How predators are drawn to ads featuring young girls on Instagram — NYT investigation

Report, which raises concerns about Meta's algorithms, follows up on earlier investigation into 'dark underworld of men who have sexualised interactions' with childrens' accounts.

People walk behind a Meta logo | File Photo | Reuters

New Delhi: As part of an investigation into the abuse of children on social media, The New York Times posted photos of jewellery ads featuring a young girl on Instagram — and got responses from several men who showed sexual interest in the child. These included “phone calls from two accused sex offenders, offers to pay the child for sexual acts and professions of love”.

The report by journalists Michael H. Keller and Jennifer Valentino-DeVries, published this month, raises concerns not only about paedophiles using Instagram to follow and interact with minors, but also about Instagram owner Meta’s child safety practices and the algorithms it uses that led to these men — not the target audience — being shown the jewellery ads.

This was a follow-up to an investigation led by the two journalists, published in February this year, into how young girls’ Instagram accounts, run by their mothers, have to deal with a growing “dark underworld of men who have sexualised interactions with those accounts”.

Speaking to The Times for the latest investigation, former Meta employees said that Instagram’s image classification tools might have something to do with the jewellery ads reaching predatory men. The tools compare new images to ones already on the site and show them to users who showed an interest earlier. Since the men engage, the algorithm picks up on it and shows them more.

Moreover, as advertisers compete to target women, who drive US consumer spending, “the algorithm probably focused on highly interested, easier-to-reach men who had interacted with similar content”, Piotr Sapiezynski, a researcher at Northeastern University, told The Times.

In a response, Meta admitted that the women-based ad environment was competitive, adding that the “low quality” of The Times’s ads — which featured no text — and the fact that they were posted by new accounts factored into their delivery to more men. The company also defended itself, saying its Audience Insights data “shows an estimate of who is potentially eligible to see an ad” but does not guarantee anything.

Extent of the problem

In its February report, The Times found 5,000 accounts of young girls, run by their mothers, that attracted sexualised comments and messages from men. The parents’ reactions, however, varied — some tried to use the reach to get more followers, and some to block the predatory men.

The report said that “while men accounted for about 35 percent of the audience overall, their presence grew dramatically as accounts became more popular. Many with more than 100,000 followers had a male audience of over 75 percent, and a few of them over 90 percent”.

Moreover, The Times scrutinised three dozen brands popular among the girls’ run accounts and discovered predatory followers in nearly all of the pages of the brands.

In its latest investigation, The Times found that nearly three dozen of the men who responded to their ads featuring children have also been following the mom-run child influencer accounts it studied in February, and nearly 100 of them followed accounts featuring or advertising adult pornography despite Instagram rules barring such content.

Speaking to The Times, some small business owners such as Morgan Koontz, a founder of children’s clothing brand Bella & Omi in West Virginia, said the company received “inappropriate, almost paedophile-type, perverted comments” from men on its Facebook ads. So, when they opened an Instagram account, Koontz and co-owner Erica Barrios chose to circumvent the issue by exclusively targeting women despite having fathers and grandfathers as regular clientele.

Lindsey Rowse, the proprietor of Tightspot Dancewear Center in Pennsylvania, who also confines ads to women, found that men comprised up to 75 percent of her audience if they weren’t excluded, but made only a few purchases.

“I don’t know how people find it… I would love to just block all guys,” she told The Times.

Creator economy & its hold

The thousands of Instagram accounts The Times looked at in February show social media is redefining and reshaping the childhood of young girls, mostly with the direct involvement of their parents, who are behind the sale of “exclusive chat sessions and even the girls’ worn leotards and cheer outfits to mostly unknown followers”.

This reflects the broader contours of social media companies’ increasing prevalence and domination of the cultural landscape, with the internet being perceived as a career avenue.

The Times provides the numbers to illustrate this phenomenon: “Nearly one in three preteens lists influencing as a career goal, and 11 percent of those born in Generation Z, between 1997 and 2012, describe themselves as influencers. The so-called creator economy surpasses $250 billion worldwide, according to Goldman Sachs, with U.S. brands spending more than $5 billion a year on influencers.”

In interactions with The Times, parents have tried to justify spending money on their daughters’ influencer activities as “extracurricular activities that build confidence, develop friendships” and a “security blanket” to aid future careers and help meet college fees.

“Social media is the way of our future, and I feel like they’ll be behind if they don’t know what’s going on,” a mother told The Times. “You can’t do anything without it now.”

In 2022, Instagram introduced a feature called paid subscriptions, enabling followers to pay a monthly fee for exclusive content and perks, which children’s accounts operated by mothers have been able to access although the platform otherwise prohibits subscriptions for users under 18.

Parents offered “ask me anything” chat sessions and exclusive behind-the-scenes photos, which, child safety specialists say, have the potential to foster a sense of entitlement to the girls’ attention among predatory men, and lead to the girls feeling compelled to cater to their “needs”.

Meta has failed to act on multiple reports by parents and restricted those who tried to police their followers, according to interviews and materials provided by the parents. If parents block too many followers’ accounts in a day, Meta curtails their ability to block or follow others, they have said.

Taking Meta to court

A 2020 document, revealed in a lawsuit alleging harm by social media companies, showed that Meta has characterised child safety as a “non-goal”. Andy Stone, a Meta spokesman, however, disputed the suggestion that the trust team was understaffed, “saying that 40,000 employees worked on safety and security and that the company had invested $20 billion in such efforts since 2016”.

In December 2023, New Mexico filed a lawsuit against Meta and its CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, for allowing its platforms to “become marketplaces for child predators” as revealed in an April report by The Guardian. The lawsuit alleges that Meta “proactively served and directed [children] to egregious, sexually explicit images” and “enabled adults to find, message and groom minors”, reported The Guardian.   

The New Mexico attorney general formally asked the company to furnish documentation of subscriptions provided on Facebook and Instagram “on children’s accounts run by parents”.

Stone, in a statement in late February, however, did not address this new request for information. Instead, he told The Guardian, “Child exploitation is a horrific crime, and online predators are determined criminals.”

“We use sophisticated technology, hire child safety experts, report content to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, and share information and tools with other companies and law enforcement, including state attorneys general, to help root out predators,” he added.

Manavi Sharma is an intern with ThePrint.

(Edited by Madhurita Goswami)