Instagram exposes teens to gruesome content despite pledges to protect them

Let’s say a 15-year-old boy creates a new Instagram account and follows celebrities recommended by the platform. He searches for the word “fight” and ultimately ends up scrolling through an array of violent and gory videos, despite Meta’s pledges to restrict unsafe content.

New research by the Tech Transparency Project (TTP) reveals that the “Instagram Teen Accounts” did not protect the hypothetical young boy from fight videos, content that Meta explicitly promised to restrict.

“A teenage boy can find fighting videos on Instagram in just a few clicks without encountering any resistance from the platform,” TTP said in the report.

“After searching for ‘fight,’ the teen test user just had to click once on the Tags tab and a second time on the hashtag #fight to enter a world of brutal fight content.”

The Instagram app’s tab for Tags also suggested additional fight-related and even animal cruelty hashtags, such as #fightvideos, #hoodfight, and #dogfight. Clicking on these hashtags generated thousands of new disturbing videos, prompting researchers to include a warning before attempting to view the provided screenshots in the report.

Meta claims in its policies that it removes the most graphic content and adds “warning labels to other types of content so that people are aware it may be sensitive before they click through.”

“We restrict the ability for younger users to see content that may not be suitable or age-appropriate for them,” reads Meta’s Community Standards.

A year ago, the tech giant acknowledged that younger adolescents are more vulnerable and announced a set of safeguards supposed to protect teens and provide parents with “peace of mind.”

“Teens will automatically be placed into the most restrictive setting of our sensitive content control, which limits the type of sensitive content (such as content that shows people fighting or promotes cosmetic procedures) teens see in places like Explore and Reels,” Meta promised.

The test: no trickery needed

The test that TTP set up was actually very simple. First, they created a new Instagram account for a non-existent 15-year-old boy using a newly created email address and a newly activated iPhone with a fresh SIM card to avoid any potential bias.

During the account setup, the teen account followed the first 30 accounts recommended by Instagram, which included internet personalities, celebrities, and professional sports teams.

The hypothetical 15-year-old then searched Instagram for the word “fight.”

This already produced a series of fight videos under the For You tab, though the violent content was limited: mostly people pushing and shoving each other, moment posturing before a professional fight, demonstrations of martial arts, or highlights from movies like Fight Club.

“The one exception was a still image of a professional fighter's head and torso covered in blood.”

The Accounts tab only listed a single account, @fight, that posts promotional material for Ultimate Fighting Championship fights. It also included a message notifying that most search results were hidden because they may contain sensitive content.

The Reels and Places tabs also displayed warnings and no results.

“The Tags tab, however, showed the hashtag #fight, which encompassed 20.1 million Instagram posts,” the researchers said.

“It was accompanied by the same sensitive content message, but nothing prevented the teen user from clicking on #fight.”

Clicking on #fight generated a new set of search results, and all the sensitive content messages disappeared.

The hypothetical boy was served hundreds of videos of school fights, street fights, and gruesome dog fights.

“Two dogs tearing at each other’s heads and throats in a dimly lit space while people kick them to encourage them to fight,” the researchers described one video they saw among the top results.

Similar results appeared under other tabs with no warnings, despite the user’s age. The Accounts tab was updated to include dozens of Instagram accounts with “fight” in their name.

“Other accounts generated by the #fight search focused on knockout fights, where at least one participant is knocked to the ground. On such account, ‘_knockout_fights_,’ boasts it has the ‘Hottest Fight Vids Out Right Now.’ Many of its videos show street fights,” the researchers observed.

Some videos even contained the #sensitivecontent hashtag, which matches Meta’s terminology about content that’s supposed to be restricted for teens.

TTP warns that teens can click on many dangerous hashtags to access more fight videos, and the platform fails to shield the minors.

“Meta actually served up the hashtag #fight to our test teen, pushing the young user toward the very content it promised to restrict.”

TTP's previous report claimed that Meta also used a range of tactics to influence the public debate over kids and social media, and build a counter-narrative to the idea that its platforms are harming young users.

The tactics included “cultivating a network of paid child advocacy groups, using a social research “lab” to publish reports in support of its products, and funding academic research that highlights positive use cases for Instagram.”

Cybernews has reached out to Meta for a comment and will include its response.