The Morning After: Instagram reportedly served up child-sexualizing Reels to followers of teen influencers

According to an experiment conducted by The Wall Street Journal, Instagram’s Reels video service would serve “risqué footage of children as well as overtly sexual adult videos” to its test accounts that exclusively followed teen and preteen influencers, usually young gymnasts and cheerleaders.
While these tests don’t represent real user experiences (as tech companies tend to counter with), aggregating child sexualization content was apparently a known problem internally, according to current and former Meta employees interviewed by the WSJ.
Meta told its advertising clients it was investigating and that it “would pay for brand-safety auditing services to determine how often a company’s ads appear beside content it considers unacceptable.”
— Mat Smith
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This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/the-morning-after-instagram-reportedly-served-up-child-sexualizing-reels-to-followers-of-teen-influencers-121741678.html?src=rss
According to an experiment conducted by The Wall Street Journal, Instagram’s Reels video service would serve “risqué footage of children as well as overtly sexual adult videos” to its test accounts that exclusively followed teen and preteen influencers, usually young gymnasts and cheerleaders. While these tests don’t represent real user…
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