Delhi Police registers FIR against Meta India over child sexual abuse content

NHRC member Priyank Kanoongo said the police has registered an FIR over child sexual abuse material on Meta platforms followed the commission's directions, a month after Meta announced AI measures to detect and remove child sexual exploitation content.

In Short

• NHRC member Priyank Kanoongo says action follows commission's directions
• Meta reports 5.3 million child exploitation content takedowns in India
• Over 98% of content detected proactively between January and June 2026

Delhi Police has registered an FIR against Meta India over the availability of child sexual abuse content on its platforms, National Human Rights Commission (NHRC) member Priyank Kanoongo said on Thursday.

“Acting on our directions, Delhi Police has registered an FIR regarding the availability of Child Sexual Exploitative and Abuse Material (CSEAM) on platforms operated by Meta India,” Kanoongo said in a post on X.

The development comes a month after Meta announced a series of AI-driven measures to strengthen its systems for detecting and removing such content across Facebook and Instagram.

Between January and June 2026, the company took action against 5.3 million pieces of child sexual exploitation content on Facebook and Instagram in India.

In a statement issued in October, the company said more than 98 per cent of the material was identified and addressed proactively, before users reported it.

Globally, it acted against 33.2 million pieces of such content during the same period, with over 97 per cent detected proactively.

The company said online predators are increasingly using advertisements to evade detection, often disguising them as harmless content while using them to direct users to illegal material hosted on external websites.

In response, the company has expanded its investigations beyond individual reports to identify connected activity across its platforms, disable accounts involved and block links directing users to violating content outside its services.

Meta has also introduced large language model-based detection systems to identify what it calls "signposting" in advertisements, flagging seemingly harmless ads that may direct users to illegal or harmful content.

The company has enhanced its ability to examine the destinations of advertisements, rather than assessing only the content displayed in them. This allows it to block websites hosting violating material and take action against the accounts responsible.

The tech-giant has further introduced AI-driven sweeps of advertisements to identify child sexual exploitation content that may have escaped earlier detection systems.

It has also deployed a red-teaming AI agent to test its own safeguards and identify vulnerabilities that could potentially be exploited by predators.

The company said it has strengthened mechanisms to identify repeat offenders who attempt to return to its platforms by creating new accounts after being removed.

In India, Meta has also said it will report child safety cases directly to the National Cyber Crime Reporting Portal, operated by the Indian Cybercrime Coordination Centre (I4C).

The company said the move builds on its existing practice of reporting child sexual abuse material to law enforcement through the portal, with assistance from the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children.

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