Testing reveals that Instagram continues to recommend sexual videos to accounts that list their age as 13
A Wall Street Journal and Northeastern University study has found that the social networking site Instagram is recommending videos containing sexual content to accounts that list themselves as 13 years old in their profile.
wsj.com/tech/instagram-recommends-sexual-videos-to-accounts-for-13-year-olds-tests-show-b6123c65
Instagram is reportedly recommending sexual reels to teens as young as 13
Instagram is recommending highly inappropriate content for teens - PhoneArena
https://www.phonearena.com/news/instagram-recommends-inappropriate-content-to-teens_id159640
Do Instagram Reels or TikTok Deliver More Racy Videos to Teens?
https://news.northeastern.edu/2024/06/20/instagram-reels-tiktok-research/
In a test conducted by The Wall Street Journal and Laura Edelson, a computer science professor at Northeastern University, from January to April 2024, a new Instagram account was created with an age set to 13 and a recommended video was checked. In addition to videos of women pantomiming sexual acts, content promising to send nudes to users who reacted to their account also appeared.
The Wall Street Journal reported that 'only three minutes after creating an account, users were able to view sexually explicit content, and within 20 minutes of viewing, the Reels section had been monopolized by creators producing sexually explicit content.'
The Wall Street Journal and Edelson also ran similar tests on TikTok and Snapchat, but even when people actively searched for age-inappropriate videos and followed creators who made videos containing adult content, the content never appeared in their recommendations on those social networks.
Below is the percentage of adult content displayed on Instagram and TikTok, as shown by the overseas media Northeastern Global News. The red graph shows Instagram accounts set as adults, and the pink graph shows Instagram accounts set as minors. In both graphs, it can be seen that the percentage of adult content is increasing over time. On the other hand, the blue and green graphs show adult TikTok accounts and underage TikTok accounts, respectively, and it has been reported that adult content is rarely recommended, especially on underage TikTok accounts.
'We are sensitive to minors' feeds, especially teenagers who have access to a limited pool of content,' a TikTok spokesperson said.
Meta was contacted by The Wall Street Journal for comment, but Meta spokesman Andy Stone said the company had conducted similar tests in the past with similar results, and that the experiment was 'artificial and out of touch with how teenagers use Instagram.'
Stone also reported that 'we have established efforts to further reduce the amount of sensitive content that teens may encounter on Instagram, and have significantly reduced the amount of adult content over the past few months.'
The European Commission is investigating whether Facebook and Instagram are adequately implementing measures to protect minors under the Digital Services Act (DSA).
EU launches investigation into whether Meta's measures to protect minors are sufficient - GIGAZINE
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