Meta continues to carry paid advertisements containing AI-generated child sexual abuse imagery in India, a new report notes, despite an order from the government two months ago to remove all such content.The report by Washington-based Tech Transparency Project identified 332 adverts containing child sexual abuse material that ran on Facebook and Instagram over the last 10 months, including 274 in August alone. Nearly a quarter of the ads, 84 in total, ran in India and 78 appeared after the government issued the order and subsequently held a meeting with senior Meta officials. Nearly 80 per cent of the ads, 262, ran in the US and 120 in Australia, which was investigating Meta’s enforcement of its social media ban for children under 16, the report stated. A BBC Eye investigation in July found that Instagram was running paid adverts promoting child sexual abuse material in India, using search terms that directed users to channels on the Telegram messaging app, where the material could allegedly be bought for as little as Rs 99, or about 80p.The National Commission for Protection of Child Rights then issued a notice to Meta, asking the American tech giant to explain the allegations. After reviewing Meta's response, the commission started a formal inquiry and summoned the company’s managing director and country head to appear before it to provide further details.Separately, the National Human Rights Commission directed the Delhi police to carry out a full investigation into the allegations and examine whether Meta and other companies met their mandatory reporting obligations under the Protection of Children from Sexual Offences Act. The commission opened its proceedings against the tech company in July after receiving a complaint.In a statement published after the BBC investigation, Meta said: “It’s categorically inaccurate to suggest that we’d knowingly and deliberately target ads featuring children to people based on an inappropriate interest in children. Quite the opposite; we use technology to identify accounts that have shown potentially suspicious activity related to children, and we automatically removed over 4 million of these accounts last year.”The Tech Transparency Project said it found several images of real children, including a member of a European royal family, that had been manipulated using artificial intelligence in the adverts and that more than a dozen ads remained live even after it alerted Meta to its findings. Most of the ads directed users to AI image or video generation apps, largely from Chinese developers, and several were placed through Meta's own advertising resellers in China who did not respond to the campaign group's questions.“Content involving child sexual abuse is among the most serious that can be found online,” Katie Paul, the group’s director, said, according to Bloomberg. “But this content isn’t hiding in dark corners of the internet. It’s being used in paid ads on Meta platforms.”People are seen behind a logo of Meta during a conference in Mumbai (Reuters)In a statement to The Independent, a Meta spokesperson said: “We don't tolerate nudify apps or any kind of child exploitation, whether real or AI-generated.“The criminals behind this activity know we've built strong defences, including systems that block violating ads as well as ongoing monitoring in case we initially miss something: that's why many of the ads flagged to us had already been removed, most had fewer than 200 impressions, and the total ad spend was under $5,000.“These criminals constantly shift tactics to evade detection, which is why we keep strengthening our detection and enforcement."Tech Transparency Project said when it tried to report ads directly through Meta's own system, marking them as "problem involving someone under 18" and "seems like sexual exploitation”, the company took at least a week to review the reports and often took no action. “With 57 per cent of the CSAM (child sexual abuse material) ads reported to Meta, the company sent back a message that said, ‘We've taken a look and found that this ad doesn't go against our Advertising Standards,’” it noted. “In 43 per cent of the cases, Meta sent back a message that the ad had already been removed, though six of the ads remained visible in the Ad Library.”The flagged ads were taken down only after it contacted Meta directly, the group said in its report, adding that it later reported all 332 ads to the US-based National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, the centralised global reporting system for online child sexual exploitation.