India’s Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology will summon Meta executives after a BBC investigation found that Instagram had been running paid advertisements promoting child sexual abuse material to users in the country.
Union IT Minister Ashwini Vaishnaw has directed ministry officials to seek a formal explanation from the company, according to Business Standard, which cited government sources.
An IT ministry official told the outlet that Meta’s executives had been asked to appear in person.
“We have taken note of the reports that have alleged that there was inaction from Meta, despite being made aware of ads that contained CSAM, offensive and illegal search words,” the official said.
It is the ministry’s second intervention against the company this week, following an earlier order telling WhatsApp to pause its planned usernames feature pending consultation.
The BBC investigation, reported by journalist Divya Arya and published on July 3, set up a test Instagram account in India and followed ten women who posted lifestyle content in suggestive clothing to see what the recommendation system would surface next.
Within a week the account was being served ads for video calls and explicit content involving adults, and MediaNama’s summary of the findings notes that days later it began receiving ads depicting children in sexually suggestive situations alongside adults.
Those ads reportedly used search terms including “rape video” and “child video,” and pointed to Telegram channels where the material was said to be offered for as little as 99 rupees.
The BBC reported that its test account alone was served roughly 30 distinct ads promoting the material, some of them repeated across other accounts, alongside about 20 further ads for explicit adult content.
Meta’s first response was not encouraging. When the BBC flagged one ad through Instagram’s own reporting tool, the company replied within a day that its review team had found the ad “does not go against our community standards,” per the BBC’s account.
It was only once BBC journalists approached Meta directly for an on-the-record comment that the company disabled a number of the ads, suspended the accounts running them, and blocked associated Telegram links.
Meta subsequently called the practice a “horrific crime” and said it had removed further ads and accounts beyond those the BBC had specifically raised.
The company added, in a formulation that will read as thin comfort to child-safety campaigners, that “no system is perfect, and our review process may not detect all policy violations,” pointing to its ongoing use of proactive detection tools and user reporting.
The episode lands inside a wider pattern of scrutiny facing platforms over how their systems handle material involving children.
Meta is currently contesting the UK’s Online Safety Act fee calculations in the High Court, and the European Commission has separately found the company in breach of EU rules over child protection on its platforms.
In the US, Meta has been lobbying Congress for protection from child-harm lawsuits, a lobbying push that sits awkwardly next to this week’s findings.
India’s intermediary rules require platforms to remove unlawful content once notified by a court or a government agency, and to maintain functioning grievance and takedown mechanisms to retain their safe-harbour protection under Section 79 of the IT Act.
MeitY has used that leverage before: in October 2023, it sent notices to X, YouTube and Telegram warning them to remove CSAM from their services, a precedent MediaNama’s reporting on the current case points back to.
What the ministry does after Meta’s executives appear remains to be seen. No date for the meeting had been made public at the time of writing, and it is not yet clear whether the summons will lead to a formal notice, a penalty, or simply a documented explanation.
The government has not said whether it plans to examine Instagram’s ad-review pipeline more broadly, beyond the specific ads the BBC surfaced.
