Social media giant Instagram is allowing parents to sell exclusive content of their children
Social media giant Instagram is still allowing parents to sell exclusive content of their children, including bikini photos, despite claiming it stopped the practice. Meta, who owns the platform, told a Four Corners investigation earlier this year that it no longer allowed fans to subscribe to child Instagram accounts. But the ABC has found that's not the case.
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00:00So I'm looking at the Instagram account of a 13-year-old girl from the US that's operated
00:06by her mother, and in this account there's many photos and reels of her promoting her
00:11modelling talents, so dressed in revealing clothing and wearing bikinis.
00:17If you pay $8 a month, you can receive exclusive content, including more revealing photos.
00:23And I can tell by looking at some of the comments that many of the subscribers are men.
00:30When you subscribe, as well as getting exclusive photos, you can watch live videos of some
00:35of the children trying on make-up and different outfits.
00:39Some accounts seem to be deliberately sexualised, asking things like...
00:44What type of content do you want to see more of?
00:46Keep it clean!
00:47Child safety advocates say it allows men who are sexually interested in children to form
00:52obsessions with them.
00:54Now not only am I invested in this child and getting all this content for free, well now
01:00I have the ability to feel special and have a special relationship with this child through
01:08subscriptions.
01:09I have more access to have chats with them or get exclusive photos, you know, more photos
01:15of them in bikinis.
01:17Over the course of a day, the ABC found almost 50 child accounts still taking subscriptions,
01:24several of them Australian.
01:26That's despite Meta saying in April it had stopped the practice.
01:31When the ABC alerted Meta, it removed the subscription features on the accounts.
01:36In a statement, a Meta spokesperson said the company was taking action on the accounts
01:40whenever it became aware of them and that enforcement can take time to roll out.
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