Paedophiles use food emojis as secret code on social media sites
CHEESE and pizza emojis are being used as a secret code by paedophiles to communicate on social media sites such as Instagram and Twitter, online safety groups have warned.
A group of more than 100 parents has banded together to hunt down and report accounts using the emoji to signal they are sharing sexualised images of children, in an attempt to evade detection by the social media giants.
Members of the parents’ group told The Telegraph they often found such accounts sharing images of children in family settings such as beaches or gar- dens, which appeared to have been stolen from parents’ social media profiles.
The development has prompted a former Government child safety advisor to warn parents to avoid sharing images of their children openly on social media in case they are stolen.
The group of parents was started by India, a 27-year-old executive assistant from London, who asked the paper not to use her surname, and who stumbled across the child image accounts on social media. Since then she has set up Twitter and Instagram pages, called Protectpd, dedicated to naming accounts she finds sharing child images so her followers can report them en masse to the social media giants. She said: “I couldn’t just scroll past it as at the end of the day these are people’s children.” India, who has had direct talks with officials at Instagram over the issue, said the accounts often signalled what they were doing by using cheese and pizza emojis, to represent “CP”, meaning “child porn”.
Following the revelation, John Carr, an online child protection expert who formerly sat on the Government’s UK Council for Internet Safety, described the phenomenon as “horrifying” and said social media giants had to do more themselves to hunt down and delete the account. He said: “This is about parents not thinking because they are not aware that these bad guys are out there doing this.”
Vaishnavi J, head of safety at Instagram, told The Telegraph: “Any content that endangers children is abhorrent and we’re committed to doing everything we can to keep it off our apps.”
A Twitter spokesman said: “Twitter has a zero-tolerance policy for child sexual exploitation content. We aggressively fight online child sexual abuse and have heavily invested in technology and tools to enforce our policy.”