Cybersecurity

"Meta did have more work to do on “child grooming,” as we saw in a June 2019 deck titled, “Inappropriate Interactions with Children on Instagram.” An early page called out that “IG recommended a minor through top suggested to an account engaged in groomer-esque behavior.” Grooming refers generally to the tactics a child predator might use to gain trust with potential victims to sexually abuse them. Subsequent pages gave some broader data: “27% of all follow recommendations to groomers were minors.” There’s a lot we don’t know about this statement: how did Meta track accounts that were “groomers” or “engaged in groomer-esque behavior”? And why were those accounts allowed at all? How did they generate that statistic? And it’s important to caveat as well that perhaps Meta didn’t know that any potential groomers were actual criminals. But by any measure, the headline is troubling.

There was more data than that. 33% of Instagram comments reported to Meta as inappropriate were reported by minors, the deck said of a three-month period. Of the comments reported by minors, more than half were left by an adult. “Overall IG: 7% of all follow recommendations to adults were minors,” the deck concluded.

The presentation also noted that during a “3-month period”—presumably in 2019—2 million minors were recommended by Instagram’s algorithm for groomers to follow. 22% of those recommendations resulted in a follow request from a groomer to a minor. Doing some back of the envelope math, that’s approximately 440,000 minors over just a three-month period who received a follow request from someone Meta labeled as a “groomer.” That number is shocking even before being annualized."

https://www.bigtechontrial.com/p/instagrams-algorithm-recommended

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