Meta Runs Child Abuse Ads in India

Here is what happened: a BBC Eye investigation says that Meta, the company that owns Facebook and Instagram, has been carrying paid advertisements in India that promote child sexual abuse material. Here is how it is being described: an “allegation,” a “report,” a matter “under review,” a question of “content moderation effectiveness.” The gap between these two descriptions is the whole story.

Notice what the second vocabulary does. It moves the crime out of the world of things that happen to children and into the world of things that happen to documents. Nobody moderates a rape. Somebody moderates a post. By the time the event reaches the press release, the child has vanished and been replaced by a technical problem, the kind of problem that gets solved by a task force and an updated policy PDF. This is not an accident of style. It is the entire function of corporate language in cases like this: to convert an atrocity into an inconvenience.

I do not accept, and no honest person should accept, the framing that this is merely “contested” in the sense of being unresolved between two equally plausible accounts. It is contested in the narrow legal sense that Meta has not admitted it, which is not the same thing at all. A company that runs on advertising revenue has every incentive to describe its own advertising system in the gentlest terms available, and BBC Eye, whatever its faults, has no comparable incentive to invent this. When a tobacco company disputes a cancer study, we do not call the science “contested” as though the two positions were symmetrical. The same rule should apply here, and if I would apply it against an oil company, I must apply it against a technology company too - that is the whole discipline of this method, and I intend to keep it.

The scale of the thing matters. India is not a marginal market for Meta; it is, by user numbers, one of its largest, which means the advertising system responsible for this material is not some neglected corner of the platform but the same machine that sells soap and sarees and political candidates to hundreds of millions of people. A system that can target an advertisement to a farmer in Bihar within seconds can, evidently, fail to notice what it is being paid to distribute. That is not a failure of technology. Technology of this sophistication does what it is told to prioritise, and revenue has been told to hurry.

I think of the phrase “content moderation” and try to translate it back into a human scene: a person, somewhere, deciding whether to take down an advertisement, weighing that decision against volume, quota, and the certain knowledge that the advertising revenue keeps flowing whether the decision is made quickly or not at all. The abstraction survives; the person and the child do not appear in it.

The report may yet be wrong in some particular. But the language already in use - before a single fact has been settled - has been built to survive that determination either way, guilty or innocent, and go on meaning nothing. That, more than the allegation itself, is the thing worth watching.