Instagram recommends sexually explicit Reels videos to teens under 13, even if they aren’t specifically looking for explicit videos, according to separate tests by The Wall Street Journal and Northeastern University professor Laura Edelson.
Instagram is reportedly recommending sexually explicit Reels videos to teens under 13
For the tests, they both created new accounts and set their age to 13 for the tests, which mostly ran from January to April this year.
Instagram suggested moderately explicit Reels videos to these accounts from the start, including women dancing sensually or focusing on their bodies. Accounts that watched these videos and skipped other Reels videos then started receiving suggestions for more explicit videos.
Some of the recommended Reels videos featured women miming sexual acts, while others promised to send nude photos to users who commented on their accounts.
Testers were also reportedly presented with videos featuring people exposing their genitals. Three minutes after the accounts were created, Reels videos with sexual content began to arrive. Within 20 minutes of watching them, the recommended Reels section was dominated by creators producing sexual content.
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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 accounts actively searched for age-inappropriate videos and followed the creators who produced them, they never saw recommendations for these Instagram Reels videos.
The Wall Street Journal says Meta employees have identified similar problems in the past, citing undisclosed documents detailing internal research into teens’ harmful experiences on Instagram.
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According to the newspaper, Meta’s security personnel had previously conducted the same test and reached similar results. However, company spokesman Andy Stone dismissed the allegations in a statement: “This was an artificial experiment that did not match the reality of how young people use Instagram. “The company is making an effort to further reduce the volume of sensitive content young people can see on Instagram, and we have meaningfully reduced these numbers over the last few months.”
In January, Meta rolled out major privacy updates to protect young users, automatically placing them in the most restrictive control settings they can’t get out of on their own. Testing was done after the release of these updates. What are you thinking? Please don’t forget to share your thoughts with us in the comments section below.