WSJ Study: Instagram Recommends Sexual Videos to Young Teens

Instagram consistently recommends sexual videos to accounts for younger teenagers, according to a study conducted by The Wall Street Journal and an academic researcher which was published Thursday.

Testing conducted by the outlet and Northeastern University computer science professor Laura Edelson ran over seven months and concluded in June. The results showed the widely popular photo and video sharing app continued to push adult-orientated content to minors even after parent company Meta Platforms said in January it would be giving teenagers a more age-appropriate experience.

Independent testing by both the Journal and Edelson involved setting up new accounts with ages listed at 13. The accounts then watched Instagram’s curated video stream known as Reels. In some cases, adult sex-content creators began appearing in the feeds in 3 minutes. After 20 minutes of watching Reels, test accounts feeds became inundated by promotions for creators offering nude photos for engagement.

Similar tests were performed on video sharing apps TikTok and Snapchat but did not produce the same results.

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

A spokesperson for Meta dismissed the findings, saying they are not representative of how teenagers use the app.

“This was an artificial experiment that doesn’t match the reality of how teens use Instagram,” spokesman Andy Stone said.

Stone said Meta’s efforts on shielding minors from explicit content is ongoing.

“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,” he told the outlet.