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Instagram “helps connect and promote” a vast pedophile network that facilitates the commission and purchases of underage child sex and abuse content, The Wall Street Journal has revealed.
WSJ and researchers at Stanford University and the University of Massachusetts Amherst conducted a sweeping investigation of the top social media site’s algorithm and found that not only does Instagram host this content, it specifically promotes and recommends content sellers to pedophile users.
From the WSJ:
Pedophiles have long used the internet, but unlike the forums and file-transfer services that cater to people who have interest in illicit content, Instagram doesn’t merely host these activities. Its algorithms promote them. Instagram connects pedophiles and guides them to content sellers via recommendation systems that excel at linking those who share niche interests, the Journal and the academic researchers found.
Though out of sight for most on the platform, the sexualized accounts on Instagram are brazen about their interest. The researchers found that Instagram enabled people to search explicit hashtags such as #pedowhore and #preteensex and connected them to accounts that used the terms to advertise child-sex material for sale. Such accounts often claim to be run by the children themselves and use overtly sexual handles incorporating words such as “little slut for you.”
But it gets much worse. The investigation also found some content “menus” also featured children harming themselves, engaging in sex acts with animals, and had options to arrange “meet ups.”
Instagram accounts offering to sell illicit sex material generally don’t publish it openly, instead posting “menus” of content. Certain accounts invite buyers to commission specific acts. Some menus include prices for videos of children harming themselves and “imagery of the minor performing sexual acts with animals,” researchers at the Stanford Internet Observatory found. At the right price, children are available for in-person “meet ups.”
The pedophile network also employed the use of “cheese pizza” and “map” emojis to communicate with each other, the Journal reported.
The pedophilic accounts on Instagram mix brazenness with superficial efforts to veil their activity, researchers found. Certain emojis function as a kind of code, such as an image of a map—shorthand for “minor-attracted person”—or one of “cheese pizza,” which shares its initials with “child pornography,” according to Levine of UMass. Many declare themselves “lovers of the little things in life.”
Parent-company Meta Platforms told the WSJ it “acknowledged problems” within its enforcement of content violation rules but assured the paper it already took down “27 pedophile networks” with more on the way.
Alex Stamos, the head of the Stanford Internet Observatory and Meta’s former chief security officer said it would be difficult to eradicate the pedophile networks on Meta.
“That a team of three academics with limited access could find such a huge network should set off alarms at Meta,” he said, adding the company has much better tools to map out these pedophile networks than outsiders do.
“I hope the company reinvests in human investigators,” he added.
What Stamos fails to realize is these social media companies are also comprised mostly of liberals, who have become sympathetic in recent years to pedophiles as an oppressed group, so it may take even longer than he realizes to stop these pedophile networks on Instagram.
Another instance of secret communications using mentions of pizzas and maps were found in Clinton campaign manager John Podesta’s emails published by WikiLeaks in 2016, which ended up sparking the so-called “PizzaGate” conspiracy theory.
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