Instagram promotes accounts sharing child sex abuse content: research

Instagram’s recommendation algorithm has been linking and promoting accounts that promote and sell child sexual abuse content, according to an investigation released Wednesday.

meta The photo-sharing service stands out from other social media platforms and “appears to have a particularly serious problem” with accounts displaying self-generated child sexual abuse material, or SG, the Stanford researchers wrote in an accompanying study. -CSAM. Such accounts claim to be operated by minors.

“Due to the widespread use of hashtags, the relatively long lifespan of seller accounts, and especially an effective recommendation algorithm, Instagram serves as a key discovery mechanism for this particular community of buyers and sellers,” according to the study, cited in this investigation Co-authored by The Wall Street Journal, Stanford University’s Internet Observatory Cyber ​​Policy Center, and the University of Massachusetts Amherst.

While the accounts could be found by any user searching for an explicit hashtag, the researchers found that Instagram’s recommendation algorithm also “recommended them to users viewing accounts across the web, allowing them to be discovered without keyword searches.”

In a statement, a Meta spokesperson said the company has been taking a number of steps to address the issues and that it has “formed an internal task force” to investigate and address the claims.

“Child exploitation is a terrible crime,” the spokesman said. “We actively work to combat it on and off our platform, and support law enforcement efforts to apprehend and prosecute the criminals behind it.”

Alex Stamos, former chief security officer at Facebook and one of the authors of the paper, said in a statement tweet On Wednesday, the researchers focused on Instagram because it “is the most popular platform for teens globally, making it an important part of that ecosystem.” However, he added, “Twitter still has a serious problem with child exploitation.”

Stamos, now director of the Stanford Internet Observatory, said the problem persisted after Elon Musk bought Twitter late last year.

“We found that Twitter’s basic scan of known CSAMs was malfunctioning after Mr. Musk took over and was not fixed until we notified them,” Stamos wrote.

“Then they cut off our API access,” he added, referring to the software that gives researchers access to Twitter data for research purposes.

Earlier this year, NBC News Report Multiple Twitter accounts offering or selling CSAM remained available for months, even after Musk pledged to tackle child exploitation on the social messaging service.

Twitter had no comment for this story.

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