Following the Centre’s notice seeking the removal of paid Instagram ads promoting child sexual abuse content and a detailed explanation from Meta, the social media giant has issued a clarification. Meta, on Tuesday (7th July) said that it is committed to improving content across its social media platforms and follows a zero-tolerance policy against “child nudity, abuse, and exploitation — which includes the sharing or soliciting of child exploitation imagery, inappropriate interactions with teens, and the sexualisation of minors”.
“Child exploitation is a horrific crime, and every day, we work aggressively to fight this kind of abuse both on and off our platforms,” Meta clarified in its response. It added that its enforcement systems had already “identified and disabled several of the violating ads and the accounts behind them”.
“It is categorically inaccurate to suggest that we’d knowingly and deliberately target ads featuring children to people based on an inappropriate interest in children. Quite the opposite; we use technology to identify accounts that have shown potentially suspicious activity related to children, and we automatically removed over 4 million of these accounts last year,” Meta said.
Admitting that no system is perfect or immune to criminal activities, Meta explained that it not only reviews individual ads but also investigates advertiser behaviour to ensure compliance with its terms and policies. “Our ad review system automatically checks ads for policy violations before they run. Anyone on our platforms can report ads if they believe they violate our policies. Ads also remain subject to review and re-review at all times and may be rejected or restricted for violation of our policies at any time. The review covers all ad components, including but not limited to images, video, and text,” it said.
Meta said that its proactive enforcement towards illegal and the most severe content on its platforms, like child exploitation, showed positive results last year. It said that to strengthen content enforcement, it has been experimenting with more advanced AI systems covering languages spoken by 98% of people online, compared to its previous coverage of around 80 languages. The company said that its improved technology automatically removed over 4 million suspicious accounts from Facebook and Instagram, in addition to 36 million pieces of content removed for child exploitation. It added that in the last six months, it removed 160,000 accounts from its platforms in India linked to child exploitative activity.
Meta highlighted its compliance with Indian law enforcement, saying that it reports cases of apparent child exploitation to law enforcement authorities through the National Centre for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC) in compliance with applicable law. To maintain transparency, Meta publishes a global transparency report, called the Community Standards Enforcement Report (CSER), detailing the enforcement of its policies across Facebook and Instagram. Additionally, Meta publishes a monthly transparency report in compliance with the Information Technology (Intermediary Guidelines and Digital Media Ethics Code) Rules, 2021.
Reiterating its commitment to curb online content relating to child sexual abuse, Meta said that it is the founding member of a program called ‘Lantern’, from the Tech Coalition, “that enables tech companies to share signals about predatory accounts and behaviours”.
