In June, we noted that Meta’s Instagram was caught facilitating a massive pedophile network, by which the service would promote pedo-centric content to other pedophiles using coded emojis, such as a slice of cheese pizza.
According to the the Wall Street Journal, Instagram allowed pedophiles to search for content with explicit hashtags such as #pedowhore and #preteensex, which were then used to connect them to accounts that advertise child-sex material for sale from users going under names such as “little slut for you.” And according to the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children, Meta accounted for more than 85% of child pornography reports, the Journal reported.
Companies whose ads appeared next to inappropriate content included Disney, Walmart, Match.com, HIms and the Wall Street Journal itself.
And yet, no mass exodus of advertisers…
They haven’t stopped…
According to a new report by the Journal, Instagram’s ‘reels’ service – which shows users short video clips of things which the company’s algorithm thinks users would find of interest – has been serving up clips of sexualized children to adults that follow preteen influencers, gymnasts, cheerleaders and other categories that child predators are attracted to.
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. -WSJ
A separate experiment run by the Canadian Centre for Child Protection had similar results after running similar tests.
Hellbound and Down 