Predators Are Leering at Posts of Girls
York Times found.
Thousands of accounts examined by The Times offer disturbing insights into how social media is reshaping childhood, especially for girls, with direct parental involvement. Some parents are the driving force behind the sale of photos, exclusive chat sessions and even the girls’ worn outfits to followers. The most devoted customers spend thousands of dollars nurturing the underage relationships.
The large audiences boosted by men can benefit the families, The Times found. The bigger followings look impressive to brands and bolster chances of getting products and other financial incentives, and the accounts themselves are rewarded by Instagram’s algorithm with greater visibility, which in turn attracts more followers. One calculation performed by an audience demographics firm found 32 million connections to male followers among the 5,000 accounts examined by The Times.
Interacting with the men opens the door to abuse. Some flatter, bully and blackmail girls and their parents to get racier images. The Times monitored separate exchanges on Telegram, the messaging app, where men openly fantasize about sexually abusing the children they follow on Instagram and extol the platform for making the images available.
Nearly 1 in 3 preteens list influencing as a career goal, and 11 percent of those born in Generation Z, between 1997 and 2012, describe themselves as influencers. The so-called creator economy surpasses $250 billion worldwide, according to Goldman Sachs, with U.S. brands spending over $5 billion a year on influencers.
But health and technology experts have recently cautioned that social media presents a “profound risk of harm” for girls. The pursuit of fame, particularly through Instagram, has supercharged the often toxic phenomenon, The Times found, encouraging parents to commodify their children’s images. Some child influencers earn over $100,000 a year, according to interviews.
“I really don’t want my child exploited on the internet,” said Kaelyn, a mother in Melbourne, Australia, who like many parents interviewed by The Times agreed to be identified only by a middle name. “But she’s been doing this so long now. Her numbers are so big. What do we do? Just stop it and walk away?”
Meta, Instagram’s parent company, found that 500,000 child Instagram accounts had “inappropriate” interactions every day, according to an internal study in 2020 quoted in legal proceedings.
In a statement to The Times, Andy Stone, a Meta spokesperson, said that parents were responsible for the accounts and could delete them anytime.
“Anyone on Instagram can control who is able to tag, mention or message them, as well as who can comment on their account,” Mr. Stone added.
Like many parents, Elissa said she protected her daughter by handling the account exclusively herself. Ultimately, she concluded, the Instagram community is dominated by “disgusting creeps,” but she nonetheless keeps the account up and running. Shutting it down, she said, would be “giving in to bullies.”
In today’s creator economy, companies often turn to social media influencers to attract new customers. In the dance and gymnastics worlds, teens and preteens jockey to become brand ambassadors. They don bikinis in Instagram posts, walk runways in youth fashion shows and offer paid subscriptions to videos showing their everyday goings-ons.
The most successful girls can demand $3,000 from sponsors for a single post, but monetary gain can be elusive for others. Youth fashion shows charge the girls to participate and charge their parents to attend.
In 2022, Instagram launched paid subscriptions, which allows followers to pay a monthly fee for exclusive content and access. The rules do not allow subscriptions for anyone under 18, but the mom-run accounts sidestep that restriction. The Times found dozens that charged from 99 cents to $19.99. At the highest price, parents offered “ask me anything” chat sessions and behind-the-scenes photos.
Child safety experts warn the subscriptions could lead to unhealthy interactions.
“I have reservations about a child feeling like they have to satisfy either adults in their orbit or strangers who are asking something from them,” said Sally Theran, a psychology professor at Wellesley College in Massachusetts.
For many mom-run accounts, comments from men are a recurring scourge to be eradicated, or a fact of life to be ignored. For others, they are a source to be tapped.
“The first thing I do when I wake up and the last thing I do when I go to bed is block accounts,” said Lynn, the mother of a 6-year-old girl in Florida who has about 3,000 followers from the dance world.
The vast world of child-influencer followers on Instagram includes men who have been convicted of sex crimes, and those who engage in forums off platform where child sexual abuse imagery, including of girls on Instagram, is shared.
In monitoring multiple Telegram chat rooms, The Times found men who treat children’s Instagram pages and subscription services as menus to satisfy their fantasies. They trade information about parents considered receptive to selling “private sets” of images. A group with over 4,000 members was highly organized, tracking nearly 700 children.
The Times asked the Canadian Center for Child Protection, a group that monitors online child exploitation, to review links and other potentially illegal material posted by the Telegram groups and elsewhere. The center identified child sexual abuse imagery involving multiple underage Instagram models from around the world, as well as sexualized videos of others, including a preteen girl wearing a thong and a young teenager raising her dress to show her bikini bottom.
Men in these groups frequently praise the advent of Instagram as a golden age for child exploitation.
“I’m so glad for these new moms pimping their daughters out,” one of them wrote.
A small group of men cultivate business and patronage relationships with mothers. One man tried to persuade a mother to sell her daughter’s used leotards because many men, including himself, were “collectors,” according to a recording of the conversation.
“In retrospect I feel like such a stupid mom, but I’m not stupid,” said a mother of a young gymnast who dealt with similar men before she realized they were predators. “I didn’t understand what grooming was.”
Meta failed to act on multiple reports made by parents and even restricted those who tried to police their own followers, according to interviews and materials provided by the parents. If they block too many followers’ accounts in a day, Meta curtails their ability to block or follow others, they said.
“I remember being told, like, I’ve reached my limit,” said a mother of two dancers in Arizona who declined to be named. “Like what? I reached my limit of pedophiles for today.”
Mr. Stone, the Meta spokesperson, said, “There are lots of reasons an account might face limitations or restrictions,” and therefore it was difficult to know why parents encountered these problems.
One parent reported a photo of erect male genitalia sent in a direct message. Another reported an account that reposted children’s photos with explicit captions. A third reported a user who propositioned her child for sex, offering $65,000 for “an hour” with the girl.
In response to those three reports, Meta said either that the communications did not violate “community guidelines” or that its staff did not have time to review them.
Former Meta trust and safety employees described an organization overwhelmed despite knowing about the problem for years.
“You hear, ‘I reported this account, it was harassing my daughter, why is he back?’” said a former investigator for the company who requested anonymity. “There are not enough people, resources and systems to tackle all of it.”