India’s Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology has given Meta seven days to explain how paid advertisements on Instagram, some allegedly containing explicit search terms and directing users to Telegram channels selling child sexual abuse material for less than the price of a cup of tea, passed through the company’s own advertising review systems. Meta’s response, a familiar refrain about a zero-tolerance policy and a “constant battle” against criminals hiding among 3.5 billion users, is not really the point.

The point is that nobody hid anything. An investigation reportedly built a fresh account, followed a handful of accounts posting merely suggestive content, and within days was being served advertisements for material depicting the sexual abuse of children. Nothing was searched for. The platform’s own recommendation system did the finding. That distinction matters more than most of the coverage has allowed. When Instagram approves an advertisement, it does not simply permit it to exist. It reviews the creative, prices the placement, selects the audience, and pushes it into a specific feed.

That is a commercial act performed by the platform itself, not a passive act of hosting someone else’s speech. Every other advertiser on Instagram accepts that the platform bears responsibility for what it approves and profits from. That responsibility does not evaporate the moment the product being sold is access to a child’s exploitation. Safe harbour, the legal shield that protects intermediaries from liability for content they host but did not create, exists because a platform cannot plausibly review billions of daily uploads before they appear.

It was never designed to cover a paid placement that the platform’s own systems screened, priced, and distributed. India’s IT Rules already require large platforms to deploy automated detection for exploitative content within compressed timelines, so the principle that an auditable........

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