A groundbreaking undercover investigation by BBC Eye has exposed a disturbing criminal operation: paid advertisements promoting child sexual abuse material (CSAM) are actively circulating on Instagram, one of the world’s most popular social media platforms, across India.
The investigation began after BBC researchers observed that Instagram’s algorithm was pushing sexually suggestive content to users even when no explicit search for such material had been conducted. To probe this issue further, the BBC created an anonymous alias account based in India, which followed 10 accounts featuring Indian women posting about daily life topics like food and weather, while using revealing clothing and sexual innuendo in their content. In less than seven days, the account started being served explicit ads, first for adult pornography and nude content, and soon after for CSAM that linked directly to paid channels on the messaging platform Telegram.
Over the course of the investigation, roughly 30 unique CSAM advertisements appeared on the account’s feed, alongside an additional 20 ads for unregulated adult pornography. Both distribution of CSAM and adult pornography are classified as serious criminal offenses under Indian law, and Meta — Instagram’s parent company — has explicit public policies prohibiting ads that contain nudity, sexual exploitation, or content that endangers children. The ads included graphic, exploitative content: one depicted two pre-teen children estimated to be around 12 years old engaged in a sexual act, while another showed a 52-year-old man with a 12-year-old girl with text inviting viewers to click through to a Telegram channel to watch more content. When the BBC reported an ad featuring a crying young girl labelled as a sexual assault victim to Instagram’s moderation team, the platform replied 24 hours later that the ad did not violate its community guidelines and refused to remove it.
All pre-publication ad reviews on Instagram are conducted via Meta’s moderation system, which the company says vets every ad before it goes live. The system relies primarily on automated technology to scan content, with uncertain cases escalated to human reviewers. In a March 2026 announcement, Meta said it would reduce its reliance on third-party human moderators and shift further toward AI-powered moderation, claiming that expert teams would oversee and refine the new systems.
After the BBC shared its full findings with Meta, the company said it had disabled multiple violating ads, suspended the accounts behind them, and blocked offending URLs in line with its policies. Meta also pushed back against criticism, saying in an official statement: “Child exploitation is a horrific crime and Meta works aggressively to fight it on our apps.” The company denied claims that it prioritizes revenue over user safety, noting that it automatically disabled more than four million accounts in 2025 for suspicious behavior linked to child exploitation. Meta added that it complies with all legal requirements to report suspected CSAM to the U.S.-based National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC), the global central clearinghouse for CSAM reports. When reached for comment by the BBC, Meta acknowledged that “no system is perfect” and that automated reviews may miss some policy violations.
The CSAM ads direct users to Telegram channels where the exploitative content can be purchased for as little as 99 Indian rupees, equal to roughly $1. When the BBC reported two of these CSAM-selling channels to Telegram, one was removed for violating the platform’s terms of service, while the other remained active and continued posting new content for sale. Telegram has faced longstanding criticism for insufficient action against criminal content sharing, and it is not a member of either NCMEC or the Internet Watch Foundation, two leading global organizations that partner with platforms to detect and remove CSAM. In a response to the BBC, Telegram said it uses a combination of automated and human moderation to remove CSAM, and claimed it has “virtually eliminated the public spread of CSAM from its platform.” The company also noted that it removed more than 274,000 CSAM-linked groups and channels in 2026.
The investigation has sparked sharp condemnation from legal and law enforcement experts in India. Retired Indian Supreme Court Justice Madan Lokur told the BBC he believes Instagram is “making money by participating in a criminal activity.” Lokur called the issue severe enough that India’s Supreme Court should initiate suo moto cognisance — an automatic legal proceeding without a formal complaint being filed — to force government action against the platform. He added that while Indian law shields platforms from liability for user-uploaded content in many cases, “the platform cannot, cannot shirk its responsibility.”
Former Meta executive Brian Boland, who served as a vice president at Facebook (Meta’s predecessor brand) between 2009 and 2020 and helped build the company’s advertising business, told the BBC he was “horrified and unsurprised” by the investigation’s findings. Boland, who left Meta in 2020 because he believed the company did not prioritize user safety, explained that Instagram’s algorithm is intentionally designed to maximize user engagement and time on platform by serving increasingly extreme and titillating content. “It’s not like an algorithm that says ‘let’s make people paedophiles’, but because they’re not responsibly guiding and controlling it – and it’s just pursuing the goals of revenue and clicks – it will create these outcomes if people aren’t being truly, aggressively protective over these systems,” Boland said. He added that early in his tenure, he was authorized to remove a large share of revenue-generating scam ads to protect users, but over time the company began prioritizing revenue gains over user safety. Boland deleted his own Instagram account in 2025, and urged mass user action to force Meta to change its policies.
Boland testified against Meta earlier this year in a trial in New Mexico, where the company was found liable for misleading the public about the safety of its platforms for children. The court ordered Meta to pay $375 million in damages, a ruling the company has said it will appeal.
Advertising makes up nearly 98% of Meta’s total annual revenue, which hit $200 billion in the 2025 financial year, and analysts estimate advertising accounts for over 90% of Instagram’s standalone revenue.
Indian law enforcement and child welfare organizations have long flagged Meta platforms as the most common source of CSAM reports in the country. Shikha Goel, director of the Cyber Security Bureau in the southern Indian state of Telangana, noted that Meta platforms generate more CSAM reports to the NCMEC tipline than any other provider operating in India. In 2025, India received 1.9 million CSAM reports via the NCMEC system, second only to the United States’ 2 million reports. Goel added that higher reporting volumes may reflect better detection systems, not simply more content. The Mumbai-based Rati Foundation, an NGO that runs a helpline for children affected by online harm, confirmed that the vast majority of CSAM reports it receives come from Meta platforms. Rati co-founder Siddharth Pillai told the BBC that criminals exploit the seamless connection between Instagram and Telegram to evade moderation: after one piece of content is removed, offenders simply reupload it to a new channel. Experts note that most CSAM in India is produced by organized criminal groups like human trafficking networks, though community and family members are sometimes responsible for exploitation. Many offenders go unreported, and Indian law enforcement is still building the technical expertise needed to tackle the transnational crime. Bhuwan Ribhu, founder of child welfare network Just Rights for Children, said cross-border international cooperation and intelligence sharing are critical to dismantling these criminal networks, saying “the entire chain of demand and supply needs to be tracked” to root out the crime. The BBC has formally shared all evidence of the ads and Telegram channels with Indian law enforcement authorities.