New Delhi: Facebook and Instagram owner Meta on Wednesday said it has deployed new AI tools to crack down on ads that covertly lead users to child abuse material, as it disclosed that it acted on 5.3 million pieces of child sexual exploitation content in India during the first half of 2026.
More than 98% of the content on Facebook and Instagram in India was found and addressed before anyone reported it, the company said in a blog post.
Globally, it actioned 33.2 million such items on the two platforms between January and June, with over 97% found proactively.
“Today we’re sharing the additional measures we’ve put in place to strengthen our efforts to combat child sexual exploitation on our platforms,” it said.
These measures include new AI tools to address the identified adversarial tactics and improve the efficacy of systems for detecting ads that either feature child sexual abuse material or that direct people to violating activity off-platform.
“Keeping young people safe on our apps is among the most important work we do, and it never stops,” Meta said. It further noted that predators have shifted tactics to advertising, where an ad can look harmless on its own while leading people to illegal material hosted off its platforms.
After identifying the scheme, it widened its investigation beyond the ads reported to it, disabled the accounts behind them and blocked the off-platform links involved, according to the company.
The new measures include a large language model system to detect “signposting”, meaning ad content that appears benign but is strongly suspected of directing people to illegal content. Meta said it has also improved how it assesses where an ad leads, not only what it shows, and added AI-driven sweeps to surface material that earlier systems missed.
It is also using a red-teaming AI agent that probes its own defences for weaknesses, and has strengthened detection of banned users who create new accounts.
Besides this, Meta said it continues to use PhotoDNA and other image and video matching technology, which it has deployed across its apps since 2011, along with behavioural signals and rules-based systems. It shares hashes of identified material with other companies through the Tech Coalition’s Lantern programme, and blocks links to external sites that host such content, deleting other posts, comments or ads containing them.
Meta said it reports confirmed material to the US-based National Center for Missing & Exploited Children. In September, Meta had announced it would report child safety cases directly to the National Cyber Crime Reporting Portal run by India’s Indian Cybercrime Coordination Centre.
