India has demanded that Instagram remove advertisements promoting child sexual abuse imagery, state-owned media reported this weekend, following accusations that the popular social media platform had facilitated the spread of illegal content exploiting children.

India’s Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology issued a “stern notice” on Saturday to Meta, the tech giant that owns Instagram, Facebook and WhatsApp, according to the Indian state television broadcaster, DD News.

The notice demanded that “all advertisements and content that promote or facilitate access” to child sexual abuse material be taken down immediately and that Meta offer a detailed explanation within seven days, DD News said in a social media post.

Representatives for India’s technology ministry, the government agency that monitors the internet, contacted after working hours, could not be reached for comment.

In a statement, a spokesman for Meta said the company had a “zero tolerance policy” for child sexual abuse imagery. It said it was “having constructive conversations” with India’s technology ministry on the issue, without offering further details about specific ads or content related to India’s demand.

“We use advanced AI technology to proactively detect violating content and individuals, but we are in a constant battle with criminals who hide among our 3.5 billion users and try to evade our detection,” Meta’s statement said.

India’s demands come at a time when countries around the world are trying to extend greater protections to underage internet users, by suing tech companies and passing laws that set age limits on social media.

A recent BBC investigation discovered at least 30 advertisements on Instagram in India with links leading to child sexual abuse imagery available on the separate and unrelated messaging app, Telegram.

The report described one ad showing a middle-aged man with his arm around a young girl, with an external link to “watch more.” Another ad showed children “engaging in a sexual act,” the outlet said.

The BBC investigation’s findings could not be independently verified.

In the past six months, Meta said, the company has removed 160,000 accounts in India that were suspected of containing links to illegal content related to children.

Telegram, a Dubai-based company, said in a statement that so far this year, it has removed more than 293,000 groups and channels that violated its rules on child exploitation.

“The fact that abusers must depend on evasion tactics like using other platforms to lead people to their groups is testimony to the effectiveness of Telegram’s moderation,” the company said.

Meta has come under growing scrutiny in the United States for its policies on teenagers and younger children. In March, a state court in New Mexico ordered the company to pay $375 million in damages after a jury found that it had misled users about the safety of its platforms and enabled the sexual exploitation of young users. Meta defended its safety policies and said it would appeal that decision.

As part of broader concerns about children’s online lives, calls to place age restrictions on social media access have proliferated in recent years. A long list of nations — including Britain, Australia, Malaysia, Indonesia, China, Brazil, and several members of the European Union — have taken steps recently to put restrictions or bans on social media for young people.

Meta on Tuesday released an artificial intelligence tool that can generate images, the company’s latest push to integrate the technology into more aspects of its social media business and catch up with rivals in a global A.I. race.

The new A.I. image model, Muse Image, is available on Instagram and WhatsApp, the company said. Users can generate A.I. photos similar to those they would normally post, including vacation selfies from a beach or a reel from a photo booth.

“Muse Image acts as the creative partner that knows your world, making it easy to turn your ideas into high-quality visuals,” the company said in a blog post. It added, “One tap restores an old family photo, lets you see yourself with trending hairstyles, or reimagines you as a claymation character.”

The company also previewed an A.I. video generator, Muse Video. It will become available to the public in the coming months in the Meta AI app, the stand-alone platform for Meta’s A.I. chatbot.

Muse Image is the first A.I. image generator created under the company’s new A.I. division, Meta Superintelligence Labs. After Meta fell behind in the A.I. race last spring, Mark Zuckerberg, the chief executive, spent billions of dollars revamping the division in an attempt to compete with Google, Anthropic, OpenAI and others.

In the last year, Meta has slowly narrowed the gap. But Muse Spark, its top chatbot model, released in April, still lags rivals.

Meta’s release of new A.I. image and video tools follows the rest of the industry’s shift to tools that can write code. OpenAI shut down Sora, which made A.I. videos, in March as the company said it would focus its resources elsewhere.

Meta, which owns Facebook and Threads in addition to Instagram and WhatsApp, plans to invest up to $145 billion in A.I. this year as part of its efforts to transform itself into an A.I. company. Meta is also increasingly relying on A.I. to moderate content on its social media platforms, as well as to offer customer service.

The company is also asking employees to use A.I. tools to speed up their work as it lays off thousands to help offset spending on the technology.

Meta’s embrace of A.I. has not always been smooth. Last month, a bug in the company’s A.I. customer service software let hackers attack more than 34,000 Instagram accounts. Internal A.I. tracking software has also hurt morale among Meta’s rank-and-file employees.

Muse Image will replace technology from Midjourney, an A.I. start-up that Meta previously worked with to generate A.I. images, in the Meta AI app.

Users can tag friends in the app to create “personalized birthday cards, group trip memes or playful edits” based on their friends’ Instagram accounts, the company said. In the coming weeks, advertisers will be able to use the new A.I. model to make ads.

Alexandr Wang, Meta’s chief A.I. officer, has said publicly that his A.I. division is planning to release a new cutting-edge model, called Watermelon internally, in the coming months. Watermelon is on track to perform as well as OpenAI’s latest model, Mr. Wang said at a staff meeting last week.