Measures We’ve Put in Place to Fight Child Exploitation

Keeping young people safe on our apps is among the most important work we do, and it never stops.

Sophisticated bad actors who try to exploit children online don’t stay in one place. These determined predators move across different platforms, and change their tactics to evade detection. Staying ahead requires constant adaptation and that is why we are continuously evolving our tools, sharing signals across the industry, and reporting offenders to law enforcement so they can be held accountable.

How We Responded

Whenever we detect or are made aware of potential child sexual abuse or exploitative content on our platform, we investigate it. If the content violates our policies, we remove it and in cases where the signals indicate malicious sharing by predators, we disable the accounts behind it. We then report the content to the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children (NCMEC), in line with applicable law. But we haven’t stopped there. We have been doing strategic network disruptions on child safety for years – our team of experts including former FBI investigators who conduct manual investigations to proactively uncover, remove and report networks of predatory accounts. We continue to investigate how these networks behave so we can act against them at a network level, not just account by account. 

Today we’re sharing the additional measures we’ve put in place to strengthen our efforts to combat child sexual exploitation on our platforms.

New Improvements to Our Ad Review Process

Online predators have shifted their tactics, and advertising is one of the surfaces where we have seen this play out. Bad actors persistently try to exploit the systems, often with content designed specifically to evade detection. An ad can look harmless on its own while directing people towards illegal material hosted off our platforms in a covert way to avoid detection.

Once we understood the design of this malicious advertising scheme, we didn’t stop at the ones reported to us. We widened our investigation to find related activity across our platforms, disabled the violating accounts behind it, and blocked the off-platform links involved.

We then deployed additional measures, including new AI tools, to address the adversarial tactics we identified and improve the efficacy of our systems for identifying ads that either feature CSAM or that direct people to violating activity off-platform. These included:

• New Large Language Model (LLM) detection for “signposting” of Child Sexual Exploitation (CSE) material – seemingly benign ad content that is strongly suspected of covertly directing people to illegal content or harmful activity off our platforms.
• Improved understanding of where an ad leads, not only what it shows, so that we can block violating destinations and enforce against the accounts responsible.
• Additional AI-driven sweeps of ad content to surface CSE material that earlier systems did not catch, using signals we continue to expand as our investigation progresses.
• A red-teaming AI agent that proactively probe our own defences to find weaknesses, so we can identify new adversarial CSE tactics before they scale.
• Strengthened recidivism detection – the mechanisms for identifying bad actors who try to create new accounts after removal.

The Technology Behind Our Work

Our range of AI and automated tools work to proactively detect CSAM and related child safety violations:

• Behavioural signals, which analyse combinations of metadata and behavioural signals to detect accounts engaged in suspicious patterns of behaviour.
• PhotoDNA and other photo and video-matching technology, used across all of Meta’s apps since 2011 to detect identical or near-identical copies of known CSAM and remove them. Meta maintains one of the industry’s largest databases of image and video hashes for this purpose, contributes newly identified hashes to it and then shares those hashes with industry through the Tech Coalition’s Lantern program, so that other participating companies can remove that content as well, which helps keep the broader internet safer.  Meta also uses the same technology to identify CSAM in off-platform link previews. All CSAM content identified with these matching technologies is reported to Law Enforcement Authorities with the assistance of NCMEC in compliance with applicable law.
• We work to block links to external websites that host or create violating CSAM content. Once a link is blocked, we search for and then delete other content – such as ads, posts or comments – that contain the link. We take steps to prevent people from posting content containing a blocked link on Facebook, Instagram and Threads, and ads containing blocked links would be rejected at upload.
• Heuristics-based rules that combine automated classifiers, AI models and other signals to proactively identify and act on new or emerging violation patterns at scale, including in ads.

Where the Numbers Stand

Globally between January to June 2026, we actioned 33.2 million pieces of child sexual exploitation content from Facebook and Instagram, over 97% found and proactively addressed before anyone reported it, while in India, we actioned 5.3 million pieces of child sexual exploitation content on Facebook and Instagram for the same duration, with over 98% found and proactively addressed before anyone reported it. 

Working with Law Enforcement

We’re consistently working with the authorities to hold the people behind these crimes accountable. This September, we announced that Meta will report child safety cases directly to the National Cyber Crime Reporting Portal (cybercrime.gov.in) run by the Indian Cybercrime Coordination Centre (I4C). This builds on our existing reporting where we report child sexual abuse material to Law Enforcement through the National Cyber Crime Reporting Portal with the assistance of National Center for Missing & Exploited Children (NCMEC).