Instagram It appears to be flooding children's feeds with sexually explicit content, including videos from adult content creators who offer users free nude photos in exchange for engagement.
A new investigation has found that The Wall Street JournalA study conducted with Laura Edelson, a computer science professor at Northeastern University, found that three minutes after creating an account, whose age is determined to be 13 years And apart from viewing the content, Instagram also shows sexual videos to those new users.
The investigation, conducted over seven months, found that multiple accounts created by users as young as 13 years old found that within just 20 minutes of watching the platform's short-form video platform Reels, users' feeds were flooded with posts from online sex workers. When the same test was run on Snapchat and TikTok, there was not a significant amount of sexual content being served up.
“All three platforms also differ in what kind of content they recommend to teens,” Edelson said. “But adults' experience on TikTok also has much less explicit content than teens' experience on Reels.”
Meta spokesman Andy Stone told the Journal that “this was a contrived experiment that does not match the reality of teens' use of Instagram.”
Stone said the company “set up an effort To further reduce the amount of sensitive content teens see on Instagram, and these numbers have decreased significantly over the past few months.”
Meta did not immediately respond to Quartz’s request for comment on the matter.
Still, the investigation produced disturbing results. In one case, an Instagram account belonging to a 13-year-old was shown multiple videos about anal sex after 30 minutes of viewing Instagram's suggested content.
A test account for a teenager featured a video of a content creator promising to send pictures of her “chest bags” to users who commented on her videos.
In tests, accounts created for minors did not follow any other accounts or search for anything to see what Instagram was putting in their feed. Although the accounts initially featured videos about cars and comedy, those reportedly diminished and sexually explicit content often replaced them.