Meta to report child abuse cases to law enforcement in India: sources

Social media giant Meta has agreed to report child sexual abuse cases to the appropriate law enforcement agencies in India, government sources said on Tuesday. While the move is the first step towards making the platforms safe for children, they said much more needs to be done.

Meta India head Arun Srinivas appeared before the National Commission for Protection of Child Rights (NCPCR) last week as part of an inquiry into alleged advertisements of child abuse content on Meta-owned platforms in India.

"The government shall take action against platforms that do not take proactive steps for the safety of children," a government source said.


The Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) has been holding regular meetings with Meta on technical measures since August, when senior Meta executives, led by global chief policy officer Joel Kaplan, were summoned to India over a host of issues, including the spread of child abuse content online.

Comments from Meta were not immediately available. This story will be updated if queries mailed to Meta elicit a response.

"To collectively strengthen our efforts to combat this harm, Meta will now report child safety matters directly to the Cybercrime portal managed by the Indian Cybercrime Coordination Centre (I4C)" a Meta spokesperson said. I4C is an attached office under the Home Affairs Ministry, and manages the National Cyber Crime Reporting Portal.

Child abuse content

The NCPCR had issued a notice to Meta on July 3, hours after an investigative report by BBC Eye alleged advertisements related to child sexual exploitative and abuse material were live on Meta-owned Instagram in India.

The ads used graphic terms, and linked users to channels on the messaging app Telegram, where they could buy the material for as little as Rs 99. Given that ads on Instagram are only published after first being approved by its moderation technology, MeitY had directed Meta to disable them, and other content promoting and facilitating access to such material. Days later, Meta said it had removed 160,000 suspicious accounts in India over the preceding six months using advanced AI detection tools that identify when individuals post suspicious off-platform links.

In August, Kaplan and his team committed to further strengthen automated monitoring systems to filter and curb child abuse content on Meta platforms in a meeting with Electronics and Industry Minister Ashwini Vaishnaw and other senior MeitY officials, ET had reported.

Since then the NCPCR, and the National Human Rights Commission (NHRC) have begun an independent investigation into the matter and sought specific, point-wise action-taken reports from MeitY, the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting (MIB) and the Delhi Police.

According to the NHRC notice, a copy of which ET has seen, the advertisements for child abuse materials allegedly used phrases such as “rape video” and “child video” and redirected users to Telegram channels where the content was allegedly offered for sale.

The Centre remains engaged with other platforms as well to proactively identify and remove such content, the government source said.

"The government is continuously engaging with social media platforms to curb harmful information. Online safety of children is a fundamental principle for any social media to operate in India and it is non-negotiable," he added.