The BBC found that Instagram is running ads promoting child sexual abuse in India

In total, about 30 unique ads promoting child sexual abuse appeared, although some of these were shared by multiple accounts.

The alternate account also featured about 20 ads featuring adult pornography.

Both child sexual abuse content and the distribution of adult pornography are criminal offenses in India, and Meta’s policy states that ads must not contain adult nudity, genitalia, or content that sexually exploits or endangers children. The BBC reported all advertisements and Telegram channels to the Indian authorities.

One ad featured a boy and a girl, both apparently 12 years old, having sex.

Another was linked to a Telegram channel where a man showed his arm around a girl with a text saying the 52-year-old girl was 12 years old.

The BBC aired an ad on Instagram showing a very young girl crying, with the words suggesting she had been sexually assaulted.

But 24 hours later, Instagram responded that it had not removed the ad because “our review team found the advertiser’s ad inconsistent with community standards.”

“No system is perfect, and our review process may not find all policy breaches,” Meta later told the BBC.

“Once ads go live, we’ll continue to run active detection technology, and anyone who thinks an ad violates our rules can report it to us,” Metha said.

He added that when he becomes aware of child exploitation, he complies with the law and reports it to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC). NCMEC is a centralized global reporting system for online sexual exploitation of children.

We reported two channels to Telegram for selling child sexual abuse videos.

One of them was taken down and replaced with the message “This group cannot be viewed because it violates Telegram’s terms of service”, while the other continued to post new videos for sale.

Critics have previously accused the platform of not doing enough to prevent the sharing of criminal content.

The Dubai-based company is not a member of NCMEC or the Internet Watch Foundation, which works with most online platforms to find, report and remove such content.

Telegram told the BBC that the company uses both automated and human moderation to remove child sexual abuse (CSAM) from its app, and as a result “has completely removed CSAM from its public broadcast platform.”