An investigation by The Wall Street Journal and an academic researcher found the platform continues to push sexually suggestive material to minors
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An investigation by The Wall Street Journal and an academic researcher has found Instagram regularly — and immediately — recommends sexual content to accounts for teenagers that appear interested as soon as they log in.
The investigation follows an announcement from parent Meta Platforms in January that it would be restricting “sensitive content” for teen users.
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Over a seven month period, ending in June, WSJ and Laura Edelson, a computer-science professor at Northeastern University, found that Instagram continues to push sexually suggestive material to minors.
The investigation involved setting up multiple new accounts, with ages listed as 13, and then viewing Instagram’s suggested “Reels” or video streams.
From initiating the news accounts, Instagram suggested “moderately racy content,” WSJ reports. If the accounts lingered on the suggestive material, the platform pushed “edgier” content.
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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.
Andy Stone, spokesman for Meta, said the “artificial experiment” doesn’t “match the reality of how teens use Instagram” and the company is continuing to work on its systems to prevent recommending inappropriate content to minors.
Stone added that the company, in the past few months, has “meaningfully reduced” the volume of sensitive content teens could be exposed to the on the platform
In a thread on X, Edelson highlighted 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 13 year old user, and found that the TikTok experiences was very different between my adult and teen ‘personas’, but the Instagram Reels experiences were not,” she wrote in a report for Cybersecurity for Democracy, a multi-university research project.
“I was somewhat surprised about just how quickly I could get to a steady content diet of sexually suggestive content on Reels,” she wrote. “Videos on the top end of the scale (miming sex acts, nudity, non-street appropriate clothing like lingerie) started appearing by minute three for both my teen and adult accounts and became a regular occurrence before minute 10 for both accounts.”
TikTok, for its part, says it operates “content level systems” where content is categorized based on thematic maturity, similar to film or TV ratings, as a means to protect younger audiences from mature themes.
“It’s worth noting that my findings about TikTok are consistent with what TikTok has said about their ‘Content Levels’ approach to content for teens,” Edelson added.
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“We err on the side of caution,” a TikTok spokesman told WSJ, noting that the “pool of content” for young users is restricted on the platform.
According to a 2022 Meta internal analysis, reviewed by WSJ, the company has long known that Instagram pushes adult content, in addition to gore and hate speech, to young users more often than adults on the platform.
“Teens on Instagram reported exposure to bullying, violence and unwanted nudity at rates exceeding older users in company-run surveys, and the company’s statistics confirmed that the platform was disproportionately likely to serve children content that violated platform rules,” reports WSJ.
The report added that teens were exposed to three times as many prohibited posts containing nudity, 1.7 times as much violence and 4.1 times as much bullying content as users above 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 were not being exposed to inappropriate content.
Meta has not yet taken action on that proposal.
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