Highlights

• Tests reveal Instagram recommends suggestive content to teen accounts
• Meta’s promise of age-appropriate content for teens seemingly unfulfilled
• Internal study shows teens see more inappropriate content than adults
• TikTok and Snapchat perform better in similar tests

Instagram’s content recommendations for teens have been in the spotlight lately.

Researchers from The Wall Street Journal and Northwestern University ran a seven-month-long experiment ending in June, creating fake Instagram accounts for 13-year-olds and tracking the types of content suggestions they received.

Instagram Recommending Obscene Content

What they found was pretty shocking: within minutes of logging in, the accounts were being shown videos of women in suggestive poses.

When those videos were watched, the Reels algorithm started suggesting even racier content.

In just three minutes, adult sex content creators were showing up in the feed!

This isn’t what Meta, Instagram’s parent company, had promised back in January.

They’d said they’d make the platform more age-appropriate for users 16 and younger by restricting access to sexually suggestive material.

But apparently, that promise hasn’t been kept.

Professor Laura Edelson from Northwestern University noted “All three platforms also say that there are differences in what content will be recommended to teens. But even the adult experience on TikTok appears to have much less explicit content than the teen experience on Reels.”

Meta’s Response

When asked about the test results, Meta spokesman Andy Stone said, “This was an artificial experiment that doesn’t match the reality of how teens use Instagram.” The spokesman added, “As part of our long-running work on youth issues, we established an effort to further reduce the volume of sensitive content teens might see on Instagram, and have meaningfully reduced these numbers in the past few months.”

An internal study from 2022 showed that Instagram actually shows more porn to teens than it does to adults.

Like, a lot more.

Teens see three times as many posts with nudity, almost twice as many violent posts, and more than four times as many posts about bullying compared to users over 30.

In one test this month, a fake 13-year-old account started watching recommended videos about women for half an hour, and then it got sent videos about anal sex.

These findings are definitely concerning for parents of teenagers who have phones.

It seems like Instagram is recommending inappropriate stuff to users as young as 13, even though Meta promised to keep them safe in the first place.

So, if you’re a parent, you might want to keep an eye on what your teen is watching on Insta.

FAQs

What kind of content is Instagram recommending to teens?

According to recent tests, Instagram is recommending sexually suggestive videos and images to accounts registered as 13-year-olds.

This includes videos of women in provocative poses and even content from adult sex creators, which appeared within minutes of account creation.

How does this compare to other social media platforms?

Tests conducted on TikTok and Snapchat showed that these platforms did not deliver the same level of sexually-focused content to underage users.

A TikTok spokesperson stated that they “err on the side of caution” when it comes to content for teen subscribers.

What has Meta said about these findings?

Meta, Instagram’s parent company, has dismissed the test results as artificial and not representative of how teens typically use Instagram.

They claim to have made efforts to reduce sensitive content for teens and say they’ve made significant progress in recent months.

Are there any internal studies from Meta about this issue?

Yes, an internal Meta analysis from 2022 revealed that Instagram shows more pornographic content to teens than to adult users.

The report indicated that teens saw three times more posts containing nudity, 1.7 times more violent posts, and 4.1 times more posts showing bullying than users over 30.

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