The algorithm behind Instagram's Reels service recommended "contrary doses of vulgar content" including children to test accounts created by The Wall Street Journal, in an investigation published on Monday.
The news outlet says the purpose of the investigation is to find out what type of content the platform will suggest to accounts that primarily follow young gymnasts, cheerleaders and other teen and pre-teen influencers.
The Wall Street Journal says it decided to conduct the test after noticing that many subscribers to these types of accounts are adult men, and some of them have also expressed an interest in sexual content related to both children and adults.
During its testing, the outlet claims that Instagram's algorithm delivered a large amount of lewd content, including "explicit footage of children as well as sexually explicit videos of adults."
Among these videos, the Wall Street Journal says that the platform also displayed ads for some of the largest American brands.
In one example, the outlet says, Instagram showed a group of videos that included an ad for a dating app, a video of a person caressing a life-sized doll, and a video of a young girl lifting her shirt to reveal her body. Another broadcast included a commercial, followed by a video of a man lying on a bed with his arm around a ten-year-old girl.
According to the Wall Street Journal, the Canadian Center for Child Protection conducted similar tests on Instagram and reported similar results.
Meta, which owns Instagram and Facebook, responded to the Wall Street Journal's investigation by saying that tests of the port produced a "manufactured experience" that did not represent what the vast majority of its billions of users saw.
However, a number of companies have chosen to opt out of advertising their products on Meta's platforms, with Match spokeswoman Justine Sacco saying: "We have no desire to pay Meta to market our brand to scammers or place our ads anywhere with this content."
Last month, Instagram was also targeted in a lawsuit filed by prosecutors in 41 US states, accusing the platform and its parent company of contributing to the ongoing mental health crisis among young people by deliberately urging them to compulsively use the social networking site.
Users of Google's Drive storage service report the sudden disappearance of their private files
Google reported that it has begun investigating allegations by a number of users that they lost many private files stored in its popular service, Google Drive.
Google said in a statement issued last night that it is investigating reports from Drive users claiming that their personal files have unexpectedly disappeared from the cloud service.
The company acknowledged the problem through the Google community support website, but it does not know the root cause yet, and the problem has not been solved yet.
The company believes the issue involves a "limited subset" of Google Drive users via the desktop app.
The leading technology company indicated that it is a synchronization issue for Google Drive desktop versions from 84.0.0.0 to 84.0.4.0.
The problem was first pointed out by a user who noticed that all of his files on Drive dating back to May 2023 had disappeared. He took his complaints to the Google community support website, according to The Register.
The Google community support team, as the user explains, guided him through the data recovery process, including trying to backup and restore the DriveFS folder, but to no avail.
So far, the “I have the same question” button about the issue has been clicked on the Google community support site by 268 users with similar issues.
“We are investigating reports of an issue affecting a limited subset of Drive desktop users and will follow up with further updates,” said a Google Help Center employee called Saitaj.
Google has not yet revealed the number of users who may have been affected.
Some users speculated that the problem may be related to Google's upcoming "purge" of inactive accounts.