Instagram is the hot place for pedophiles--and the company pushes it to you

(AP Photo/Jeff Chiu)

As I noted earlier today, Instagram doesn’t want you to see Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s campaign images. Even before the Democratic presidential candidate was able to post a single image the company suspended his account.

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Apparently opposing President Biden is cause for suspension.

Posting Child Sexual Exploitation (CSE) and selling the images? That is not just OK, but Instagram will facilitate the practice.

You have to have standards, I guess, and we know what Instagram and its parent company Meta, formerly Facebook, believe is worth promoting and what needs to be suppressed.

Welcome to the world of Leftists.

The Wall Street Journal did a deep dive into Instagram’s facilitating the distribution and sale of child pornography. Not noted, but evident to people who pay attention, is how the FBI has apparently focused more attention on suppressing pro-life activists and parental rights advocates than actual sexual predators, who are openly selling their wares online.

Needless to say, what they found was both shocking and unfortunately unsurprising in the United States where the Left is rapidly normalizing pedophilia. While most Americans still deny this obvious trend because it is so horrific, the evidence is everywhere if you are willing to just look.

Instagram, the popular social-media site owned by Meta Platforms, helps connect and promote a vast network of accounts openly devoted to the commission and purchase of underage-sex content, according to investigations by The Wall Street Journal and researchers at Stanford University and the University of Massachusetts Amherst.

Pedophiles have long used the internet, but unlike the forums and file-transfer services that cater to people who have interest in illicit content, Instagram doesn’t merely host these activities. Its algorithms promote them. Instagram connects pedophiles and guides them to content sellers via recommendation systems that excel at linking those who share niche interests, the Journal and the academic researchers found.

Though out of sight for most on the platform, the sexualized accounts on Instagram are brazen about their interest. The researchers found that Instagram enabled people to search explicit hashtags such as #pedowhore and #preteensex and connected them to accounts that used the terms to advertise child-sex material for sale. Such accounts often claim to be run by the children themselves and use overtly sexual handles incorporating words such as “little slut for you.”

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Notice how the hashtags and accounts are not using codewords, which makes it more difficult to find such content. Rather than forcing pedophiles and the people who serve them fresh content to go underground, Instagram actively connects people not only by allowing explicit hashtags but through using algorithms that aggregate and push the content to the people who crave it.

Instagram accounts offering to sell illicit sex material generally don’t publish it openly, instead posting “menus” of content. Certain accounts invite buyers to commission specific acts. Some menus include prices for videos of children harming themselves and “imagery of the minor performing sexual acts with animals,” researchers at the Stanford Internet Observatory found. At the right price, children are available for in-person “meet ups.”

Obviously, Meta has “rules” which proscribe posting such content, but as with the efforts to provide legal protections for “nonpracticing” pedophiles that are sweeping the nation, such rules are observed in the breach. Twitter, too, used to follow this practice until Elon Musk cracked down on it. While CSE material can no doubt still be found on Twitter briefly before being taken down, the no-tolerance policies are no longer mere words.

Not so on Meta’s Instagram platform, and likely other social media sites. TikTok heavily promotes Jeffrey Marsh’s videos aimed at children, where the sicko encourages kids to hide their predilections from parents and join him on private one on one “sessions” on his Patreon. God knows what happens there.

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Instagram, apparently, doesn’t even force pedophiles to hide their activity in the least, creating a vast market for pedophiles to not only share material but to commission new content for a fee. It also, apparently, allows children themselves to create the equivalent of OnlyFans accounts to cater to willing buyers.

The latter should be unsurprising given the grooming of kids and the celebration of “sex work.” Mothers and daughters share OnlyFans accounts, so it makes sense that children get in on the games. The money is probably good, and as we know, these days children can “consent” to almost anything besides cigarettes and alcohol.

Meta said it has in the past two years taken down 27 pedophile networks and is planning more removals. Since receiving the Journal queries, the platform said it has blocked thousands of hashtags that sexualize children, some with millions of posts, and restricted its systems from recommending users search for terms known to be associated with sex abuse. It said it is also working on preventing its systems from recommending that potentially pedophilic adults connect with one another or interact with one another’s content.

Finding pedophilic material on a social media site isn’t that hard, Meta. The company knows what brand of athlete’s foot powder its users buy, and serves ads to people that are eerily predictive of one’s thoughts. An account named “little slut for you” or a hashtag #preteensex might raise a red flag or three. If the company is making it easy for the pedos themselves, they are making it even easier for their “moderators” to find and eliminate it.

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They didn’t want to. Three academics found a network of pedos without anything like the resources of a company valued at $700 billion.

“That a team of three academics with limited access could find such a huge network should set off alarms at Meta,” he said, noting that the company has far more effective tools to map its pedophile network than outsiders do. “I hope the company reinvests in human investigators,” he added.

To give you a sense of the scale of the problem–and by that, I am referring to Meta’s corruption, not just the pedophiles themselves–consider that it took minutes for Instagram to start recommending child sexual exploitation material to an account that searched for it.

Test accounts set up by researchers that viewed a single account in the network were immediately hit with “suggested for you” recommendations of purported child-sex-content sellers and buyers, as well as accounts linking to off-platform content trading sites. Following just a handful of these recommendations was enough to flood a test account with content that sexualizes children.

The Stanford Internet Observatory used hashtags associated with underage sex to find 405 sellers of what researchers labeled “self-generated” child-sex material—or accounts purportedly run by children themselves, some saying they were as young as 12. According to data gathered via Maltego, a network mapping software, 112 of those seller accounts collectively had 22,000 unique followers.

Underage-sex-content creators and buyers are just a corner of a larger ecosystem devoted to sexualized child content. Other accounts in the pedophile community on Instagram aggregate pro-pedophilia memes, or discuss their access to children. Current and former Meta employees who have worked on Instagram child-safety initiatives estimate the number of accounts that exist primarily to follow such content is in the high hundreds of thousands, if not millions.

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Pedophiles have always been with us, so the existence of such people is hardly shocking. What is new, in modern America, is the not-so-secret embrace of these vile perverts by the people running Western civilization.

Pedophilia is being normalized by the elite. It hasn’t reached the tipping point where the average member of the public accepts or even understands that. But it is.

10 years ago would you have imagined that there would be an all-out campaign to normalize the sterilization, mutilation, and grooming of children? Certainly, most adults would have been horrified.

Now, half the country celebrates it openly, and major corporations jumped on board.

Welcome to modernity. It sucks.

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David Strom 10:30 AM | November 15, 2024
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David Strom 10:00 PM | November 14, 2024
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