Aggressively working to combat child exploitation on our apps: Meta

Just days after the government issued it a notice, Meta on Tuesday outlined its efforts to combat child sexual abuse material (CSAM) across its apps, highlighting AI-powered detection and large-scale enforcement actions, as the social media giant promised to continue investment in technology and resources to keep young people safe and strengthen its ad review processes.

In a blog published Tuesday, the company termed child exploitation as a "horrific crime" and asserted that it works aggressively every day to fight this kind of abuse on and off its platforms.

"This work is ongoing. Our teams are constantly improving our defences -- developing new technology, blocking violating links, and sharing intelligence across the industry -- but we know there is more to do. We will continue investing in every resource needed to keep young people safe, strengthen our ad review processes, and work with law enforcement to hold criminals accountable," Meta said.

Meta detailed the company's ongoing efforts to combat child exploitation across its apps, highlighting AI-powered detection and large-scale enforcement action.

"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 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 four million of these accounts last year," Meta said.

Meta said it has strengthened AI-powered enforcement against child exploitation, with newer systems covering languages spoken by 98 per cent people online.

Last year, it removed over four million suspicious accounts and 36 million pieces of child exploitation content globally. In India, AI tools helped remove 1,60,000 accounts in the past six months for posting suspicious links linked to exploitative activity.

It further said 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 pointed out.

The Menlo Park, California-headquartered tech giant Meta owns popular social media platforms Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp.

"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.

Meanwhile, government sources told PTI that Meta's official response to Saturday's notice is awaited. The government's focus will be on the corrective measures and actions taken by the company to address the concerns, they 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.

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 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.

In Tuesday's blog post, Meta said its advertising review process combines automated systems with human reviewers to detect and remove policy-violating ads, while acknowledging that no system can catch every violation.

Ads are screened before they run and remain subject to continuous review and re-review, with users also able to report suspected violations, according to the company.

Meta said it monitors advertiser behaviour in addition to individual ads, and may reject ads or restrict advertiser business accounts, ad accounts, pages and user accounts found violating its policies.

The social media firm pointed out that it continues to strengthen its ad review systems and enforcement to keep bad actors off its platforms and better protect users.

"We're committed to keeping bad actors off our platforms and are constantly evolving our systems to stay ahead of them. Protecting people who use our platforms remains at the centre of how we build and enforce our advertising standards," it said.

Highlighting its zero-tolerance approach on the issue, Meta said it has detailed and robust policies against child nudity, abuse and exploitation, which include sharing or soliciting of child exploitation imagery, inappropriate interactions with teens, and the sexualisation of minors.

"As noted in our Ad Standards, all ads must comply with our Community Standards on Child Sexual Exploitation, Abuse, and Nudity. Ads must not contain content that sexually exploits or endangers children," it said.

Meta said it reports apparent child exploitation cases to law enforcement through the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC), publishes global and India-specific transparency reports, and has appointed statutory compliance officers (Chief Compliance Officer, Grievance Officer, and Nodal Contact Person) under India's IT Rules.

The company said it works with the industry and law enforcement to combat online child exploitation beyond its own platforms.

It highlighted the ways in which it supports industry-wide efforts, and spoke about its founding membership of the tech coalition's Lantern programme for cross-platform intelligence sharing on predatory accounts, and efforts to block links to third-party websites hosting abusive content.