Instagram running ads promoting child sexual abuse material in India, BBC finds

Warning: This story contains descriptions of abuse

BBC Eye investigation has revealed that Instagram is running paid ads promoting child sexual abuse material in India.

The ads, seen by the BBC World Service, use terms such as “rape video” and “child video” and link users to channels on the messaging app Telegram, where they can purchase the material for as little as 99 rupees (about $1).

Ads on Instagram only run after approval by moderation technology.

When the BBC reported one of the ads to Instagram, the social media platform responded 24 hours later, saying the post did not violate its “community guidelines.”

When the BBC later asked Meta, Instagram’s parent company, for comment, it said many ads had already been disabled and the accounts running them had been suspended. The company said it removed additional ads, disabled more accounts and blocked URLs of other content that violated its policies in response to the BBC’s findings.

Telegram said it removed more than 274,000 groups and channels related to child sexual abuse material in 2026.

The BBC created a pseudonymous account on Instagram after realizing the platform was posting sexually explicit content even if a user had not searched for such material.

This included women posting about food, weather and daily life in India, wearing revealing clothing and using sexual innuendos in their posts.

The new pseudonym account, established in India, began following these women and similar people (10 people in total) to investigate sexually explicit content on the platform.

In less than a week, Instagram began showing ads in the feed where women were on video calls and clearly showed naked couples having sex.

Days later, it began showing ads of children with adults in sexually suggestive situations, which included links to their Telegram channels.

In total, approximately 30 unique ads promoting child sexual exploitation were uncovered, although some were shared across multiple accounts.

The pseudonymous account was also shown approximately 20 ads containing adult pornography.

Distribution of both child sexual abuse material and adult pornography is criminalized in India; According to Meta’s policy, ads must not contain adult nudity, genitalia, or content that sexually exploits or endangers children. The BBC reported all the ads and Telegram channels to Indian authorities.

One ad showed a boy and girl, both appearing to be about 12 years old, engaging in sexual intercourse.

Another showed a man with his arm around a girl, and the message said he was 52 and the girl was 12. “Click to watch more,” it said, linking to a Telegram channel.

The BBC published an advert on Instagram showing a very young girl in tears and a statement saying she had been sexually assaulted.

But 24 hours later, Instagram responded, saying it did not remove the ad because “our review team found that the advertiser’s ad did not violate our community standards.”

Meta later told the BBC that “no system is perfect and our review process may not detect all policy breaches”.

“We continue to implement proactive detection technology after ads go live, and anyone can report an ad they think violates our rules,” Meta said.

He added that if he becomes aware of clear child abuse, he will report it to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC) in accordance with the law. NCMEC is the central global reporting system for online child sexual exploitation.

We reported two channels selling child sexual abuse videos to Telegram.

One of them was later removed and replaced with the message “This group cannot be viewed because it violates Telegram’s Terms of Service,” but the other continued to post new videos for sale.

Critics have previously accused the platform of not doing enough to prevent criminal content from being shared.

The Dubai-based company is not a member of NCMEC or the Internet Watch Foundation, which also works with most online platforms to find, report and remove such materials.

Telegram told the BBC that the company uses both automated and human moderation to eliminate child sexual abuse material (CSAM) from the app, resulting in “virtually eliminating the public dissemination of CSAM on its platform.”

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Ads are an important source of revenue for Meta.

In January it reported that almost 98% of the $200bn (£152bn) in revenue in the financial year ending 2025 would come from advertising. Analysts estimate that ads account for more than 90% of Instagram’s revenue.

While standard posts typically aren’t checked by Meta’s technology until they’re published, Meta says each ad is reviewed before being allowed onto their platform.

The review system relies primarily on automated technology and is designed to check images, videos, text and audio, as well as who the ad targets and where the links send them.

This software then rejects or approves the ads, allowing cases when unclear to be escalated for human review.

In March, Meta announced it was reducing its reliance on third-party human moderators and increasing its use of AI, adding that “experts will design, train, audit and evaluate our AI systems.”

The BBC described the ads we saw to Madan Lokur, a retired judge of the Supreme Court of India, who was concerned that Instagram was “making money by engaging in criminal activity”.

“This is a serious enough issue for the Supreme Court of India to take suo moto notice [when a court initiates legal proceedings without waiting for a case to be brought by someone else] and ensure that the government takes action against any social media platforms,” he says.

Justice Lokur added that although Indian law protects social media companies from being held responsible for content uploaded by users, “the platform cannot escape its responsibility”.

The former vice president of Facebook, known as Meta until its name change in 2021, said he was “appalled and not surprised” by the BBC’s findings.

Brian Boland, who worked at the company from 2009 to 2020 and helped launch its advertising and marketing business, said he left because he believed “they don’t care about users anywhere.”

He said Instagram’s algorithm is designed to keep users on the platform by showing them “something more extreme, more seductive.”

“It’s not like an algorithm saying ‘let’s pedophile people,’ but because they’re not directing and controlling it responsibly – and they’re just chasing revenue and click targets – it’s going to create these consequences if people don’t really aggressively guard against these systems.”

Between 2009 and 2010, Boland said, he led a project to remove ads that defrauded users, which meant “the company was allowed to remove a large portion of its revenue in the name of user safety and user experience.”

“I think the sad and tragic thing is that over time the balance between revenue and user experience has become a more fundamental part of the conversation.”

He says he deleted his Instagram account in 2025, adding: “If people en masse started to say, ‘I’m out, I’m done, forget it,’ the company would pay attention.”

In a statement sent to the BBC, Meta said: “Child abuse is a horrific crime and Meta is working aggressively to combat it across our apps.”

The allegation that Meta knowingly and deliberately targeted ads featuring children at users with an inappropriate interest in such material was stated to be “categorically false”.

The company denied it prioritized revenue over security and said more than four million accounts were automatically disabled in 2025 because they showed “sufficient signals of potentially suspicious behavior.”

“As determined criminals seek to evade detection, our expert teams are constantly working to improve our defenses, developing new technologies to root out predators, blocking links to infringing websites and sharing intelligence with other companies so they too can take action,” Meta said. he added.

Boland testified against Meta at a hearing in the US state of New Mexico earlier this year, where Meta was accused of misleading users about the safety of its child-oriented platforms.

The court ordered Meta to pay $375 million (£279 million) to New Mexico. A spokesman for the company said at the time that it disagreed with the decision and planned to appeal.

US-based social media companies are required to report child sexual abuse material on their platforms to the NCMEC Cyber ​​Tip Line.

The tip line then forwards the report to the appropriate law enforcement agency in the country where the incident is believed to have occurred.

In 2025, India received 1.9 million reports, second only to the United States with two million.

Shikha Goel, one of India’s top cyber police officers and director of the Cyber ​​Security Bureau in India’s Telangana state, said Instagram and Facebook, both owned by Meta, generate the most reports.

“But that doesn’t mean they’re the biggest,” he said. “If they have a good algorithm for tracking child sexual abuse material, then clearly more alerts will be generated.”

Rati Foundation, a Mumbai-based NGO that runs a helpline service for children facing online harm, also said that the vast majority of reports it received of child sexual abuse material came from Meta platforms.

It partners with social media platforms to help remove harmful content, but co-founder and director Siddharth Pillai said “criminals are using seamless navigation from Instagram to Telegram to evade our moderation efforts and continue to re-upload content we helped remove.”

Child sexual abuse material in India is often created by criminal groups such as human traffickers, but sometimes family and community members are also responsible, experts said.

Bhuwan Ribhu, founder of Just Rights for Children, a group of more than 250 organizations working to prevent violence against children in India, said crime was under-reported and police were still trying to develop technical skills to combat it.

To achieve this successfully, international cooperation and cross-border intelligence sharing is vital, he said.

“The entire demand and supply chain needs to be traced to find the tentacles of organized crime,” he said.