New Delhi

Meta’s Facebook and Instagram platforms carried more than 300 paid advertisements featuring child sexual abuse material (CSAM) this year, including AI-manipulated images of real children, according to an investigation by the Tech Transparency Project (TTP).

The investigation found that many of the advertisements used photographs of real children that had been taken from social media posts and websites. The images were subsequently manipulated using artificial intelligence to make it appear as though the children were involved in explicit sexual acts. In one particularly disturbing case, a photograph of a minor member of a European royal family that had been publicly released last year appeared in an advertisement on Facebook and Instagram.