Along with Snapchat and especially TikTok, Instagram is one of the favorite social networks for the little ones. It’s not a coincidence, I remember reading a study that claimed there was a direct correlation between the image/video-text ratio and the age profile it attracted. In short, the more audiovisual content and less text, the younger the audience, which is empirically proven if we compare the average age of TikTok users with the age of Facebook users.

The youngest is an audience that is especially sought after by many companies of all types. and that is why social networks are trying to attract them. We still very well remember Meta’s plans to create an Instagram for children, a deeply despicable idea that, fortunately, generated negative reactions and ended up being shelved when it became clear that Meta was well aware of the harmful effects of their social network on the youngest.

Since, either because they saw the light or because they saw the wolf’s earsThe truth is that Meta has announced several improvements when it comes to the use of Instagram by minors. Progress in the right direction without a doubt. Just read the official publications of those responsible for the service and experience, if you are a parent, great peace of mind knowing that your littlest users of the service are, right?

The truth is, not at all, and as we read in The Wall Street Journal, Instagram allows access and even suggests adult content to minors. And when I talk about minors, I don’t mean young people a few months before coming of age, no, an investigation by the newspaper and Northeastern University professor Laura Edelson showed that the network hesitates to recommend clearly sexual content to user accounts that imitate the age of 13.

That’s the age they set when creating the accounts they’ll use to conduct the tests, which ran from January to April this year. According to them, certain risky content was suggested to them from the first moment, and if they consumed this content, Instagram’s algorithm would show them more and more explicit content. To put it into numbers, they say it only took them three minutes to start watching adult content, and that tWithin 20 minutes, a large portion of your feed was already made up of these types of posts.

In these cases, we might think that it is very, very difficult to create an effective filtration system, right? However, it turns out that the researchers (TWSJ and Edelson) conducted similar tests on TikTok and Snapchat, but They have never received recommendations for adult content on these servicesand this despite his active search and monitoring of creators of this type of content.