According to separate tests conducted by The Wall Street Journal and Northeastern University professor Laura Edelson, Instagram recommends sexually explicit Reels videos to teens younger than 13, even if they are not specifically looking for explicit videos.
Instagram reportedly recommends sexually explicit Reels videos to teens as young as 13
Both created new accounts for the tests and set their age at 13 for the tests, which ran mostly from January to April this year.
From the outset, Instagram offered these accounts moderately racy videos, including women dancing sensually or focusing on their bodies. Accounts that watched these videos and skipped other Instagram Reels videos then started receiving suggestions for more explicit videos.
Some of the suggested Reels videos featured women mimicking sexual acts, while others promised to send nude photos to users who commented on their accounts.
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Test users were also reportedly offered videos featuring people exposing their genitals. Three minutes after accounts were created, sexually explicit Instagram Reels videos began to appear. Within 20 minutes of watching them, the recommended Reels section was dominated by creators producing sexual content.
The Wall Street Journal and Edelson conducted the same test for TikTok and Snapchat and found that neither platform recommended sexually explicit videos to the young accounts they created. Even after the accounts actively searched for age-inappropriate Instagram Reels videos and followed the creators who produced them, they never saw recommendations for them.
The Wall Street Journal says Meta employees have found similar problems in the past, citing undisclosed documents detailing internal investigations into teens’ harmful experiences on Instagram.
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Meta’s security staff had previously conducted the same test and reached similar conclusions, the Journal reported. But company spokesperson Andy Stone dismissed the allegations in a statement: “This was an artificial experiment that doesn’t match the reality of how young people use Instagram. The company is making an effort to further reduce the volume of sensitive content that teens can see on Instagram, and we’ve meaningfully reduced those numbers over the last few months.”
In January, Meta introduced significant privacy updates to protect young users, automatically placing them in the most restrictive control settings that they cannot opt out of on their own. The tests were conducted after these updates were released. What do you think? Please share your thoughts with us in the comments section below.
