S. Krishnan, Secretary in Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (file photo) | Photo Credit: SUSHIL KUMAR VERMA

The government on Thursday said it will await Meta’s formal reply to notice served last week over Child Sexual Exploitative and Abuse Material (CSEAM) in paid advertisements on Instagram, and a view be taken basis the response given by the company.

Speaking on the sidelines of CII GCC Business Summit, S Krishnan, Secretary, Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY), said “We will await the formal response to the notice that we have issued, and thereafter we will take a view based on what the response is.”

MeitY Minister Ashwini Vaishnaw had directed his officials to summon Meta over Instagram ads allegedly promoting child sexual abuse material. The Ministry demanded an explanation and information from the company on action that had been taken.

The regulatory scrutiny from the government came amid a BBC report which alleged that Meta’s recommendation algorithm had been promoting videos containing child sexual abuse material, exposing serious gaps in the safeguard mechamisms.

The BBC investigation had also allegedly found advertisements of this nature appearing on Facebook and Instagram, despite Meta’s advertising policies explicitly prohibiting nudity and sexually explicit content.

Meanwhile, Meta through a blogpost on Tuesday refuted the claims stating that it was categorically inaccurate to suggest that it 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 have automatically removed over four-million of these accounts last year,” Meta had said adding that the company removed 1.60 lakh accounts in India in last six months using AI tools to detect suspicious links, child exploitative activity signals.

Meta detailed the company’s ongoing efforts to combat child exploitation across its apps, highlighting AI-powered detection tools, its clearly laid-out policies against child nudity, abuse, and exploitation, and the large-scale enforcement action.

“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,” it published in the blog.

The company added that last year it had removed over four-million suspicious accounts and 36-million pieces of child exploitation content globally.

Published on July 9, 2026