Original published on Fox News
By Christopher Carbone
A group of international anti-sexual exploitation organizations on Wednesday blasted Instagram as a “predators’ paradise” as a part of a campaign to call out abusive behaviors on the popular photo platform.
“It’s time to #WakeUpInstagram, and stop a predators’ paradise from flourishing. Instagram needs to prioritize the safety of minors, not the accessibility of minors to adults, on its platform,” Haley Halverson, vice president of advocacy and outreach for the National Center on Sexual Exploitation, said in an emailed statement to Fox News.
Halverson’s organization, which is based in the U.S., was joined by Collective Shout in Australia and Defend Dignity in Canada; the groups claim to have collected “hundreds” of sexual and predatory comments on the Instagram posts of underage girls, as well as evidence of sex trafficking and child sexual abuse grooming.
The groups have three demands of the Facebook-owned social network: Instagram should change its settings so that adults cannot directly message minors; it should “fix” its algorithm to remove sexualizing and graphic comments from minors photographs; and it should update its reporting system so someone reporting a sexual comment on a minor’s photo can specify that the offensive content came from an adult.
