Reels Instagram Shows Inappropriate Videos On Youth Special Accounts

Reels Instagram shows obscene videos to accounts that follow teenagers (photo: dock. unsplash)

JAKARTA Meta, the company that houses Instagram, is now in the spotlight after the Wall Street Journal released its experiment about videos of obscene and sexual nature on Reels.

In this experiment, the Wall Street Journal conducted testing on Instagram accounts with a teenage point of view. The account only follows rejuvenate and prejuvelet influencers such as young gymnasts and cheers guiders.

Although the focus of this account is only on teen special shows, Reels still shows videos with obscene content. In fact, these content can be seen mixed with several advertisements from big companies such as Disney, Walmart, Pizza Hut, and much more.

The results of this experiment seem to be exactly the result of a test conducted by the Canadian Child Protection Center. Knowing this controversy, Engadget reported that Disney had withdrawn their ads from Meta.

Apart from Disney, several companies that reportedly withdrew their ads were Bumble, Match Group, and Hims, health and medical services specifically for men. Meanwhile, Walmart and Pizza Hut declined to comment.

The controversy on Meta is almost similar to the ad problem on X, Twitter before. However, X makes their ads side by side with antisemitism content. However, the impact of these two issues is the same, namely the loss of advertisers.

Meta has responded to the emergence of lewd content on the teenager's special account. The company said it would immediately contact the audit service to investigate the matter.

"(We) will pay brand security audit services to find out how often company ads appear alongside content deemed unacceptable," said a Meta spokesperson.