Child exploitation is a horrific crime and every day, we work aggressively to fight this kind of abuse both on and off our platforms. 

We’re aware of recent news reports about Instagram ads in India that violated our policies against child exploitation. And we want to be clear: we take these concerns seriously, we never want this content on our platforms, and we’re committed to improving our efforts to combat it.  

Before these cases were brought to our attention, our enforcement systems had already identified and disabled several of the violating ads and the accounts behind them. 

Our subsequent investigation led to additional action, including removing further ads, disabling accounts, and blocking URLs linked to policy-violating content.

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. 

How Our Ad Review Process Works

We recognise that no system is perfect and that determined criminals will continue to try to exploit our platform, including through our advertising systems. Our review process may not catch every violation, but we’re continuously working to stay ahead of bad actors through our robust ad review process.

We use automated and manual reviews to enforce our policies. Beyond reviewing individual ads, we also monitor and investigate advertiser behavior, and may restrict advertiser accounts that don’t follow our Advertising Standards, Community Standards or other Meta policies and terms. 

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.

We also review and take action on an advertiser’s Business Account or its assets (ad accounts, Pages and user accounts). If a violation is found at any point in the review process, the ad will be rejected, and the Business Account or its assets may be restricted. If a Business Account or its assets is restricted, that account or asset can’t be used to advertise across our technologies.

We’re committed to keeping bad actors off our platforms and are constantly evolving our systems to stay ahead of them. Protecting people who use our platforms remains at the centre of how we build and enforce our advertising standards.

Our Zero Tolerance Approach

We have detailed and robust policies 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.

As noted in our Ad Standards, all ads must comply with our Community Standards on Child Sexual Exploitation, Abuse, and Nudity. Ads must not contain content that sexually exploits or endangers children.

How We’re Fighting Back — The Numbers

Last year, we shared the positive results of the changes we made to focus our proactive enforcement toward illegal and the most severe content on our platforms like child exploitation. We also shared that we’ve been experimenting with more advanced AI systems for content enforcement covering languages spoken by 98% of people online — far beyond our previous coverage of around 80 languages. 

We’re in a constant battle with criminals who hide among our 3.5 billion users and try to evade our detection. Here is what our enforcement looks like in practice:

• Globally, last year alone, thanks to improvements to our technology, we automatically removed more than 4 million suspicious accounts from Facebook and Instagram, on top of the 36 million pieces of content we removed for child exploitation.
• We have advanced AI detection tools set up to identify when individuals post suspicious off-platform links in coordination with other signals indicating child exploitative activity. In the last six months alone, this led to the removal of 160,000 accounts in India.
• Globally when we become aware of apparent child exploitation, we report it to local law enforcement authorities through the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC) in compliance with applicable law. In India, in compliance with the Protection Of Children from Sexual Offences (POCSO) Act, 2021 and accompanying Rules, Meta ensures that such content is reported by NCMEC to the national cyber-crime reporting portal on behalf of Meta. Thanks to our continued investment in detection and reporting, we report more to law enforcement authorities than anyone else in the industry, something that is also acknowledged in the recent news reporting. 
• Transparency Report – Meta publishes its Community Standards Enforcement Report (CSER) regularly — a global transparency report that details how we enforce our policies across Facebook and Instagram. The report covers multiple policy areas, including child nudity and sexual exploitation, and provides data on the volume of violating content actioned, proactive detection rates, and prevalence. We use sophisticated technology to proactively identify child exploitation content on our platforms. Between October and December 2025, we removed 13 million pieces of child sexual exploitation content from Facebook and Instagram — over 96% of which we found and proactively addressed, before anyone reported it. The full report is available at transparency.meta.com
• India Monthly Transparency report: Meta publishes monthly transparency reports as required under Information Technology (Intermediary Guidelines and Digital Media Ethics Code) Rules, 2021 (“IT Rules 2021”). We’ve been publishing these reports since June 2021. This report covers multiple policy areas, including child nudity and sexual exploitation and provides data on the volume of violating content actioned, and proactive detection rates. The report contains information on (1) actions taken against violating content on Facebook, Instagram and Threads for content created by users in India and proactive detection rates, and (2) information on grievances received from users in India via the grievance mechanisms and (3) orders received from Grievance Appellate Committee (GAC).
• Statutory officers appointed as per IT Rules: In compliance with the IT Rules 2021, Meta has appointed a Chief Compliance Officer, Grievance Officer, and Nodal Contact Person.

Supporting Industry-wide Efforts

As part of our commitment to child safety, we also work to strengthen reporting frameworks that support others in their efforts. In 2019, we played an integral role in establishing India’s relationship with NCMEC by enabling local law enforcement authorities to receive reports and take action on violating activity.

We know that predators don’t limit themselves to any one platform. That’s why we’ve also spent years developing technology that is now used across the industry to help address online child sexual exploitation:

• Cross-platform intelligence sharing: We’re a founding member of Lantern, a program from the Tech Coalition that enables tech companies to share signals about predatory accounts and behaviours. Participating companies can use this information to conduct investigations on their own platforms and take action – and in doing so helps keep the whole internet safer. Meta provided and continues to maintain the technical infrastructure that enables the Lantern program. By the end of 2025, 2M+ signals had been shared through Lantern, supporting over 350k platform enforcement actions. Lantern’s 2025 Transparent Report is available here 
• Blocking links to violating websites: We continue to fight this abuse across the internet by blocking links to third-party websites that host this material – and we share these violating URLs with our peer platforms through Lantern too. Our aggressive fight to remove millions of violating accounts against child exploitation makes it significantly harder for criminals to share this content on our platforms. As a result, predators are increasingly forced to try to share links to off-platform content instead.
• Take It Down: We supported NCMEC to create the Take It Down tool, which helps prevent the spread of young people’s intimate images online.

Our Ongoing Commitment

This work is ongoing. Our teams are constantly improving our defences – developing new technology, blocking violating links, and sharing intelligence across the industry – but we know there is more to do. We will continue investing in every resource needed to keep young people safe, strengthen our ad review processes, and work with law enforcement to hold criminals accountable.