Tag Archive for: Instagram
“Instagram Connects Vast Pedophile Network”
Reporting underscores need for a national data privacy standard
A new investigative report is out by the Wall Street Journal and the evidence is clear: Instagram connects and promotes accounts that are openly dedicated to the purchasing and selling of child sexual abuse materials. Instagram is allowing this content to spread in violation of both federal law and Meta’s own platform rules.
The Journal’s reporting underscores the need to pass a national data privacy standard. It’s the best way to protect Americans online, especially kids, and hold Big Tech companies accountable for its dangerous algorithms.
Top takeaways from the report:
1. Instagram’s algorithms actively promote illicit content.
As reported by the WSJ: “Pedophiles have long used the internet, but unlike the forums and file-transfer services that cater to people who have interest in illicit content, Instagram doesn’t merely host these activities… Instagram connects pedophiles and guides them to content sellers via recommendation systems.”
“Even glancing contact with an account in Instagram’s pedophile community can trigger the platform to begin recommending that users join it.”
2. Instagram allows explicit hashtags which connect users to accounts that advertise child-sex material for sale.
“The researchers found that Instagram enabled people to search explicit hashtags such as #pedowhore and #preteensex and connected them to accounts that used the terms to advertise child-sex material for sale.”
3. Instagram has allowed users to search for terms that its own algorithms know may be harmful or illegal content.
WSJ: A screenshot taken by the Stanford Internet Observatory shows the warning and clickthrough option when searching for a pedophilia-related hashtag on Instagram.
PHOTO: STANFORD INTERNET OBSERVATORY
“In response to questions from the Journal, Instagram removed the option for users to view search results for terms likely to produce illegal images. The company declined to say why it had offered the option.”
4. Instagram’s parent company, Meta, admitted they are not enforcing their policies and have failed to combat inappropriate content.
“Earlier this year, an anti-pedophile activist…
Meta Expunges Multiple APT, Cybercrime Groups From Facebook, Instagram
Facebook parent Meta said it thwarted the activity of three advanced persistent threat groups (APTs) in South Asia engaged in cyber espionage as well as six adversarial groups from various global regions engaged in what it deems “inauthentic behavior” on Facebook and other social networks.
The company’s takedown of these and other activities on its platforms is indicative of a sea of consistent and globally dispersed exploitative behavior from threat actors to leverage various online platforms to create elaborate social-engineering campaigns to lure and exploit Internet users, the company said.
In most of the cases, threat actors are using Facebook and other social networking and media platforms —including Twitter, Telegram, YouTube, Medium, TikTok, and Blogspot — to create various fake online accounts and personas, according to Meta. The attackers used fake identities, including job recruiters, journalists, or even military personnel, to earn credibility with users and legitimate entities so they could engage in malicious threat activity, the company said.
In its Quarterly Adversarial Threat Report released today, Meta detailed these incidents as well as actions it’s now taking to minimize security threats that leverage its platforms.
The report draws from Meta’s security monitoring of the use of its platforms, as well as monitoring of the Internet overall in order to flag malicious activity, which is increasingly becoming more dispersed across various platforms and geographies and thus harder to track, Nathaniel Gleicher, head of security policy at Meta, told journalists in a briefing on the report May 2.
“These threats are extremely persistent, and that they’re not going anywhere because the threat actors behind them are financially motivated,” he said. “That’s why we see … adversarial adaptation … including malware operators, spreading themselves across many places at once. So each phase of the campaign relies on a different service to survive.”
As part of its work to combat this activity, Meta also plans to empower businesses as well with a new tool it will release later this year to help them identify malicious activity as well as malware being used by the threat groups…
