Instagram's Algorithm Reportedly Recommended Sexual Content to Teenagers' Accounts

June 20, 2024

Investigations by The Wall Street Journal and a researcher have reportedly uncovered a concerning issue with Instagram's AI-driven Reels algorithm. It appears that the platform is recommending sexually suggestive content to accounts listed as belonging to 13-year-olds.

Meta, the parent company of Instagram, has pledged to restrict such content for minors. However, explicit videos were allegedly served within minutes of account creation according to these findings.

This incident underscores the importance of safe and secure AI practices. For those interested in shaping responsible AI governance, contributing to harm prevention efforts, or learning more about how incidents like this map to HISPI Project Cerebellum TAIM (Measure function), JOIN US.

Matched TAIM controls

Suggested mapping from embedding similarity (not a formal assessment). Browse all TAIM controls

Alleged deployer
meta-platforms, instagram
Alleged developer
meta-platforms, instagram
Alleged harmed parties
minors, children, instagram-users, general-public

Source

Data from the AI Incident Database (AIID). Cite this incident: https://incidentdatabase.ai/cite/788

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.