Meta said in a blog post today that it is expanding and updating its child safety features designed to protect children, the latest development amid mounting reports about how its platform recommends child sexual content.
For months, The Wall Street Journal has detailed how Instagram and Facebook served users inappropriate and sexual content related to children. In June, a report detailed how Instagram connected a network of accounts that trafficked in child sexual abuse material (CSAM) and directed those accounts toward each other through its recommendation algorithm. A follow-up investigation published today revealed how the problem extended to Facebook groups, where there was an ecosystem of pedophile accounts and groups, some with as many as 800,000 members.
In both cases, Meta's recommendation system allowed abusive accounts to find each other through features like Facebook's "You May Be Interested Groups" or autocomplete tags on Instagram. Meta said today that it will limit how "suspicious" adult accounts can interact with each other: On Instagram, these accounts will not be able to follow each other, they will not be recommended, and their comments will not be visible to other "suspicious" accounts.
Meta also said it has expanded its list of terms, phrases and emojis related to child safety and started using machine learning to detect connections between different search terms.
While U.S. and EU regulators put pressure on Meta on how to ensure the safety of children on the platform, Meta also released the above report and made corresponding child safety adjustments. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg will join several other big tech executives to testify before the Senate in January 2024 about online child exploitation. In November, EU regulators gave Meta a deadline (which expires today) to provide information on how it protects minors; today they issued new requests to Meta, specifically calling out "self-generated child sexual abuse material (SG-CSAM) circulating on Instagram" and the platform's recommendation system.
In late November, dating app companies Bumble and Match suspended advertising on Instagram following a Wall Street Journal report. Advertisements from both companies appeared alongside Reels videos of explicit content and sexual assaults on children.