Meta’s new paid subscription service allowed parents to exploit their children by charging pedophiles to gawk at their bikini-clad kids on Instagram, where girls as young as nine years old were attracting comments from men such as “perfect bikini body,” “those thighs are perfection” and “you’re so hot.”
Staffers at Facebook and Instagram parent Meta said that they flagged hundreds of so-called “parent-managed minor accounts” that were using the subscription feature on those platforms to sell exclusive content that included photos of young girls in bikinis and leotards to mostly men, according to the Wall Street Journal.
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To make matters worse, Meta’s algorithm-run recommendation systems were reportedly promoting child-modeling accounts to adults who posted pedophilic comments. When Meta staffers tried to get the company to ban these accounts or at least force them to register with content moderators so that they could be monitored, their bosses declined — instead choosing to rely on a less-reliable automated system that allowed pedophiles to evade guardrails, sources told Journal.
The report comes as Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, who personally apologized to parents who confronted him about their children being exploited through his platforms last month, is seeking to avoid personal liability in two dozen lawsuits accusing his company of getting kids hooked on his social media sites.
Last year, Meta introduced a paid-subscription service to entice influencers to produce more content on their flagship social media platforms.Subscribers to these accounts who agreed to pay $19.99 a month were offered perks such as “in-person events” as well as “early access or releases,” according to The Journal report.The Journal found several instances in which banned accounts engaged in child exploitation were resurfacing — generating as many as hundreds of thousands of followers.One Facebook page with more than 200,000 followers featured pinup-style photos of children.
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The Meta staffers realized that the parents were well aware of highly explicit comments from adults toward their children — even going so far as to engage in sexual banter about their kids with subscribers.
The company’s policy required that adults be the only ones eligible to sell content or solicit donations, though it did create a carve-out for kids to have their names on an account so long as it was co-managed by an adult.
This led to the creation of child-model accounts which attracted the interest of strange men — prompting one Canadian activist, Sarah Adams, to warn of Instagram pages that included photos of prepubescent girls in bikinis that were being purchased by pedophiles.
“We launched creator monetization tools with a robust set of safety measures and multiple checks on both creators and their content,” Meta spokesperson Andy Stone told The Journal. He said Meta’s efforts to bar pedophiles from viewing child-model accounts “part of our ongoing safety work.”
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