Meta Child Abuse Row: Experts Back Stricter Rules, Stronger Accountability

Union IT Minister Ashwini Vaishnaw has directed officials in the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) to summon Meta over reports that paid advertisements promoting child sexual abuse material (CSAM) appeared on Instagram, officials familiar with the matter said. Experts state that there are several loopholes that leave children exposed to being targeted on social media companies, highlighting the need for stricter implementation of laws and enhanced scrutiny.

MeitY will seek an explanation from the company on how such advertisements were approved and served to users despite safeguards designed to prevent the circulation of child sexual abuse material, the officials said.

According to the National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB), 1,099 of the 1,238 cybercrime cases registered against children in 2024 related specifically to the publishing or transmission of sexually explicit material involving children. Overall crimes against children rose 5.8 per cent to 1.87 lakh cases, while offences involving children have increased by nearly 46 per cent since 2020. International data underscores the scale of the challenge. The US-based National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC) recorded more than 2.25 million CyberTipline reports linked to India in 2025 - the highest for any country. Since India signed an MoU with NCMEC, more than 69.05 lakh CyberTipline reports have been shared with states and Union Territories for police verification. In 2023, the National Human Rights Commission issued notices to the Centre and states over reports of a 250-300 per cent increase in CSAM circulating across social media platforms.

Officials familiar with the matter said the Meta episode is being examined through the lens of India's existing legal obligations on intermediaries, particularly where a platform has accepted payment to amplify content through its advertising systems.

Child sexual abuse material (CSAM) refers to images, videos or other material depicting the sexual abuse or sexual exploitation of a child. Cyber law expert Pavan Duggal said the term has replaced "child pornography" because the Supreme Court has recognised that pornography implies consensual adult activity, whereas every CSAM image is documented evidence of the abuse of a child. He added that with the rise of generative artificial intelligence, synthetically generated CSAM has emerged as an equally serious and rapidly growing challenge.

Under Section 67B of the Information Technology Act, publishing, transmitting, advertising, promoting, or facilitating CSAM is a criminal offence. The provision also criminalises creating, browsing, downloading and exchanging such material, and covers online grooming of children. Safe harbour protection under Section 79 is conditional upon intermediaries observing due diligence requirements. The Information Technology (Intermediary Guidelines and Digital Media Ethics Code) Rules, 2021 require significant social media intermediaries to proactively deploy technology to identify CSAM, remove such content expeditiously, preserve evidence, cooperate with law enforcement, appoint compliance and grievance officers, and publish monthly compliance reports. The Protection of Children from Sexual Offences (POCSO) Act separately criminalises the use of children for pornographic purposes and the transmission, storage, and commercial distribution of such material, while also mandating reporting of offences. Provisions of the Digital Personal Data Protection Act, 2023, could also become relevant if children's personal data, behavioural profiling or targeted advertising systems were involved in the delivery of such advertisements.

Government officials said the latest action against Meta builds on the Centre's broader efforts to tighten compliance by digital platforms. In 2023, MeitY directed major intermediaries, including X, YouTube and Telegram, to proactively identify and permanently remove CSAM, warning that failure to comply with due diligence obligations could result in the loss of safe harbour protections under the IT Act.

Duggal said India has a "reasonably robust statutory framework" to tackle CSAM, but the challenge lies in implementation, particularly where platforms monetise illegal content through advertising. "When a platform accepts money to amplify content, it ceases to be a passive conduit and becomes a commercial beneficiary. Paid advertisements pass through the platform's own review pipeline-they are actively approved, targeted and monetised. There is therefore no legal or moral justification for advertisements receiving anything less than the most stringent human-plus-automated scrutiny," he said, adding that where exploitative material travels through a paid channel, a platform's claim to intermediary safe harbour "must be treated as forfeited" because due diligence stands compromised.

Kazim Rizvi, founder of The Dialogue, said India's legal framework already criminalises CSAM and imposes due diligence obligations on intermediaries, but the real challenge lies in implementation. "The IT Act, POCSO Act and the IT Rules provide a strong legal framework, but the gap lies in how these obligations translate into platform practice. India's framework is stronger on prohibiting unlawful content and requiring takedowns than on verifying whether platforms' safety systems are actually effective in preventing, detecting, escalating and reporting child-safety risks," he said.

Rizvi said India's response should move beyond a narrow compliance model towards a broader child-safety governance approach. "Existing laws already recognise CSAM as a serious offence, but implementation needs to treat child safety as a core design and accountability priority across digital services. That means prioritising prevention, early detection, safer product design, meaningful user reporting, institutional coordination and regular assessment of how platform systems affect children," he said.

He noted that global regulatory approaches are increasingly centred on "safety by design", child rights and platform accountability. "The Committee on the Rights of the Child has emphasised that states must ensure children's rights are protected in the digital environment, while OECD and Australia's e-Safety framework focuses on anticipating, detecting and reducing online harms before they occur. India can build on its existing legal framework by making child safety a more explicit regulatory priority across platform design, enforcement, transparency and cooperation mechanisms," Rizvi said.

Several jurisdictions have already moved in that direction. Australia's Online Safety Act empowers the e-Safety Commissioner to order the removal of child sexual exploitation material and impose civil penalties for non-compliance. Under the country's Basic Online Safety Expectations framework, major technology companies are required to demonstrate how they are reducing child safety risks across recommender systems, artificial intelligence tools, encrypted services and reporting mechanisms.

The European Union has adopted a similar systems-based approach through the Digital Services Act, which requires very large online platforms to assess and mitigate systemic risks arising from illegal content, recommender systems and online advertising. The law mandates transparent advertisement repositories, stronger protections for minors, easier reporting of illegal content and prohibits targeted advertising directed at children. Regulators can also examine whether advertising approval systems, recommendation engines and algorithms themselves create foreseeable risks that facilitate illegal content.

Duggal said India now needs "sharper laws, stricter enforcement and smarter architecture-in that order". While describing the existing legal framework as robust, he said the law should explicitly address AI-generated CSAM, harmonise penalties under the IT Act and POCSO, and strengthen platform accountability through mandatory reporting obligations, meaningful financial penalties and greater responsibility for compliance officers. "Ultimately, the strength of a law lies not in the years of imprisonment it prescribes but in the certainty of its enforcement," he said.

Responding to NDTV's queries, a Meta spokesperson said: "Meta has a zero tolerance policy for soliciting or sharing CSAM, including in ads. We use advanced AI technology to proactively detect violating content and individuals, but we are in a constant battle with criminals who hide among our 3.5 billion users and try to evade our detection. That is why our expert teams are constantly working to improve our defenses, develop new technology to root out predators, block links to violating websites, and share intelligence with other companies so they can take action too."