sabrina maddeaux: how instagram, liberals are failing to protect kids
we shouldn’t have to wait for more children to be harmed before the government acts
4 minute read
although the u.k., eu and australia have all passed online harms legislation, the canadian government has yet to do so, despite repeated promises, writes sabrina maddeaux.
frederic j. brown / afp / getty images
there’s no question that social media platforms are failing children when it comes to online safety, consistently doing the bare minimum to protect their mental and physical well-being while serving them up to advertisers, data collectors and dangerous predators.
worse, some social networks may even be encouraging predation via their algorithms while actively connecting networks of pedophiles. a recent wall street journal (wsj) investigation alleges instagram reels is quick to take adult users down a rabbit hole of risqué children’s content interspersed with adult sexual content when they show an initial interest in accounts of preteen gymnasts, cheerleaders and other young influencers.
the experiment’s results highlight the urgent need for stricter online harms legislation around the world — and any online harms legislation at all in canada. despite their promise to introduce such a bill in 2019, then again within 100 days of their 2021 electoral win, the federal liberals have yet to do so.
the wsj set up instagram test accounts on new phones and used them to follow accounts of adolescent girls. they say the algorithm soon began to promote adult sexual content as well as pedophilia-laced content on their feeds. meta, which owns instagram, claims this was a “manufactured experience” that doesn’t reflect that of most users.
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“the journal set up the test accounts after observing that the thousands of followers of such young people’s accounts often include large numbers of adult men, and that many of the accounts who followed those children also had demonstrated interest in sex content related to both children and adults,” read the wsj’s report. “the journal also tested what the algorithm would recommend after its accounts followed some of those users as well, which produced more-disturbing content interspersed with ads.”
it’s one thing for an algorithm to direct a user who likes cat videos to other animal videos, it’s entirely another for it to direct adult accounts who follow young girls to increasingly sexualized content featuring both adults and children.
“in a stream of videos recommended by instagram, an ad for the dating app bumble appeared between a video of someone stroking the face of a life-size latex doll and a video of a young girl with a digitally obscured face lifting up her shirt to expose her midriff,” reads wsj’s reporting. “in another, a pizza hut commercial followed a video of a man lying on a bed with his arm around what the caption said was a 10-year-old girl.”
last week, experts brought together by the liberal government last year to provide advice on an online harms bill penned an open letter calling on the government to finally get its act together, particularly when it comes to protecting children. “our lack of governance has put canadian children at greater risk than their counterparts in much of the democratic world,” it reads. “canadian kids are increasingly subjected to egregious privacy violations, harassment, extortion and cyberbullying from offenders within and outside of canada, on platforms they use every day.”
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the united kingdom, european union and australia have all passed online harms legislation, making us a relative outlier among peer nations. it’s part of the federal liberals’ distressing pattern of being woefully slow and incompetent when it comes to any form of internet regulation.
meanwhile, harm proliferates. just over a week ago, news broke that a 12-year-old boy in british columbia died by suicide after he became the victim of sexual extortion. the tragedy became public on nov. 27, which would have been amanda todd’s 27th birthday had she not also died by suicide after explicit screenshots of her were non-consensually distributed among her peers.
todd died in 2012, and while canada introduced an anti cyber-bullying bill in 2014, little has been done since then to keep pace with the times. meanwhile, the canadian centre for child protection says sextortion reports to cybertip.ca have increased by 150 per cent in the past six months alone.
legislating the internet is undeniably complicated, particularly if one cares about protecting free expression. however, the federal liberals’ line that they’re still working on it isn’t nearly good enough nearly five years after they initially promised online harms legislation for modern times.
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while organizations like the canadian centre for child protection provide tips for parents and youth on how to protect themselves online, the reality is there’s only so much parents can do when platforms refuse to sufficiently regulate themselves and the government is still mia on the matter. the liberals’ abdication of responsibility is especially ironic when the party has been happy to use children’s well-being as a cultural wedge issue on the subject of parental rights.
we shouldn’t have to wait for more canadian children to be harmed or, worse, die before the government acts to protect them from platforms that have become predators’ playgrounds and whose algorithms promote pedophilia.
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