Meta on Tuesday published a detailed blog outlining its efforts to combat child sexual abuse material across its apps, citing AI-powered detection, ad review systems and large-scale enforcement actions, days after the government issued a notice to the social media giant over reports of Instagram advertisements promoting such content.
Terming child exploitation as a horrific crime, Meta said it works aggressively every day to fight this kind of abuse on and off its platforms.
“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 knowingly and 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 4 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 of people online.
Last year, it automatically removed over 4 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 that 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 technology 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.
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 action taken by the company to address all the concerns, they added.
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.
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