Meta unveils AI tools to detect child abuse material, steps up India reporting

Meta has announced a new package of artificial-intelligence tools to fight child sexual exploitation on its platforms, after spotting offenders using advertising to steer users towards illegal material. The announcement came on Wednesday, amid heightened scrutiny of the company in India over child-safety failures (Meta newsroom; NDTV Profit).

The measures target malicious ad tactics: a large language model system hunts “signposting” — apparently benign ad copy suspected of covertly directing users to illegal content hosted off-platform — while upgraded ad-destination analysis examines where an advert leads, not just what it shows. Meta has also added AI-driven sweeps of ad content, a red-teaming AI agent that probes its own defences for weaknesses, and strengthened detection of offenders who create new accounts after removal.

Alongside the tools, Meta published enforcement figures: between January and June 2026 it actioned 33.2 million pieces of child sexual exploitation content across Facebook and Instagram, with over 97 per cent caught proactively before anyone reported it. In India, the figure was 5.3 million pieces, with over 98 per cent detected before being flagged (ET Now).

The company also folded in a commitment made this September: suspected child-safety cases from India will now be reported directly to the National Cyber Crime Reporting Portal (cybercrime.gov.in) run by the Indian Cybercrime Coordination Centre (I4C) (NDTV).