Warning: This story contains descriptions of abuse
Meta ran hundreds of paid ads with artificial intelligence-generated child sexual abuse imagery, including several in India, over the past 10 months, a new report by US-based campaigners has found.
The report comes two months after the Indian government ordered Meta to remove all ads and content promoting child sexual abuse material (CSAM) on Instagram. This was in the aftermath of a BBC Eye investigation which found that Instagram was running paid adverts promoting CSAM in India.
Washington-based Tech Transparency Project (TTP), external says it found 332 adverts with CSAM that ran on Facebook and Instagram, the majority of them (274) in August this year.
When the BBC wrote to Meta about these findings, they said in a statement, “We don’t tolerate nudify apps or any kind of child exploitation, whether real or AI-generated. These criminals constantly shift tactics to evade detection, which is why we keep strengthening our detection and enforcement.”
The TTP report, published on Tuesday, says that it identified several photos of real children, including a member of a European royal family, that were used in the ads and then manipulated using AI. It says more than a dozen ads appeared on Meta platforms even after TTP made the company aware of its findings.
About a quarter (84) of the ads ran in India and 78 of these were published after the Indian government’s order on removing CSAM and its meeting with senior Meta officials.
After the BBC investigation, several Indian agencies including the National Commission for Protection of Child Rights and the National Human Rights Commission have said they are examining the matter.
The distribution of CSAM is a criminal offence in India, while Meta’s policy states that ads must not contain content that sexually exploits or endangers children.
When the BBC contacted Meta about its investigation, it said that when it becomes aware of apparent child exploitation, it reports it to the US-based National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC) in compliance with its legal obligations.
The NCMEC is the centralised global reporting system for the online sexual exploitation of children.
But Bhuwan Ribhu, the founder of Just Rights for Children, a network of more than 250 organisations working to prevent violence against children in India, says this is not enough.
Just Rights for Children has filed a petition in India’s Supreme Court, citing the BBC’s findings, and asked for directions to social media platforms for mandatory reporting and identification of those promoting child sexual abuse material
