Wall Street Journal Investigation Shows Instagram Serving Skeevy Videos, Alongside Mainstream Ads, to Adults Who Follow Accounts Featuring Young Gymnasts and Cheerleaders

Jeff Horwitz and Katherine Blunt, reporting for The Wall Street Journal:

The Journal sought to determine what Instagram’s Reels algorithm would recommend to test accounts set up to follow only young gymnasts, cheerleaders and other teen and preteen influencers active on the platform. Instagram’s system served jarring doses of salacious content to those test accounts, including risqué footage of children as well as overtly sexual adult videos — and ads for some of the biggest U.S. brands.

The Journal set up the test accounts after observing that the thousands of followers of such young people’s accounts often include large numbers of adult men, and that many of the accounts who followed those children also had demonstrated interest in sex content related to both children and adults. The Journal also tested what the algorithm would recommend after its accounts followed some of those users as well, which produced more-disturbing content interspersed with ads.

In a stream of videos recommended by Instagram, an ad for the dating app Bumble appeared between a video of someone stroking the face of a life-size latex doll and a video of a young girl with a digitally obscured face lifting up her shirt to expose her midriff. In another, a Pizza Hut commercial followed a video of a man lying on a bed with his arm around what the caption said was a 10-year-old girl.

Worse, Meta has known of the Journal’s findings since August and the problem continues:

The Journal informed Meta in August about the results of its testing. In the months since then, tests by both the Journal and the Canadian Centre for Child Protection show that the platform continued to serve up a series of videos featuring young children, adult content and apparent promotions for child sex material hosted elsewhere.

As of mid-November, the center said Instagram is continuing to steadily recommend what the nonprofit described as “adults and children doing sexual posing.”

There’s no plausible scenario where Instagram wants to cater to pedophiles, but it’s seemingly beyond their current moderation capabilities to determine the content of videos at scale. Solving this ought to be their highest priority.

★ Tuesday, 28 November 2023