Meta has deployed new artificial intelligence tools and strengthened its ad review systems to detect and disrupt child sexual exploitation on Facebook and Instagram, as the company seeks to counter increasingly sophisticated tactics used by online predators.

Meta said the new measures are designed to identify advertisements that either feature child sexual abuse material (CSAM) or covertly direct users to violating activity hosted outside its platforms.

Between January and June 2026, Meta actioned 5.3 million pieces of child sexual exploitation content on Facebook and Instagram in India, with more than 98 per cent of the content identified and addressed proactively before it was reported, the company said.

Globally, Meta actioned 33.2 million pieces of such content during the same period, with more than 97 per cent detected proactively.

The company said predators increasingly use advertising to evade detection, including by creating advertisements that appear harmless while directing users to illegal material hosted on external websites. Meta said it expanded its investigations beyond individual reports to identify related activity across its platforms, disable accounts involved and block associated off-platform links.

As part of the latest measures, Meta has introduced large language model-based detection to identify "signposting" in advertisements, where seemingly benign content is suspected of directing users towards illegal or harmful material.

The company has also enhanced its ability to assess where advertisements lead, rather than examining only their visible content, allowing it to block violating destinations and take action against the accounts responsible.

Meta said it has added AI-driven sweeps of advertisements to identify child sexual exploitation content that earlier systems may have missed. It has also deployed a red-teaming AI agent designed to test its own defences and identify vulnerabilities that could be exploited by predators.

The company has further strengthened systems to detect repeat offenders who attempt to create new accounts after being removed.

Meta said its broader child-safety systems include behavioural signals, PhotoDNA and other image and video-matching technologies, automated classifiers and heuristics-based rules to identify emerging patterns of violations.

In India, Meta also said it would report child safety cases directly to the National Cyber Crime Reporting Portal operated by the Indian Cybercrime Coordination Centre (I4C). The company said this builds on its existing reporting of CSAM to law enforcement through the portal with assistance from the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children.