Indian IT minister Ashwini Vaishnaw on Friday directed that Meta officials be summoned over Instagram advertisements allegedly promoting child sexual abuse.
The tech giant will now have to explain to Meta the issue that a BBC investigation uncovered recently, and will have to describe what steps it is taking to address the issue.
The company was already in hot water with the government over the WhatsApp username feature issue, when the BBC probe surfaced, which showed that paid ads on Instagram in India—which were using terms like "rape video" and "child video" in their descriptions—were even taking users out of the platform where the material could be bought.
The probe revealed that the targeted ads, which redirected users to Telegram channels offering the material for as little as Rs 99, were also managing to bypass Meta's community guidelines.
Due to this, the ad was not even taken down after it was reported on Instagram, and was allegedly only removed after the BBC report forced Meta to crack down more on such ads, as well as accounts and URLs linked to them.
Telegram also said it had removed more than 274,000 groups and channels related to child sexual abuse material in 2026.
To test the moderation further, the probe report mentioned that an alias account was created in India, which began pushing sexually suggestive content from a number of accounts among regular posts—even when no such searches had been made from that account.
When the new account began following some accounts posting mildly sexual content or female influencers, ads soon popped up about women offering video calls and pornography with nudity in "less than a week".
Just days later, the adverts featuring child sexual abuse material were back.
"One ad showed a boy and girl, both of whom appeared to be about 12 years old, engaging in a sexual act," the report said, pointing out that the distribution of child and adult pornography is a criminal offence in India.
"Another showed a man with his arm around a girl, with text saying he was 52 and the girl was 12," it said, citing another ad that had a link to a Telegram channel, which would not be taken down by Instagram as it was found not to be in violation of the community guidelines.
The London case in 2025
This is not the first time that Meta's ad moderation has landed it in hot water.
Back in September 2025, the tech giant landed in hot water after a London man alleged that social media company was targeting him with pictures of girls returning to school, in its ads for Threads.
ALSO READ | Meta in trouble: Schoolgirls were used in Threads ads targeting him, man claims; angry parents lash out at company
The 37-year-old described the back-to-school pictures of the schoolgirls—some said to be as young as 13, and dressed in short skirts, with either bare legs or stockings—as “deliberately provocative and ultimately exploitative of the children and families involved”, as per a Guardian report.
The man, who is himself a father, revealed that he had neither posted nor liked any such images before the ads popped up, which led to serious backlash for Meta.
Parents of the schoolgirls were then furious when they found out that their kids' public posts were being used for the ad material—which Meta claimed was only being used as "recommendation tools" by its algorithms, which was in line with its policies.
