Kerby Anderson

A recent study, done by the Wall Street Journal, illustrates how dangerous social media platforms have become. Instagram is owned by Meta, which also owns Facebook and was founded by Mark Zuckerberg.

Working with two teams of specialized Internet researchers from Stanford University and the University of Massachusetts Amherst, the Wall Street Journal was able to find 405 sellers of “self-generated” child-sex material, which had 22,000 unique followers.

In case you are wondering, the promotion of underage-sex content violates federal law as well as the rules established by Meta. And the company does know it has a problem. A Meta spokesman said the company actively seeks to remove such users, taking down 490,000 accounts for violating its child safety policies in January alone.

Now, I have a question for you. Have you even heard about this? We are talking about a major social media company that is owned by one of the wealthiest individuals in America. You might imagine this would be a major story. I did talk about it on my radio program but haven’t heard much else about this issue. We will see if Mark Zuckerberg will be called before a congressional hearing soon.

The head of the University of Massachusetts Rescue Lab warned that, “Instagram is an on-ramp to places on the Internet where there’s more explicit child sexual abuse.” The Stanford researchers looked at other social media sites and concluded, “The most important platform for these networks of buyers and sellers seems to be Instagram.”

You might want to reevaluate whether you should allow your children and grandchildren to use the Instagram app.