Sexual content is routinely recommended to minors on Instagram: report

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An investigation by The Wall Street Journal and an academic researcher found that Instagram regularly and immediately recommends sexual content to accounts for teenagers who appear interested as soon as they log on.

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The investigation follows an announcement by parent meta platforms in January that it would restrict “sensitive content” for teenage users.

Over a seven-month period ending in June, the WSJ and Laura Edelson, a computer science professor at Northeastern University, found that Instagram continued to deliver sexually suggestive material to minors.

The investigation involved creating several new accounts, with ages listed as 13, and then viewing “Reels,” or video streams, suggested by Instagram.

Since the inception of news accounts, Instagram has suggested “moderately boring content,” the WSJ reports. If the accounts lingered on the suggestive material, the platform pushed “more incessant” content.

According to the report, after 20 minutes of watching Reels, the accounts were dominated by suggestive content, including adult creators, some of whom advertised nude photos.

Meta spokesman Andy Stone said the “artificial experiment” does not “fit the reality of how teenagers use Instagram” and the company continues to work on its systems to prevent inappropriate content from being recommended to minors.

Stone added that the company has, in recent months, “significantly reduced” the amount of sensitive content that teenagers may be exposed to on the platform.

In a thread on X, Edelson pointed out that compared to TikTok and Snapchat, minors were consistently shown more suggestive content on Instagram.

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“Instagram and TikTok both say they have different feed experiences for users based on whether they are adults or minors. To find out, I tested these platforms as a 23-year-old and a 13-year-old user and found that the TikTok experiences were very different between my adult and teenage “personas,” but the Instagram Reels experiences were not,” she wrote in a report for Cybersecurity for Democracy, a multi-university research project.

“I was kind of surprised at how quickly I could get to a steady diet of sexually suggestive content on Reels,” she wrote. “Videos at the higher end of the scale (mimic sex acts, nudity, inappropriate streetwear such as lingerie) started appearing at minute three on both my teen and adult accounts and became a regular occurrence before minute 10 for both accounts.”

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TikTok, for its part, says it operates “content-level systems” where content is rated based on thematic maturity, similar to movie or TV ratings, as a means of shielding younger audiences from mature themes.

“It’s worth noting that my findings about TikTok are consistent with what TikTok has said about their ‘content tiers’ approach to teen content,” Edelson added.

“We’re erring on the side of caution,” a TikTok spokesperson told the WSJ, noting that the “pool of content” for young users is restricted on the platform.

According to an internal Meta analysis from 2022 reviewed by the WSJ, the company has long known that Instagram pushes adult content, in addition to gore and hate speech, more often to young users than adults on the platform.

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“Teenagers on Instagram reported being exposed to harassment, violence and unwanted nudity at rates that exceeded older users in the company’s surveys, and the company’s statistics confirmed that the platform was disproportionately likely to serve content to children that violated the platform’s rules” , the WSJ reports.

The report added that teenagers were exposed to three times more banned posts containing nudity, 1.7 times more violence and 4.1 times more bullying content than users over the age of 30.

The report concluded that building a separate recommendation system for young users would be “the most effective way” to ensure they are not exposed to inappropriate content.

Meta has not yet taken action on this proposal.

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