Yulia Kozlova

Disgusting: “Meta Staff Found Instagram Tool Enabled Child Exploitation. The Company Pressed Ahead Anyway. Two teams inside Meta raised alarms in internal reports, after finding that hundreds of what the company calls ‘parent-managed minor accounts’ were using the subscription feature to sell exclusive content not available to nonpaying followers. The content, often featuring young girls in bikinis and leotards, was sold to an audience that was overwhelmingly male and often overt about sexual interest in the children in comments on posts or when they communicated with the parents… Meta’s staffers found evidence that some parents understood they were producing content for other adults’ sexual gratification. Sometimes parents engaged in sexual banter about their own children or had their daughters interact with subscribers’ sexual messages. Meta’s own reviews confirmed that parent-run modeling accounts were catering to users who had demonstrated pedophilic interests elsewhere on the platform and regularly used sexualized language when discussing the models. According to the reviews, Meta’s recommendation systems were actively promoting such underage modeling accounts to users suspected of behaving inappropriately online toward children. To address the problems, Meta could have banned subscriptions to accounts that feature child models, as rival TikTok and paid-content platforms Patreon and OnlyFans do, those people said. The staffers formally recommended that Meta could require accounts selling subscriptions to child-focused content to register themselves so the company could monitor them. Meta didn’t pursue those proposals, the people said, and instead chose to build an automated system to prevent suspected pedophiles from being given the option to subscribe to parent-run accounts. The technology didn’t always work, and the subscription ban could be evaded by setting up a new account. While it was still building the automated system, Meta expanded the subscriptions program as well as the tipping feature, called ‘gifts,’ to new markets. A Wall Street Journal examination also found instances of misuse involving the gifts tool. Those failures have drawn the attention of federal legislators and state attorneys general.  A recent Journal review of accounts subscribing to child-modeling content found that many had explicitly sexual usernames. Those with publicly viewable accounts appeared to mostly follow sexual cartoons and other adult content along with children. One subscriber to child-model accounts posted on his account a video of what he said was himself ejaculating. The Journal also found that Meta’s gifts program, available to accounts with at least a thousand followers, also featured unsavory activity. Some popular accounts sought donations via the program for curating suggestive videos of young girls stretching or dancing that they had culled from other sources, exposing those children to a mass audience that plastered the posts with suggestive emojis and sexual comments. In a number of cases the ‘send gift’ button was featured on posts promoting links to what they indicated were child sexual-abuse videos. In addition to problematic parent-run minor accounts, the Journal found numerous examples of others offering subscriptions and gifts for content against Meta’s rules. One titled ‘sex porn video xvideos xnxx xxx girl sexy’ purported to livestream adult videos. A 500,000-user Spanish-language group called ‘School Girls’ also was offering subscription content. TikTok told the Journal it bans the sale of underage modeling content on both TikTok marketplace and via its creator-monetization services. A spokeswoman for YouTube said it wouldn’t inherently ban subscriptions to child-modeling content, but noted that it doesn’t allow communication between accounts and their followers, which Meta promotes as a core feature of its subscription product.”