India, July 7 -- A BBC Eye investigation this month found Instagram running paid advertisements in India that funnelled users toward Telegram channels selling child sexual abuse material. Meta's own review system approved the ads before publication. When BBC flagged one through Instagram's reporting tool, the company said it did not violate community standards - and only reversed course once journalists sought official comment. Asked to explain, Meta described the problems as horrific and acknowledged no system is perfect - true, but beside the point. The question was never whether the system is flawless, but whether years of warnings should have made it better than this. In 2021, a Facebook whistleblower revealed internal research on how Instagram's algorithm could send teenagers into harmful spirals. In 2023, a former Instagram consultant told the US Senate that 13% of 13-to-15-year-olds had received unwanted sexual advances on the app in the previous week - data he had emailed Zuckerberg two years earlier. That same year, Wall Street Journal reporters working with Stanford researchers found Instagram's recommendation systems connecting paedophile networks to content sellers - the same logic that connects any two accounts with a shared interest. The algorithm, it seems, could not distinguish between a hobby and a crime. These are two separate abuses. One is the harm inflicted on a platform's own underage users - anxiety, body-image damage, solicitation - by design built to maximise attention. The other is the harm perpetuated on children who may never open the app at all: infrastructure that discovers, links and advertises access to abuse networks operating elsewhere, treating an illegal transaction like any other match between shared interests. The BBC's find belongs to the second category, and implicates the whole chain, not one app alone. It is well known that content moderation across these platforms is unevenly resourced by language, weighted toward English-speaking users. Whether that explains what an Indian test account surfaced is a fair question neither company has answered. What moves Big Tech is not notices or tersely worded calls for explanations. It is fines - pegged to global revenue, not local turnover. It is executives facing personal liability, as UK law now allows. It is courts treating exploitable design as a manufacturing defect, as American lawsuits now argue. Anything short of costs that are genuinely crippling will be absorbed as the price of doing business - as it has been, twice, since the first warning reached Zuckerberg's inbox....