Instagram is recommending sexual videos to teen accounts if they appear interested in “racy content,” according to The Wall Street Journal. The newspaper cited tests run over the course of seven months that involved registering accounts with the ages listed as 13, and then using the accounts to watch Reels, Instagram’s curated clip stream. If the accounts watched “moderately racy” videos in full while skipping other content, Reels would then serve up even “edgier” content, according to the Journal, with adult sex-content creators showing up in feeds in just three minutes, in some cases. In June, one 13-year-old test account which only watched “Instagram-recommended videos featuring women” was soon “served video after video about anal sex,” the report claims. The newspaper said similar tests on Snapchat and TikTok did not find them pushing the same type of sexualized content to teen accounts. “This was an artificial experiment that doesn’t match the reality of how teens use Instagram,” Meta spokesman Andy Stone told the Journal.
