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.
In another case of Meta-owned WhatsApp’s ‘username’ notice by MeitY, the instant messaging company’s response was due on Thursday, Krishnan informed. Last Wednesday, the Centre issued a notice to Meta questioning the proposed username feature on WhatsApp, flagging concerns that it could materially increase online fraud, phishing, digital arrest scams, and impersonation attacks.
Last Friday (July 3), a team from Meta met officials in the IT Ministry following the notice summoning them. In the notice, the government asked Meta to explain why action shouldn’t be initiated under the IT Act and Rules over WhatsApp’s new feature that may increase cybercrimes.
When asked WhatsApp, the company said, “The deadline is today and it will be submitted today.”
Meanwhile, Krishnan also said the government will assess Meta’s new Muse AI image generator under the existing legal framework.
The comment assumes significance as Meta’s launch of Muse Image, touted as its most powerful AI image generator and first media generation model developed by Superintelligence Labs, has drawn criticism and user concerns over data privacy, image-scraping and consent.
“We will have to look at it with reference to the legal framework, and whether it is in accordance with the legal framework or not. We will examine the representations we receive,” Krishnan added..
Published on July 9, 2026
