Meta on Tuesday detailed the measures it has taken to combat child sexual abuse and exploitation on its platforms after the Centre issued a notice over reports of Instagram advertisements allegedly promoting child sexual exploitative and abuse material (CSEAM).
In a blog post, the company described child exploitation as a "horrific crime" and said it works every day to identify and remove such content across its platforms.
"We're aware of recent news reports about Instagram ads in India that violated our policies against child exploitation. 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," Meta said.
The company rejected allegations that it knowingly targeted users with advertisements featuring children based on inappropriate interests.
"It is categorically inaccurate to suggest that we knowingly and deliberately target 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," it said.
Meta, which owns Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, said its enforcement systems had already detected and disabled several of the violating advertisements and the accounts behind them before the cases were brought to its attention.
"Our subsequent investigation led to additional action, including removing further ads, disabling accounts, and blocking URLs linked to policy-violating content," the company said.
According to Meta, improvements to its detection technology led to the automatic removal of more than four million suspicious accounts globally last year, in addition to 36 million pieces of content removed for child exploitation.
The company also said its AI-powered detection systems identify suspicious off-platform links in combination with other signals of exploitative activity. "In the last six months alone, this led to the removal of 1,60,000 accounts in India," it said.
The blog post follows a notice issued by the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) last week directing Instagram to disable all advertisements and content promoting or facilitating access to CSEAM and submit a detailed explanation within seven days.
The ministry's action came after Union IT Minister Ashwini Vaishnaw directed officials to summon Meta following reports that Instagram advertisements were allegedly promoting child sexual abuse material.
The scrutiny followed a BBC investigation that alleged Meta's recommendation algorithm promoted videos containing child sexual abuse material and that paid advertisements with terms such as "rape video" and "child video" appeared on Facebook and Instagram, directing users to Telegram channels where such content was allegedly being sold.
(With inputs from PTI)