The Grim Reality for Some Young Influencers on Instagram

[00:00:00] This program is brought to you by Vanta. Vanta's trust management platform helps you quickly assess risk, streamline security reviews and automate compliance for SOC 2, ISO 27001 and more. Learn how by watching Vanta's on-demand demo at vanta.com slash WSJ. Welcome to Tech News Briefing. It's Friday, June 21st.

[00:00:23] I'm Zoe Thomas for The Wall Street Journal. A mother and daughter ran an Instagram account together, posting pictures and videos of the young teen modeling and dancing. But as the account grew in popularity, the mom began to notice a disturbing trend.

[00:00:40] Most of the girl's followers were adult men. A spokesman for Meta, Instagram's owner, said the company enables parents who run accounts for their children to control who is able to message them or comment on their accounts.

[00:00:52] Later in the show, our reporter Kathryn Blunt brings us the story of this mother and daughter and tells us why adult men make up so much of the follower base for this account and others. But first, Reddit is a social network with over 82 million daily active users.

[00:01:15] Posting in groups called subreddits, they can upvote or downvote what others contribute, surfacing what are considered to be the best responses. What Reddit isn't is a search engine. And yet many people are using it that way to find information on the internet.

[00:01:30] Earlier this month, that included our personal tech reporter Anne-Marie Alcantara. And she is with us now to talk about how that went. Anne-Marie, a lot of people are looking for answers on Reddit by searching Google and putting Reddit at the end of their query.

[00:01:45] What numbers do we have on how this trend is impacting Reddit and Google, which has dominated the search market? So according to similar web, worldwide desktop, mobile visits to Reddit in May increased 39% year over year to 2.4 billion visits. In the same period, Google visits decreased 2.2% to 86.2 billion.

[00:02:05] So obviously Google is still king. But you know, it's impressive how much Reddit has seen traffic climb and grow. What has Reddit said about the fact that people go to Google to search for things on their site rather than directly to Reddit?

[00:02:19] So Reddit definitely knows this is a thing and they have, you know, are trying to basically improve their own search experience on Reddit's own websites, apps, that sort of thing. Has Google said anything about this?

[00:02:33] Google has told me, you know, that they still believe that search satisfies an incredible diverse need of information needs and that it's just constantly innovating to figure out what people need to find. So you were doing this earlier this month.

[00:02:48] Can you tell us what queries work best with Reddit and which are less successful? Yeah, so for about a week I tried searching everything through both Google and then adding Reddit at the end of my searches.

[00:03:01] And it was surprising because I thought maybe Reddit would win because I use it so much for things. But for example, I was like going to a restaurant for breakfast and I wanted to figure out like what was the best type of dish I should order.

[00:03:15] And everyone on Reddit recommended not eating there, which was not an option because it was business breakfast. Google, however, you know, showed me the first link was like a menu and then showed some dishes so I could figure out like what I wanted to eat.

[00:03:26] But then Reddit really shined in other surprising ways. Like I recently read this book Fourth Wing for my book club and they both surfaced appropriate searches and threads for like spoilers and things that happened in the book.

[00:03:42] But at least with Reddit it tells you when there's going to be a spoiler in the post. It was little things like that that made a difference. What about product recommendations? Yeah, so in my search I was been looking like redoing my sleep setup and so I'm looking

[00:03:58] for a knee pillow. And with Google it was just so many shopping links. It was like regular shopping links and there was a sponsored section and there's like another section of popular products. I'm like scrolling down the page on my phone and nothing out of like websites reviewing

[00:04:14] this or recommending which ones are better. It was that sort of thing. But when I added Reddit to the same question it was completely different. You know, I had tons of recommendations, people describing exactly like what's helping, why

[00:04:27] a knee pillow helps and it was just way more what I wanted than just a bunch of shopping links when I don't even know what I'm shopping for. What are some of the downsides to using Reddit in this way?

[00:04:37] So as one person I spoke to for this story described, it's all the other recommendation apps that we come across in the sense that people who have bad experiences with anything, whether it's a restaurant, a product, a TV show, they're definitely going to post.

[00:04:53] And so you might be searching for something and you might encounter just a bunch of bad experiences or comments, whatever it might be. That was our personal tech reporter Anne-Marie Alcantara. After the break, the influencer is a young teenage girl. The followers are 92% adult men.

[00:05:12] We'll tell you about the grim reality for some families running Instagram accounts for their children when we come back. This program is brought to you by Vanta. Managing the requirements for modern security programs is increasingly challenging. Vanta's trust management platform helps you quickly assess risk, streamline security reviews

[00:05:36] and automate compliance for SOC 2, ISO 27001 and more. Plus, save time by completing security questionnaires with Vanta AI. Learn how by watching Vanta's on-demand demo at vanta.com slash WSJ. That's vanta.com slash WSJ. Parents who run Instagram accounts for their young children are confronting a grim reality.

[00:06:09] For young influencers, the followers include large numbers of men who take a sexual interest in children. Studies by The Wall Street Journal and outside researchers have found that once Instagram's algorithm recognizes that an account might be sexually interested in children, it recommends

[00:06:27] child accounts for the user to follow, as well as sexual content related to both children and adults. In response to our earlier reporting, Instagram's parent Meta said it took a series of measures to remove violating accounts and enhance safety.

[00:06:43] But the reality of who many of these followers are creates a difficult choice for some parents. Taking down an account could mean the loss of income or the end of their child's dream to be an influencer. Here to tell us more about this is our reporter, Katherine Blunt.

[00:07:00] Katherine, you spoke with a mother and daughter who started an Instagram account together when the daughter was under 13 years old to show the daughter's dance skills. Can you tell us about their experience? It was enlightening to hear how this mother came to understand this really difficult

[00:07:16] dynamic on Instagram as her young daughter wanted to be an influencer like so many other young girls out there, certainly today. And as the account became more popular, the mother had access to data on the account that showed that many of these followers were adult men.

[00:07:34] And they were not necessarily men who are interested in buying preteen fashion, say, because you could see in terms of the comments on the account or the direct messages coming into the account inbox that a lot of them were really preoccupied with the girl's appearance.

[00:07:50] And others sent messages that made clear that they had pedophilic tendencies and were sexually interested in the girl. And so this mother, over the course of the life of the account, was really trying to position herself as the barrier between her daughter and these followers.

[00:08:06] And certainly in some cases, one might ask, like, why continue at all? And it was because her daughter was making a substantial amount of money from brand deals and saving the money for college. And save from the unsavory followers, it was something that they enjoyed doing together.

[00:08:21] So the calculation got pretty complex for this family. What kinds of posts were the mother and daughter putting up? When the account started, it wasn't immediately an influencer account. It was photos from her dance competitions and practice.

[00:08:34] And it sort of morphed into modeling dancewear, because dance brands offered to send free apparel for her to model and would pay some amount of money for the posts. And as the account matured, it became like an adolescent modeling account.

[00:08:48] School outfits or leisure outfits or just anything that you would think that a young teen would be interested in. How many male followers are we talking about? Over the course of time, had two accounts. The initial account that Meta ultimately deleted it, there was several hundred thousand followers.

[00:09:06] On that account, we're talking 80% male followers. And they ultimately were using a backup for some period of time. There were more than 100,000 followers on that account. And the dashboard showed 92% were adult men. Have other families had to deal with similar issues, having a large number of male followers

[00:09:24] who maybe take a sexual interest in the children that are being posted about? Absolutely. And this is a dynamic that is true across the young influencer industry. And the reason is Meta's algorithm largely creates this problem.

[00:09:39] Because once the algorithm recognizes that a user is likely sexually interested in children, we the Wall Street Journal have found in a series of investigations as well as outside researchers that the algorithm will then recommend users sexual content related to both children and adults.

[00:09:56] So it will recommend child focused accounts for the user to follow. It will connect the user with other users who are sexually interested in children. And so once that sort of begins to snowball, it becomes easier and easier for the user

[00:10:08] to find these sorts of child influencer accounts. What has Meta said about its child safety policies in this issue? In response to Wall Street Journal reporting over the past year, the company has said it

[00:10:20] is doing a lot more to try to create a safe online experience for both children and their The company has been building technology meant to identify potentially suspicious adults and remove those accounts.

[00:10:31] It has certainly publicized a wide range of tools that parents can use to help their children have a safe online experience. And as we mentioned earlier, it's trying to look at ways to address some of the safety issues that relate specifically to this influencer phenomenon.

[00:10:47] There may be more movement to come. What steps does Meta take as it relates to potentially problematic accounts, including the one run by the mother and daughter you spoke to? The company at times maybe removes photos that it thinks could be construed as overly

[00:11:02] sexual or something along those lines. It sometimes deletes accounts on those grounds, saying this violates community guidelines or it violates policies as it relates to child exploitation. In this particular case, this mother and daughter had a large account that Meta deleted and

[00:11:19] then a smaller account that Meta ultimately deleted again on the grounds that once you lose an account, you can't resume the same activity on a quote unquote backup. This mother said she does not believe she was in violation of any sort of policy that Meta made public.

[00:11:32] All right. That was our reporter, Catherine Blunt. And that's it for Tech News Briefing. Today's show was produced by Julie Chang. I'm your host, Zoe Thomas. Jessica Fenton and Michael LaValle wrote our theme music. Our supervising producer is Catherine Millsop. Our development producer is Aisha Al-Muslim.

[00:11:51] Scott Salloway and Chris Dinsley are the deputy editors. And Felana Patterson is The Wall Street Journal's head of news audio. We'll be back this afternoon with TNB Tech Minute. Thanks for listening. This program is brought to you by Vanta.

[00:12:11] Vanta's trust management platform helps you quickly assess risk, streamline security reviews and automate compliance for SOC 2, ISO 27001 and more. Learn how by watching Vanta's on-demand demo at vanta.com slash WSJ.