Instagram Algorithms Promoting Child Sex Abuse Content, Say Researchers In Explosive Report; Meta Vows Action

Instagram’s algorithms linked and even promoted a vast network of pedophiles who commission and sell child sexual abuse material on the platform, researchers have found.

New Delhi: Meta-owned Instagram’s recommendation algorithms are reportedly promoting child sexual abuse content. Instagram’s algorithms linked and even promoted a vast network of pedophiles who commission and sell child sexual abuse material on the platform, researchers have found.

What Researchers Found About Instagram Algorithms

Instagram “helps connect and promote a vast network of accounts openly devoted to the commission and purchase of underage-sex content”, according to a report in The Wall Street Journal. This was revealed during a joint investigation by The Wall Street Journal and researchers at Stanford University and the University of Massachusetts Amherst.

“The Meta unit’s systems for fostering communities have guided users to child-sex content” while the social networking platform has claimed it is “improving internal controls”. Accounts found by the researchers are advertised using blatant and explicit hashtags like #pedo****, #preteensex, and #pedobait.

When researchers set up a test account and viewed content shared by these networks, they immediately recommended more accounts to follow. “Following just a handful of these recommendations was enough to flood a test account with content that sexualizes children,” the report claimed.

The Stanford investigators found “128 accounts offering to sell child-sex-abuse material on Twitter, less than a third of the number they found on Instagram”. David Thiel, the chief technologist at the Stanford Internet Observatory, was quoted as saying that one has to “put guardrails in place”.

“You have to put guardrails in place for something that growth-intensive to still be nominally safe, and Instagram hasn’t,” Thiel said.

Reacting to the report, Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk said that the findings are “extremely concerning”.

Meta Vows Action

Responding to the report, Meta said it is setting up an internal team to look into the matter. “Child exploitation is a horrific crime. We are continuously investigating ways to actively defend against this behavior,” Meta said, according to a report by The Verge.