Instagram has been running paid adverts promoting child sexual abuse material in India, a BBC Eye investigation has found. This was reported by Qazaqyia.kz citing BBC News.
The ads, seen by the BBC World Service, use terms including "rape video" and "child video" and link users to channels on the messaging app Telegram, where they can buy the material for as little as 99 rupees (about $1).
Ads on Instagram are only published after first being approved by its moderation technology. When the BBC reported one of the ads to Instagram, the social media platform responded 24 hours later saying the post did not violate its "community guidelines".
Later, when the BBC asked Instagram's parent company Meta for comment, it said it had already disabled several adverts and suspended the accounts posting them. The company said it had removed additional ads, disabled more accounts and blocked URLs for other content that violated its policies in response to the BBC's findings.
Telegram said it had removed more than 274,000 groups and channels related to child sexual abuse material in 2026.
The BBC set up an alias account on Instagram after we noticed that the platform was pushing sexually suggestive content, even when a user hadn't searched for such material. This included women posting about food, weather and daily life in India, who were dressed in revealing clothing and using sexual innuendo in their posts.
The new alias account, which was set up in India, started following these women and other similar people - 10 in all - to investigate sexualised content on the platform. In less than a week, Instagram started showing advertisements on the feed featuring women offering video calls and showing clearly naked couples having sex. Days later, it began showing adverts of children with adults in sexually suggestive situations, with links to Telegram channels.
A retired justice of India's Supreme Court, Madan Lokur, said he was concerned that Instagram was "making money by participating in a criminal activity".
In total, about 30 unique adverts appeared promoting child sexual abuse, although some of these were shared by multiple accounts. The alias account was also shown about 20 ads featuring adult pornography.
The distribution of both child sexual abuse material and adult pornography are criminal offences in India, while Meta's policy states that ads must not contain adult nudity, genitals or content that sexually exploits or endangers children. The BBC has reported all of the ads and the Telegram channels to the Indian authorities.
One ad showed a boy and girl, both of whom appeared to be about 12 years old, engaging in a sexual act. Another showed a man with his arm around a girl, with text saying he was 52 and the girl was 12. "Click to watch more," it said, linking out to a Telegram channel.
The BBC reported an advert to Instagram showing a very young girl in tears, with wording indicating that she had been sexually assaulted. But 24 hours later, Instagram replied saying it hadn't removed the advert 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 may not detect all policy violations". "We continue to run proactive detection technology on ads once they're live, and anyone can report an ad to us that they think breaks our rules," Meta said.
It added that 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. The NCMEC is the centralised global reporting system for the online sexual exploitation of children.
We reported two channels to Telegram for selling child sexual abuse videos. One of them was subsequently taken down and replaced with a message saying: "This group can't be displayed because it violated 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 prevent the sharing of criminal content. The Dubai-based company is not a member of either the NCMEC or the Internet Watch Foundation, which also works with most online platforms to find, report and remove such material.
Telegram told the BBC that the company uses both automated and human moderation to eradicate child sexual abuse material (CSAM) from the app, and as a result it says it has "virtually eliminated the public spread of CSAM from its platform".