New Delhi: Delhi Police have registered an FIR against Meta India over paid Instagram advertisements that allegedly pointed users toward child sexual abuse material. The complaint invokes the POCSO Act. It also lands while the government is reportedly weighing whether to scale back the legal shield platforms have relied on for years. The FIR itself is still thin on public detail, so what follows is the surrounding record.
How did these ads get approved?
This is the question everyone keeps asking. New Delhi gave Meta seven days to explain how paid CSEAM ads passed Instagram’s review, after a BBC investigation set off the whole chain. The ads allegedly redirected users to Telegram channels where such content was offered for sale. An ad is a paid product. Someone submitted it, someone or something reviewed it, and it ran. Nobody has publicly explained where that process broke.
Can a platform still claim it is just a host?
That’s the legal knot. The “safe harbour” protection under the IT Act treats platforms as passive carriers. The pushback now is that algorithms make them active curators, particularly when they’re taking money to promote content. Officials reportedly want to strip that immunity for promoted material, but changes of that kind need parliamentary approval, and critics warn about the legal risks. Nothing is settled.
Meta’s own numbers versus the allegations
I can’t give you a clean set of Meta figures here, because none have been made public in this case. What’s on record is thinner. The company has highlighted its AI-based detection and safety measures, and it replied to the child rights commission within a week. Meta officials later appeared before that body. The tension is plain enough, though. Automated detection that works at scale on organic posts apparently didn’t stop paid ads that, by the allegations, were pushing people to illegal content.
The money trail
Follow the cash and you hit the same gap. The NHRC told police to preserve advertisement records, metadata and financial trails, and identify advertisers and perpetrators. Who paid for these ads, how much, and whether Meta earned revenue from them are exactly the things investigators now have to establish. Until they do, anyone claiming to know who profited is guessing.
Were authorities informed quickly enough?
Here the record gets awkward for several parties, not just Meta. The NHRC directed Delhi Police to examine whether Meta and other intermediaries met their mandatory reporting duties under POCSO. Section 19 of that law requires suspected offences to be reported to police. But the police had their own delay. The NHRC took a “very serious view” when the Delhi Police Commissioner hadn’t filed the requested action-taken report and issued summons. The commission first asked for that report on July 8, and an FIR followed months later. Hard to call that a model of speed.
The wider picture is grim too. One analysis notes India received roughly 1.9 million CyberTipline reports on suspected CSAM in 2025, but only a fraction lead to police action.
Why this could reshape the industry
If this case moves forward, the fight won’t stay with Meta. Facebook, YouTube and X all run promoted content too. A finding that a platform is answerable for what its ad system amplifies would change how every one of them handles ad review, reporting and liability in India.
Courts and Parliament will decide that, not a social media summary. For now there’s an FIR, a pile of regulator notices, and a lot of unanswered questions about a system that took money to show people things it should have blocked.
