crime does not receive enough reports and the police are still trying to develop technical skills to combat it. And, for this work to be successful, Ribhu highlights that international cooperation and the sharing of intelligence across borders are fundamental. To "find the tentacles of organized crime, the entire supply and demand chain needs to be tracked," he declared. READ ALSO: Mark Zuckerberg's apology to families of children harmed by social media Verified X users spread images of child sexual abuse freely, BBC investigation shows TikTok recommends sexual content and pornography for children, reports report