Meta Allowed Parents To Exploit Their Kids By Having Pedophiles Pay To See Them In Bikinis On Instagram: Report

Meta’s new paid subscription service allowed parents to exploit their children by charging pedophiles to gawk at their bikini-clad kids on Instagram, where girls as young as nine years old were attracting comments from men such as “perfect bikini body,” “those thighs are perfection” and “you’re so hot.”

Staffers at Facebook and Instagram parent Meta said that they flagged hundreds of so-called “parent-managed minor accounts” that were using the subscription feature on those platforms to sell exclusive content that included photos of young girls in bikinis and leotards to mostly men, according to the Wall Street Journal.

To make matters worse, Meta’s algorithm-run recommendation systems were reportedly promoting child-modeling accounts to adults who posted pedophilic comments.

When Meta staffers tried to get the company to ban these accounts or at least force them to register with content moderators so that they could be monitored, their bosses declined — instead choosing to rely on a less-reliable automated system that allowed pedophiles to evade guardrails, sources told Journal.

The report comes as Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, who personally apologized to parents who confronted him about their children being exploited through his platforms last month, is seeking to avoid personal liability in two dozen lawsuits accusing his company of getting kids hooked on his social media sites.