In total, about 30 unique ads appeared to promote child sexual exploitation, although some of these were shared by multiple accounts.
The alias account also featured approximately 20 advertisements containing adult pornography.
Distribution of both child sexual abuse material and adult pornography is a criminal offense in India, while Meta’s policy states that ads should not contain adult nudity, genitalia or material that sexually exploits or endangers children. BBC has reported all advertisements and Telegram channels to Indian authorities.
One advertisement showed a boy and a girl, both looking about 12 years old, engaging in sexual activity.
Another showed a man with his arm around a girl, writing that he was 52 and the girl was 12. “Click to see more,” it said, linking to the Telegram channel.
The BBC reported an ad on Instagram depicting a very young girl crying, with words suggesting she had been sexually assaulted.
But 24 hours later, Instagram responded that it had not removed the ad because “our review team found that the advertiser’s ad does not go against our community standards”.
Meta later told the BBC that “no system is perfect, and our review process cannot detect all policy violations”.
“We continue to run proactive detection technology on ads after they go live, and anyone can report to us an ad they think violates our rules,” Meta said.
It says when it becomes aware of apparent child exploitation it reports it to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC) in compliance with the law. NCMEC is a centralized global reporting system for online sexual exploitation of children.
We reported two channels selling child sexual abuse videos to Telegram.
One of them was later removed and replaced with a message: “This group cannot be displayed 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 stop the sharing of criminal content.
The Dubai-based company is not a member of NCMEC. It joined the Internet Watch Foundation in late 2024, which also works with most online platforms to find, report, and remove such content.
Telegram told the BBC that the company uses both automated and human moderation to eliminate child sexual abuse material (CSAM) from the app, and as a result it says it has “virtually eliminated the public dissemination of CSAM from its platform”.
