Cheese Pizza? Meta’s Instagram Facilitated Massive Pedophile Network
A comprehensive investigation by the Wall Street Journal and the Stanford Internet Observatory reveals that Meta-owned Instagram has been home to an organized and massive network of pedophiles.
But what separates this case from most is that Instagram’s own algorithms were promoting pedophile content to other pedophiles, while the pedos themselves used coded emojis, such as a picture of a map, or a slice of cheese pizza.
The pedophilic accounts on Instagram mix brazenness with superficial efforts to veil their activity, researchers found. Certain emojis function as a kind of code, such as an image of a map—shorthand for “minor-attracted person”—or one of “cheese pizza,” which shares its initials with “child pornography,” according to Levine of UMass. Many declare themselves “lovers of the little things in life.” -WSJ
According to the researchers, Instagram allowed pedophiles to search for content with explicit hashtags such as #pedowhore and #preteensex, which were then used to connect them to accounts that advertise child-sex material for sale from users going under names such as “little slut for you.”
Sellers of child porn often convey the child’s purported age, saying they are “on chapter 14,” or “age 31,” with an emoji of a reverse arrow.
Meta claims to have taken down 27 pedophile networks over the past two years, and says it plans more removals.
“That a team of three academics with limited access could find such a huge network should set off alarms at Meta,” said Alex Stamos, the head of the Stanford Internet Observatory and Meta’s chief security officer until 2018, adding that the company has far more effective tools to ‘map’ its pedophile network than outsiders do.
Underage-sex-content creators and buyers are just a corner of a larger ecosystem devoted to sexualized child content. Other accounts in the pedophile community on Instagram aggregate pro-pedophilia memes, or discuss their access to children. Current and former Meta employees who have worked on Instagram child-safety initiatives estimate the number of accounts that exist primarily to follow such content is in the high hundreds of thousands, if not millions. -WSJ
“Instagram is an on ramp to places on the internet where there’s more explicit child sexual abuse,” according to Brian Levine, director of the UMass Rescue Lab. Levine authored a 2022 report for the DOJ’s National Institute of Justice on child exploitation over the internet.
In a similar vein to your post #1661:
This is from FL lawyer Jeff Childers’ “Coffee and COVID” email this morning:
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🔥 Following two weeks of Jeffrey Epstein news, the Wall Street Journal ran another shocking exposé yesterday, headlined “Instagram Connects Vast Pedophile Network.”
The story checks off yet ANOTHER misinformation conspiracy theory. Just wait, you won’t believe this one.
It’s not just that Instagram (owned by Facebook) allowed perverted users to post horrific subhuman child pornography on its system, the software even encouraged debased criminal users by helping them connect with each other, helped them trade highly-illegal CSAM, and even suggested ways for them to avoid getting caught.
Facebook blames all of that on surprising side-effects from their A.I., which sure gives us a glimpse into the near future. Get ready to hear “AI made me do it” a lot. Anyway, Facebook claimed they’ve promptly taken action, deleted accounts and illegal images, limited search tags, fixed the AI, and so forth. So don’t worry.
You might fairly be wondering what, exactly, Facebook’s swarms of social media police do all day long. I’ll tell you. They keep anti-vaxx memes off the platform, make sure nobody blames the pandemic on a lab leak, erase evidence about election cheating, and delete incriminating Hunter Biden’s laptop content. But what they DON’T DO is combat any real-life crimes:
Sometimes user reports of nudity involving a child went unanswered for months, according to a review of scores of reports filed over the last year by numerous child-safety advocates… When the activist reported a post declaring, “This teen is ready for you pervs,” Instagram responded with an automated message saying: “Because of the high volume of reports we receive, our team hasn’t been able to review this post.”
No response for months. But Michelle got banned once — in under ten minutes! — for simply posting that she wanted to “punch Joe Biden in the throat.” (It was uncivil, true, but there was mitigating context. She was provoked.) The point is, everyone has their priorities, and clearly, protecting children is not one of Facebook’s.
The appalling content and the disgraceful features helping pedophiles trade, buy and sell illegal content were recently uncovered by three independent Stanford researchers. The team said after they set up a single account and connected it to a couple other child porn collectors within a loose social network, they were immediately buried with “suggested for you” recommendations of thousands of child-sex-content sellers and buyers. They were also, oddly, offered links to off-platform CSAM trading sites.
Following just a few of the recommendations flooded their test account with underaged sexual content.
It’s a long article. But this one paragraph especially jumped out at me, and at other close observers of the captured media:
The pedophilic accounts on Instagram mix brazenness with superficial efforts to veil their activity, researchers found. Certain emojis function as a kind of code, such as an image of a map🗺️—shorthand for “minor-attracted person”—or one of “cheese pizza” 🍕, which shares its initials with “child pornography,” according to Levine of UMass. Many [Instagram perverts sickeningly] declare themselves “lovers of the little things in life.”
Wait, go back. Did they just say, “cheese pizza?” Pizza? Wasn’t that the obvious code word all over Hilary Clinton’s leaked emails? But … I thought the pizza thing was all debunked conspiracy theory misinformation. They mocked the very idea, laughingly labeling it “pizza gate” and darkly hinting that anyone who believed that stuff was dangerous and should be on the no-fly list or something.
Ironically, Facebook busily banned any accounts that discussed PizzaGate or used the PizzaGate hashtag, while at the same exact time it was helping pedophiles build a vast criminal network using that very same code word.
The Wall Street Journal, with its teams of award-winning reporters and layers of editors and fact-checkers, failed to make that connection. Just … nothing. You’d think PizzaGate might’ve earned a single sentence in the extended article. But no. Not one word about what now must be considered another established conspiracy fact.
I suppose the Journal deserves credit for running the story at all. Still, it ended on a down note, quoting the Stanford researchers who tested Instagram after Facebook reported its repairs. The researchers said Instagram is, once again, helping the network rebuild itself. One of them thinks the entire platform should be shut down:
Following the company’s initial sweep of accounts brought to its attention by Stanford and the Journal, UMass’s Levine checked in on some of the remaining underage seller accounts on Instagram. As before, viewing even one of them led Instagram to recommend new ones. Instagram’s suggestions were helping to rebuild the network that the platform’s own safety staff was in the middle of trying to dismantle…
Levine called Instagram’s role in promoting pedophilic content and accounts unacceptable. “Pull the emergency brake,” he said. “Are the economic benefits worth the harms to these children?”
Qui bono?
Reading between the lines, the paragraph above shows that the Journal gave Facebook time to clean up its act before running the story. Why? Do people without government connections get the same consideration before an exposé is published? Just asking.
So that’s one conspiracy theory confirmed.
The Zuck has a whole lot to answer for.
When will the useless hearings start?
Interesting that the WSJ, Stanford and UMass worked together on this investigation.