Instagram’s parent company dismissed a report on Thursday that concluded the social media platform regularly recommends sexual videos to teenage girls’ accounts, arguing it does not reflect “reality.”
Tests carried out by Wall Street Journal and an academic researcher discovered over seven months that accounts of users as young as 13 almost immediately received raunchy content on Instagram Reels.
When teen accounts showed interest in raunchy videos, even racier content was recommended, including from adult sexual content creators.
Internal tests and an analysis previously carried out by Meta, the parent company of Instagram and Facebook, produced similar results, according to the Journal.
Meta spokesman Andy Stone said in a statement that the tests conducted by the Journal were an “artificial experiment” and suggested it “does not match the reality of how teens use Instagram.”
“We are committed to constantly improving and have dedicated teams focused on helping ensure teens see age-appropriate content on Instagram, including when they first join the platform,” said Stone.
“As part of our long-standing work on youth issues, we have established an effort to further reduce the volume of sensitive content that teens can see on Instagram and have significantly reduced these numbers in recent months,” he added.
Meta announced in January that it was changing its approach to teen accounts, automatically placing them on the most restrictive content control settings and hiding age-inappropriate content.
This story originally appeared on thehill.com read the full story
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