HISPI Project Cerebellum
AI Incidents

Instagram Algorithms Reportedly Directed Children's Merchandise Ad Campaign to Adult Men and Sex Offenders

May 13, 2024

An Instagram ad campaign for children's merchandise was intended to reach adult women but was instead predominantly shown to adult men, including convicted sex offenders, due to Instagram's algorithmic targeting. This failure is reported to have led to direct solicitations for sex with a 5-year-old model in the ads.
Alleged deployer
meta, instagram
Alleged developer
meta
Alleged harmed parties
instagram-users, instagram-sellers, children

Source

Data from the AI Incident Database (AIID). Cite this incident: https://incidentdatabase.ai/cite/723

Data source

Incident data is from the AI Incident Database (AIID).

When citing the database as a whole, please use:

McGregor, S. (2021) Preventing Repeated Real World AI Failures by Cataloging Incidents: The AI Incident Database. In Proceedings of the Thirty-Third Annual Conference on Innovative Applications of Artificial Intelligence (IAAI-21). Virtual Conference.

Pre-print on arXiv · Database snapshots & citation guide

We use weekly snapshots of the AIID for stable reference. For the official suggested citation of a specific incident, use the “Cite this incident” link on each incident page.