Instagram Connects Vast Pedophile Network ....Instagram, the popular social-media site owned by Meta Platforms, helps connect and promote a vast network of accounts openly devoted to the commission and purchase of underage-sex content, according to investigations by The Wall Street Journal and researchers at Stanford University and the University of Massachusetts Amherst.... Instagram doesn’t merely host these activities. Its algorithms promote them. Instagram connects pedophiles and guides them to content sellers via recommendation systems that excel at linking those who share niche interests....Though out of sight for most on the platform, the sexualized accounts on Instagram are brazen about their interest. The researchers found that Instagram enabled people to search explicit hashtags such as #pedowhore and #preteensex and connected them to accounts that used the terms to advertise child-sex material for sale. Such accounts often claim to be run by the children themselves and use overtly sexual handles incorporating words such as “little slut for you.” ....Instagram accounts offering to sell illicit sex material generally don’t publish it openly, instead posting “menus” of content. Certain accounts invite buyers to commission specific acts. Some menus include prices for videos of children harming themselves and “imagery of the minor performing sexual acts with animals,”.... At the right price, children are available for in-person “meet ups.”  The promotion of underage-sex content violates rules established by Meta as well as federal law.... ....The Journal also approached UMass’s Rescue Lab, which evaluated how pedophiles on Instagram fit into the larger ecosystem of online child exploitation. Using different methods, both entities were able to quickly identify large-scale communities promoting criminal sex abuse. ...Test accounts set up by researchers that viewed a single account in the network were immediately hit with “suggested for you” recommendations of purported child-sex-content sellers and buyers, as well as accounts linking to off-platform content trading sites. Following just a handful of these recommendations was enough to flood a test account with content that sexualizes children....The Stanford Internet Observatory used hashtags associated with underage sex to find 405 sellers of what researchers labeled “self-generated” child-sex material—or accounts purportedly run by children themselves, some saying they were as young as 12. According to data gathered via Maltego, a network mapping software, 112 of those seller accounts collectively had 22,000 unique followers.... ....Current and former Meta employees who have worked on Instagram child-safety initiatives estimate the number of accounts that exist primarily to follow such content is in the high hundreds of thousands, if not millions....Instagram, estimated to have more than 1.3 billion users, is especially popular with teens. The Stanford researchers found some similar sexually exploitative activity on other, smaller social platforms, but said they found that the problem on Instagram is particularly severe. “The most important platform for these networks of buyers and sellers seems to be Instagram,”....Internet company algorithms check the digital fingerprints of images posted on their platforms against that list, and report back to the center when they detect them, as U.S. federal law requires. In 2022, the center received 31.9 million reports of child pornography, mostly from internet companies—up 47% from two years earlier....Meta, with more than 3 billion users across its apps, which include Instagram, Facebook and WhatsApp, is able to detect these types of known images if they aren’t encrypted. Meta accounted for 85% of the child pornography reports filed to the center, including some 5 million from Instagram.... ....Hashtags are a central part of content discovery on Instagram, allowing users to tag and find posts of interest to a particular community—from broad topics such as #fashion or #nba to narrower ones such as #embroidery or #spelunking....Pedophiles have their chosen hashtags, too. Search terms such as #pedobait and variations on #mnsfw (“minor not safe for work”) had been used to tag thousands of posts dedicated to advertising sex content featuring children, rendering them easily findable by buyers, the academic researchers found....In such cases, a pop-up screen for users warned that “These results may contain images of child sexual abuse,” and noted that production and consumption of such material causes “extreme harm” to children. The screen offered two options for users: “Get resources” and “See results anyway.”  ....The pedophilic accounts on Instagram mix brazenness with superficial efforts to veil their activity, researchers found. Certain emojis function as a kind of code, such as an image of a map—shorthand for “minor-attracted person”—or one of “cheese pizza,” which shares its initials with “child pornography,” according to Levine of UMass. Many declare themselves “lovers of the little things in life.” ...Accounts identify themselves as “seller” or “s3ller,” and many state their preferred form of payment in their bios. These seller accounts often convey the child’s purported age by saying they are “on chapter 14,” or “age 31” followed by an emoji of a reverse arrow.... ....Sarah Adams, a Canadian mother of two, has built an Instagram audience discussing child exploitation and the dangers of oversharing on social media. Given her focus, Adams’ followers sometimes send her disturbing things they’ve encountered on the platform. In February, she said, one messaged her with an account branded with the term “incest toddlers.” ...Adams said she accessed the account—a collection of pro-incest memes with more than 10,000 followers—for only the few seconds that it took to report to Instagram, then tried to forget about it. But over the course of the next few days, she began hearing from horrified parents. When they looked at Adams’ Instagram profile, she said they were being recommended “incest toddlers” as a result of Adams’ contact with the account....A Meta spokesman said that “incest toddlers” violated its rules and that Instagram had erred on enforcement....  ....Sometimes user reports of nudity involving a child went unanswered for months, according to a review of scores of reports filed over the last year by numerous child-safety advocates.
Earlier this year, an anti-pedophile activist discovered an Instagram account claiming to belong to a girl selling underage-sex content, including a post declaring, “This teen is ready for you pervs.” When the activist reported the account, Instagram responded with an automated message saying: “Because of the high volume of reports we receive, our team hasn’t been able to review this post.” After the same activist reported another post, this one of a scantily clad young girl with a graphically sexual caption, Instagram responded, “Our review team has found that [the account’s] post does not go against our Community Guidelines.” The response suggested that the user hide the account to avoid seeing its content. A Meta spokesman acknowledged that Meta had received the reports and failed to act on them.... https://www.wsj.com/articles/instagram-vast-pedophile-network