Growing regulatory and public pressure over the spread of monetized child sexual abuse material (CSAM) on Meta’s platforms has forced the tech giant to announce a policy shift: it will now begin reporting child safety incidents directly to Indian law enforcement, after months of scrutiny from New Delhi and child rights advocates.
The controversy first erupted in July, when a BBC Eye investigation uncovered paid Instagram advertisements actively promoting CSAM to users across India. The findings immediately triggered a formal order from the Indian government, demanding Meta purge all CSAM-linked content and advertising from its platforms. The issue reemerged in the public eye this month, when the U.S.-based nonprofit Tech Transparency Project (TTP) published a new report documenting hundreds of AI-generated CSAM advertisements still active on Meta’s Facebook and Instagram platforms. Of the 332 problematic ads TTP identified, 84 were targeted at Indian audiences—and 78 of those had been placed after the government’s original removal order in July.
In response to mounting pressure, a Meta spokesperson confirmed the company’s new policy commitment, framing child protection as a core organizational priority. “Protecting children on our platforms is a priority for us, and we’re committed to working with the government to ensure that the perpetrators of these crimes are held responsible,” the spokesperson said. “To collectively strengthen our efforts to combat this harm, Meta will now report child safety matters directly to the Cybercrime portal managed by the Indian Cybercrime Coordination Centre.”
The Indian Cybercrime Coordination Centre (I4C), which operates under India’s Union Home Ministry, manages the country’s central hub for tracking and investigating digital cybercrime. Until this policy shift, Meta only fulfilled its child safety reporting obligations by sending all CSAM and exploitation alerts to the U.S.-based National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC), which then forwarded relevant cases to local law enforcement in other countries. Direct reporting to India’s national portal is expected to cut down processing time and give local investigators faster access to critical information about bad actors operating on the platforms.
The policy change comes after multiple layers of official and civil society action against Meta over the scandal. India’s National Commission for Protection of Child Rights (NCPCR) launched a formal inquiry following the BBC investigation, summoning Meta India’s managing director and country head to answer questions about the company’s content moderation failures. India’s National Human Rights Commission also issued formal notices to two Union ministries, launching an inquiry into whether Meta’s algorithmic content systems contributed to the selection, amplification, and monetization of CSAM content. A civil society network, Just Rights for Children—made up of more than 250 child rights organizations—even filed a petition before India’s Supreme Court, asking the court to order all social media firms to report CSAM promoters directly to Indian law enforcement. The group’s founder, Bhuwan Ribhu, had long argued that routing all reports exclusively through the U.S.-based NCMEC system created unacceptable delays that let bad actors operate with impunity.
Meta has yet to release key details about the new policy rollout: the company has not announced an official start date for direct reporting, clarified exactly which types of child safety cases will fall under the new arrangement, or explained how the process will work in practice alongside existing reporting through NCMEC. In an earlier statement to the BBC following TTP’s new findings, Meta defended its existing efforts, noting that it does not tolerate CSAM or exploitative content—whether generated via AI or featuring real children—“Criminals continually change their tactics to evade detection and that it was strengthening its systems,” the company said. Meta also added that most of the advertisements identified by TTP had already been taken down, most received fewer than 200 impressions, and the total ad spend behind the problematic content was less than $5,000.
The ongoing scrutiny of Meta in India reflects a broader global push to force major social media platforms to take more aggressive action against CSAM, particularly the fast-growing category of AI-generated exploitative imagery that has evaded many older content detection systems.