I put the headline for this blog in inverted commas to indicate it is a quote from elsewhere. It is not my creation. Who gets the credit? Not some wild-eyed, woke, breathless and easily excitable liberal. It came from The Wall Street Journal. Here is a link to the article in question, although it is behind a paywall so you might struggle to read the full text. Here is a another link to some secondary reporting of the same story.
Note the quote from another not famously off-the-wall institution, Stanford University’s Cyber Policy Center.
“Instagram has emerged as the primary platform for such (paedophilic) networks, providing features that facilitate connections between buyers and sellers”
They went into greater detail in a blog post.
And after encryption?
Do I need to remind you Meta is planning to encrypt Instagram? Probably not.
But look at Meta’s response to the Journal’s revelations.
“We’re continuously investigating ways to actively defend against this behaviour, and we set up an internal task force to investigate these claims and immediately address them.”
This is a slight variation of the usual line which is
“We take these issues very seriously”.
Obviously not seriously enough, otherwise these stories would not keep on cropping up.
Meta went on to say over the past two years it had destroyed 27 paedophile networks on Instagram, as well as removed 490,000 accounts violating child safety policies in January alone. Don’t these volumes suggest a systemic problem? I’m afraid they do.
If those numbers were meant to reassure us, they had the opposite effect on me. Let me just repeat that. They took down
“27 paedophile networks over the past two years”
And they removed 490,000 accounts for violating child safety, in one month alone.
Hmmm.
We all go to railway stations or major shopping malls where there are signs everywhere which remind us to take care with our possessions because
“Pickpockets and thieves are operating in this area”
Maybe Instagram could start publishing similar warnings about paedophile activity, for every user, every time they log on.
What do you think?
Desiderata 