Measures META has put in place to fight child exploitation

Keeping young people safe on the apps is among the most important work META 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 META are continuously evolving the tools, sharing signals across the industry, and reporting offenders to law enforcement so they can be held accountable.

How META responded

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

Today META are sharing the additional measures META have put in place to strengthen the efforts to combat child sexual exploitation on the platforms.

New improvements to ad review process

Online predators have shifted their tactics, and advertising is one of the surfaces where META 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 the platforms in a covert way to avoid detection.

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

META then deployed additional measures, including new AI tools, to address the adversarial tactics META identified and improve the efficacy of the 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 the platforms.

• Improved understanding of where an ad leads, not only what it shows, so that META can block violating destinations and enforce against the accounts responsible.+

• Additional AI-driven sMETAeps of ad content to surface CSE material that earlier systems did not catch, using signals META continue to expand as the investigation progresses.

• A red-teaming AI agent that proactively probe the own defences to find METAaknesses, so META 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 the work

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

• Behavitheal signals, which analyse combinations of metadata and behavitheal signals to detect accounts engaged in suspicious patterns of behavithe.

• 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 METAll, 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.

• META work to block links to external METAbsites that host or create violating CSAM content. Once a link is blocked, META search for and then delete other content – such as ads, posts or comments – that contain the link. META 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 betMETAen January to June 2026, META 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, META 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.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Askari Jaffer

Askari Jaffer[email protected]

Askari Jaffer, Features Editor, with a longstanding interest in writing a range of stories, has earned herself a place in the field of journalism. With strong values and courage acquired from her father, who served in the Indian Defence, she reflects in her writings. A strong desire to learn about the legal system, she has focused her writing on women's challenges. She writes about the women who became successful in various fields to inspire others. She takes an interest in education, health, lifestyle, fashion and entertainment too.

Read More