Some Instagram users disturbed by unsolicited content of torture, killings

LOS ANGELES — Kristoffer Reinman, a 32-year-old music producer and investor, was scrolling through Instagram last fall when he began to encounter violent videos — videos of people being shot and mutilated, posted by accounts he said he doesn’t follow.

“It was gory stuff, torture videos, stuff you just don’t want to see,” Reinman said. “Violent videos, they just started showing up. I was like, what is this? It’s nothing that I follow myself.” Feeling disturbed and disgusted, he immediately logged onto chat app Discord to tell his friends what was happening.

His friends replied it wasn’t just him. They too were receiving violent videos in their feed. Twitter users also began posting about the phenomenon. “Hey @instagram,” one Twitter user posted in September, “why was the first thing on my feed today a beheading video from an account i don’t even follow? Thx!” Mitchell, an Instagram user in his early 20s who asked to be referred to solely by his first name because of security concerns, said that “It started with a video of a car crash, or an animal getting hit by a train. I just scrolled past it. Then I started to see people get shot.”

Since Instagram launched Reels, the platform’s TikTok competitor, in 2020, it has taken aggressive steps to grow the feature. It rewarded accounts that posted Reels videos with increased views and began paying monthly bonuses to creators whose Reels content performed well on the app.

Instagram also announced last year it would be leaning harder into algorithmic recommendation of content. On Meta’s second-quarter earnings call, CEO Mark Zuckerberg noted Reels videos accounted for 20% of the time people spent on Instagram, saying Reels engagement was “growing quickly” and the company saw a 30% increase in the amount of time people spent engaging with Reels.

But at least part of that engagement has come from the kinds of videos Reinman and other users have raised concerns about, a result that shows how Meta’s Instagram has failed to contain harmful content on its platform as it seeks to regain audience lost to TikTok.

Meta acknowledged the existence of the violent videos, but a spokesperson said they were a small percentage of the platform’s total content. According to the company’s most recent community standards enforcement report, for every 10,000 content views, an estimate of about three contain graphic violence, an increase from the previous quarter.