"Exposing Instagram's Darkest Secret": BBC's Divya Arya on Ads for Child Sex Abuse Material in India

A new investigation from the BBC is accusing Instagram of running paid ads in India promoting child sexual abuse material. BBC senior correspondent Divya Arya explains how Instagram’s AI-powered review process frequently fails to flag content suggesting illegal and abusive activity, and how the platform’s profit-driven algorithms boost accounts paying to advertise this content. Instagram’s parent company Meta has denied culpability, “saying that it’s absolutely unfair to say that they prioritize revenue over user safety and that they underinvest in safety mechanisms.” In response to Arya’s findings, the Indian government is now demanding that Meta immediately remove all such ads and child exploitation materials, and submit a detailed explanation on how such advertisements were allowed on its platforms. “This illegal content should not be on the internet, and somebody needs to be held accountable for it,” says Arya. Transcript AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org. I’m Amy Goodman, with Juan González. As countries around the world are trying to create greater protections for young users of social media, we turn now to a disturbing new story out of India, where the government has demanded the popular social media company Instagram immediately remove all illegal ads and content exploiting children. This follows a new BBC investigation accusing Instagram of running paid ads promoting child sexual abuse material in India. The BBC investigation found 30 unique Instagram ads using terms like “rape video” and “child video” that link users to content available for purchase for just over a dollar on the separate and unrelated messaging app Telegram. After a stern notice from India’s Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology last weekend, Meta issued a blog post Tuesday saying, quote, “It is categorically inaccurate to suggest that we’d knowingly and deliberately target ads featuring children to people based on an inappropriate interest in children,” unquote. This is a clip from the new BBC Eye investigation. It’s called The Careless Machine: Exposing Instagram’s Darkest Secret. The clip features multiple voices, including a retired Indian Supreme Court judge, officials from Meta, including Mark Zuckerberg, former vice president of Facebook Brian Boland, and BBC senior correspondent Divya Arya. [inaudible] and listeners might find disturbing. A warning again that the clip deals with child sexual abuse and contains scenes our viewers and listeners might find disturbing. DIVYA ARYA: There is an ad. VOICE IN AD: [translated] [Look, this woman is tormenting the child. And he’s not giving up. He is trying to do great things with a small stick.] DIVYA ARYA: This story pulled me into such darkness, I almost wish I never followed it. Oh my god! Oh no. This is — I can’t. MADAN LOKUR: Whatever you have witnessed is obviously very, very disturbing. ALEXANDR WANG: Namaste. Three-and-a-half billion people use at least one of our apps every day. That blows my mind. It’s more than half a billion people in India alone. SHIKHA GOEL: Because you are buying and looking at it is a reason why a child in the physical world is getting exploited. SEN. ORRIN HATCH: Well, how do you sustain a business model in which users don’t pay for your service? MARK ZUCKERBERG: Senator, we run ads. SEN. ORRIN HATCH: I see. DIVYA ARYA: And there’s a text on the ad which says, “She has been unboxed and reduced to tears with a big weapon.” BRIAN BOLAND: My opinion is they don’t care about the users anywhere, which is why I quit the company. MADAN LOKUR: This is a serious enough issue for the Supreme Court of India to take suo moto cognizance. BRIAN BOLAND: No, if Mark Zuckerberg is in charge, it’s not doable. DIVYA ARYA: Sir, you headed the ads business. Sir, you were the director before you became head of Meta India, sir. Sir, will you please give us an answer, sir? I think I’m done. AMY GOODMAN: That from BBC Eye investigation The Careless Machine: Exposing Instagram’s Darkest Secret. Following the report, the Indian government has given Meta until Saturday to submit a detailed explanation on how such advertisements are allowed on the platform. For more, we go to New Delhi, India, where we’re joined by the award-winning journalist Divya Arya, senior BBC correspondent. Thank you so much for being with us. This is so disturbing, such an explosive documentary, Divya. Talk about how you came upon the explosive, the abusive, exploitive content on Instagram, owned by Meta, and the response. DIVYA ARYA: Well, thank you so much for having me on the program. What we — what I found in this project, in this investigation, is not something I had set out to look for actively. I was only using Instagram like any other user, scrolling on the reels, and Instagram started serving me reels of lifestyle bloggers who would use sexual innuendo when they made their reels, which made me pause and wonder what these reels really mean. And it seems, from what we learned during the investigation, that the algorithm observes whether you stop on a reel, whether you engage with it, and then pushes more content of the same nature to you. And that’s really how this journey started. But the content became more explicit within days. And that made me pause and think about how should I go ahead in investigating the sexualized content on Instagram. And we set up a new account. I got a new phone to separate this from my personal feed. And as I followed these reels, Instagram now started serving me advertisements. And it’s important to note the difference between what users upload, like you and me, where there are no checks and balances, and if there’s something illegal, only when it is reported, the platform takes it down. But in the case of advertisements, the platform is basically providing a service to the advertiser, saying, “If you put an ad, we will get it to the consumer. Whatever product you’re advertising, we’ll get it to the right consumer.” So, here, these were paid ads for which the platform was earning money. And these paid ads found my alias account, looked at me as a consumer of illegal content, which initially was pornography. It was women and men fully nude engaging in sexual acts, which is also illegal in India. Selling and sharing pornography is illegal in India. Initially, it was that, but soon enough, the ads started featuring child sexual abuse material, children with adults in sexually suggestive scenarios, with links to an external social media platform, Telegram, where one could go and buy this content, is what the advertisement was saying, and what we confirmed later in the investigation was the truth. When we put all these allegations to Meta, which owns Instagram, which is the parent company, they said they fight child exploitation on their platforms and have removed illegal content in ads before we reached out to them. And in response to what we flagged to them, they’ve taken down more ads. They also said that no process is perfect, their review process, which we found is largely led by AI, more than 90%, with only a few human reviewers actually looking at the content before it is approved and pushed on their platform, published on their platform. So, they said they’re continuously improving it, and it’s not perfect. And now I think they will probably give a more detailed explanation to the Indian government. JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And, Divya, you mentioned Telegram, which of course is a separate company, unrelated to Meta. But talk about their response when the BBC reached out to them about the Telegram channels selling child sexual abuse videos. DIVYA ARYA: So, Telegram said that they make all attempts to eradicate bad players from their platform And they said that with their work, which they also work with the Internet Watch Foundation, which is a U.K.-based organization working on removing child sexual abuse material from the internet — they said that with all those efforts and with their reviewers’ help, they have been able to “almost eradicate” — and I’m quoting them on that — child sexual abuse material from their platform. Clearly, not all of it, because we did find plenty. But we’ve reported all these ads, all these Telegram channels, all the Instagram ads and their advertisers to Indian authorities, and we’re hopeful that further investigation leads to more action in weaning out this content from the internet. AMY GOODMAN: Earlier this year, we interviewed Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen, who talked about how she personally witnessed Facebook underinvesting in child safety. FRANCES HAUGEN: So, the closest I saw firsthand how Facebook underinvested in the safety of children was that the team that was responsible for finding people who were distributing child abuse material or looking for adults that preyed on children or finding these marketplaces where adults solicit nude photos of children from the children directly, that team was so strapped for resources that if you had given them a single engineer more, they probably would have accomplished 10 times as much. That’s the attitude I saw repeated at Facebook firsthand. AMY GOODMAN: So, that’s Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen. Of course, Facebook owned by Meta. Meta owns Instagram. And in your piece, Divya, you also interview former Meta Vice President Brian Boland, who says as long as Zuckerberg is the head of it, it’s not going to change. But in these last few minutes, can you talk about the deadline set for tomorrow by the Indian government, and what you’re hoping will come out of your report? DIVYA ARYA: Well, yes, it was very difficult to get access to anybody who’s worked inside Meta to talk about how its algorithm works, how the ad business targets people, the lack of transparency in it. And Brian Boland told many things to us in a lot of detail. Of course, Meta responded, saying that it’s absolutely unfair to say that they prioritize revenue over user safety and that they underinvest in safety mechanisms. What we are hoping now — we’ve heard from the Indian government even yesterday that they haven’t yet decided how they will proceed. In Indian law, sharing, distributing, selling child sexual abuse material is a criminal offense under child protection laws. But the social media platforms often take — cite the protection that the information technology laws provide them by saying that they cannot monitor user-generated content and they’re just a platform. But in this case, as the justice I interviewed for the documentary said, that in this case, because the platform is making money, it becomes a different case, and they may not actually have those protections. So it’s really up to the Indian government now as to how they interpret the law and look at the evidence that we have shared with them, and also how Meta responds to them in the deadline of the one week and explains how much content they’ve taken down — they’ve told us they’ve taken down millions of accounts over the last year — and what new measures they’ve put in place. Only once those details are out, we’ll know how far our investigation has been able to go in achieving the impact that we set out with, which is that this illegal content should not be on the internet, and somebody needs to be held accountable for it. AMY GOODMAN: Divya Arya, I want to thank you so much for being with us, senior correspondent for the BBC, reporting from New Delhi, India. Her latest BBC Eye investigation, The Careless Machine: Exposing Instagram’s Darkest Secret. We’ll link to it. This is Democracy Now! It’s the 60th anniversary of the Freedom of the Information Act. Stay with us. [break] AMY GOODMAN: Folk musician Nora Brown singing “[Black Jack] Davey.” Media Options