Is Instagram a “hive” of pedophiles? The popular social networking platform owned by Meta connects massive networks of pedophilia and promotes child pornography, according to investigations by the Wall Street Journal and researchers at Stanford University and the University of Massachusetts Amherst.

“Pedophiles have long used the internet, but unlike forums and file transfer services aimed at people interested in illegal content, Instagram does not simply host these activities. Its algorithms promote them,” the Wall Street Journal reports.

Instagram connects pedophiles and guides them to content sellers through “recommendation systems” that do an “effective job” of connecting those who share “specialized interests,” the newspaper and academic researchers found.⁠

As the newspaper explains in its article, although they are not visible to most users on the platform, sexual content accounts on Instagram blatantly show their “interests”. The researchers found that Instagram allowed people to search for inappropriate hashtag content, and connected them to accounts that used the terms to advertise child sex material for sale. In fact, such accounts often claim to be run “by the children themselves” and use sexually explicit user names (handles or user names).

“Promoting child sex content violates rules established by Meta as well as federal law,” the WSJ points out.