Govt to take up CSAM lapses, wrongful account blocks with Meta team on Aug 5-6

The Indian government will raise concerns over lapses in curbing Child Sexual Abuse Material (CSAM) and wrongful action on prominent accounts when it meets Meta's global team on August 5 and 6, IT Secretary S. Krishnan said on Tuesday. He added that a company at the forefront of technology should have been able to make its systems work as they are supposed to.

Meta's global team will be in India for the two-day meeting, Mr. Krishnan confirmed. The meeting comes after the government summoned Meta's top global executives following the brief restriction of Prime Minister Narendra Modi's recent Facebook post addressing Indian youth and promising stringent action against paper leaks. Top Meta executive Joel Kaplan is expected to be present, sources said.

Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram, had attributed the incident to a technical glitch and apologised. However, the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) found the explanation "inadequate". The company said the content was removed "in error" and was restored.

Separately, Meta has been under regulatory scrutiny over CSAM appearing in paid advertisements on Instagram. The government issued a notice to Meta on this issue last month.

"There are a range of issues — the CSAM issue was raised, so what measures have been taken regarding that, and to what extent is synthetically generated information being looked at. Then, for prominent personalities when they have verified accounts, if content has to be taken down, there have to be safeguards; all of these will be the issues [taken up]," Mr. Krishnan told reporters on the sidelines of the launch of an independent multimodal AI evaluation platform by AI4Bharat at IIT Madras and Josh Talks AI.

He emphasised that Meta, as a leading technology company, should have the technology to address such issues effectively. "We would like to understand from them why some of these things have not been working the way they are supposed to work, and what the challenges are," Mr. Krishnan added.

Mr. Krishnan also stressed that platforms need a clear understanding of India's law, what compliance must look like, "and a clearer understanding of how they intend to make sure compliance happens".

Government sources had earlier said that the issue is not merely technical but involves "national security and public order". Meta's global team will be "categorically" asked to clarify issues around algorithmic bias, how their algorithm operates, and the company's role in public order, they said.

In the aftermath of the incident, Meta informed the IT Ministry that posts by the Prime Minister and select prominent accounts would be subject to additional oversight, with multiple levels of checks involving senior company officials. On July 28, Meta wrote to the government outlining the enhanced safeguards it had implemented for content posted by PM Modi and other prominent accounts.

PM Modi's July 23 Instagram post, later shared on Facebook, was his first direct selfie video aimed at engaging with the youth and underscoring the government's commitment to crack down on paper leaks amid student protests. The Facebook version was briefly restricted by Meta before being restored.

The IT Ministry maintained that Meta's explanation citing a technical glitch in automated content filters was "not reasonable". They said that if a glitch in the automated system caused the error, then Meta, being a technology company, must surely hasten to improve its own tools.

Meta officials had attributed the error to AI-powered automated content filters reviewing shared posts and subsequent videos that circulated following the Prime Minister's original post.