Warning: This story contains descriptions of abuse

Instagram has been running paid adverts promoting child sexual abuse material in India, a BBC Eye investigation has found.

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.

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”.

Adverts are an important source of income for Meta.

In January, it reported that almost 98% of its $200bn (£152bn) revenue for the financial year ending 2025 came from advertising. Analysts estimate that ads account for more than 90% of Instagram’s revenue.

While standard posts are not generally checked by Meta’s technology until they are published, Meta says every advert is reviewed before being allowed on its platforms.

Its review system relies primarily on automated technology and is designed to check images, video, text and audio, as well as who the ad is targeting and where links send them to.

This software then rejects or approves adverts, escalating cases for human review when it is uncertain.

In March, Meta announced it was reducing its reliance on third-party human moderators and increasing the use of AI, adding that “experts will design, train, oversee, and evaluate our AI systems”.

The BBC described the ads we had seen to a retired justice of India’s Supreme Court, Madan Lokur, who was concerned that Instagram was “making money by participating in a criminal activity”.

“This is a serious enough issue for the Supreme Court of India to take suo moto cognisance [when a court initiates legal proceedings without waiting for a case to be brought by someone else] and get the government to act against any social media platform,” he says.

Justice Lokur added that despite Indian law protecting social media companies from being held liable for content uploaded by users, “the platform cannot, cannot shirk its responsibility”.

A former vice-president of Facebook, as Meta used to be known until it changed name in 2021, said he was “horrified and unsurprised” by the BBC’s findings.

Brian Boland, who worked for the company between 2009 and 2020 and helped build the advertising and marketing business, said he left because he believed “they didn’t care about users anywhere”.

He said Instagram’s algorithm was designed to keep users on the platform by showing them “something more extreme, more tantalising”.

“It’s not like an algorithm that says ‘let’s make people paedophiles’, but because they’re not responsibly guiding and controlling it – and it’s just pursuing the goals of revenue and clicks – it will create these outcomes if people aren’t being truly, aggressively protective over these systems.”

Boland said that between 2009 and 2010 he led a project to remove adverts that were scamming users, which meant he “was allowed to, at the time, remove a massive part of the revenue of the company in the sake of user safety and user experience”.

“I think what’s sad and tragic is over time, the trade-off of revenue and user experience became a more core part of the conversation.”

He says he deleted his Instagram account in 2025, adding: “If people en masse started to say, ‘I’m out, I’m done, forget it,’ the company would pay attention.”

In a statement sent to the BBC, Meta said: “Child exploitation is a horrific crime and Meta works aggressively to fight it on our apps.”

It said it was “categorially inaccurate” to suggest that Meta knowingly and deliberately targeted ads featuring children to users with an inappropriate interest in such material.

The company denied prioritising revenue over safety and said that in 2025 it automatically disabled more than four million accounts for showing “enough signals of potentially suspicious behavior”.

“While determined criminals try to evade detection, our expert teams are constantly working to improve our defenses, developing new technology to root out predators, blocking links to violating websites, and sharing intelligence with other companies so they can take action too,” Meta added.

Boland testified against Meta in a trial in the US state of New Mexico earlier this year, in which it was accused of misleading users over the safety of its platforms for children.

The court ordered Meta to pay $375m (£279m) to New Mexico. At the time, a spokeswoman for the company said it disagreed with the verdict and intended to appeal.

US-based social media companies are mandated to report child sexual abuse material on their platform to the NCMEC Cyber Tipline.

The tipline then refers the report to the appropriate law enforcement agency in the country it believes the incident occurred.

In 2025, India received 1.9 million reports, second only to the United States with two million.

One of India’s top cyber police officers, Shikha Goel, who is director of the Cyber Security Bureau in the Indian state of Telangana, said Instagram and Facebook, both owned by Meta, generated the most tiplines.

“But that does not mean they are the largest,” she said. “If they have a good algorithm to track child sexual abuse material, then obviously more alerts will be generated.”

A Mumbai-based NGO, the Rati Foundation, which runs a helpline service for children facing online harms, also said that the vast majority of reports it receives on child sexual abuse material come from Meta platforms.

It collaborates with social media platforms to help get harmful content removed, but co-founder and director Siddharth Pillai said that “criminals use the seamless navigation from Instagram to Telegram to evade our moderation efforts, and keep reuploading the content we help take down”.

Experts said child sexual abuse material in India was usually created by criminal groups, such as human traffickers, although family and community members were also sometimes responsible.

Bhuwan Ribhu, the founder of Just Rights for Children, a network of more than 250 organisations working to prevent violence against children in India, said the crime was not reported enough and police were still trying to develop the technical skills to tackle it.

And to do that successfully, he said international co-operation and intelligence sharing across borders was vital.

In order to “find the tentacles of organised crime, the entire chain of demand and supply needs to be tracked”, he said.