Meta Enhances Child Safety Measures: Insights into Inappropriate Content on Instagram and Facebook

Meta, in a recent blog post, announced an expansion of their child safety initiatives. This move is a response to growing reports indicating Meta’s platforms, particularly Instagram, have been recommending inappropriate, sometimes sexual content, to children, the aim is to bolster online protection for children and update current measures for a safer environment on Meta’s platforms.

Over recent months, The Wall Street Journal has released a series of reports detailing how Meta and its popular platform Instagram have displayed unsuitable content related to children, these reports highlight potential risks concerning child safety on these digital platforms.

A detailed report published in June revealed how Instagram, a Meta platform, linked a network of accounts involved in buying and selling child sexual abuse material, this report sheds light on Instagram’s recommendation algorithms facilitating these accounts to connect with each other, raising serious concerns about content and account management on

Recent investigations have shown the issue extending to Facebook groups, part of Meta, these investigations reveal an ecosystem of accounts and groups on Facebook exploiting children sexually, with some groups having around 800,000 members, indicating the extensive nature of this problem on the platform.

Meta’s recommendation systems, including features like “Groups You Should Join” on Facebook and auto-fill tags on Instagram, allowed abusive accounts to find each other, this mechanism facilitates the formation of networks exploiting children sexually, raising significant concerns about content management and organization on these platforms.

Meta announced new restrictions to limit interactions between suspicious adult accounts, these restrictions include preventing these accounts from following each other on Instagram, not recommending these accounts to other users, and making comments from these accounts invisible to other suspicious accounts, these steps aim to combat the exploitation of children on its platforms.

Meta expanded its list of terms, phrases, and emojis related to child safety and began using machine learning to detect connections between different search terms, this development comes as regulators in the United States and the European Union press Meta on child safety across its platforms.

Mark Zuckerberg, alongside other executives from major tech companies, will testify before the U.S. Senate in January 2024 on the issue of online child exploitation.

In November, the European Union regulatory authorities gave Meta a deadline to provide information on how it protects minors.

A new request specifically addressed the circulation of self-generated child sexual abuse material on Instagram and its recommendation system.