You don’t have to be a dedicated denizen of the World Wide Web to realize that “hot lusty teens” are basically only a click away at any part of the internet and on most social networking sites, but for some reason Instagram, until recently, felt like hallowed ground. Instagram felt like a place for art. Like a place where one could find inspiration for their own art from other “artists.” A place where, maybe if a few boobs do pop up they’re splattered with blue paint in an artsy way.
Maybe this feeling was because I’ve been part of the Instagram since it debuted and really was kind of an “artsy-fartsy” type thing, but Instagram is completely different now; the app has grown into the legitimate, thriving social network Facebook dropped a cool one billion dollars on a few months ago. Now people post their entire lives on Instagram from Starbucks to swimming – and some even post their private lives. Knowing all of this, I’m not sure why I was surprised when I first found a photo of a girl who was seemingly under 18 holding her breasts in a “hand bra” and mugging for her camera.
If you dig deep enough into anything on the internet things start to get dark pretty quickly. Even YouTube, filled with cat videos and kids who love turtles, has some grueling footage if you get into the bowels. But it’s a thought that never occurred about Instagram. However, it makes complete sense: give people a place to show off and they’re going to take the stage – especially boys and girls with fancy cameras and an app that is “only on mobile phones.”
So I dug into Instagram’s bowels to see what might be sitting there rotting and the results were interesting. Beyond all those HDR photos of VW Bugs lie hashtags such as #instaboobs, #instaboner or #instapussy and behind those hashtags – sometimes posted by individual accounts – lie bigger accounts that ask users to send in their best photos for a “shout out” photo to be posted which links back to the person in the photo’s account. And that’s all fine, like I said earlier, where there are people, there is porn (or nude photos, at least), but it gets alarming when you see people who look way too young posing naked and provocatively on these accounts.
Scroll through a few of these accounts, and click back to the people who sent in the photos (some are anonymous), and it becomes painfully clear that these characters in bras and panties with a towel pulled between their legs are almost certainly under legal age. Now, I’m not trying to sound like an alarmist here. Sure, some of these photos are nothing more than you would see at the beach, and there’s very little way to cull every single racy photo that hits the app – and even less reason to actually do so because everyone has the right to post a picture of themselves in a bathing suit for their friends and fans to see. But pictures of fully naked girls and guys are just a hashtag away, and this is where things get interesting: what if these people are under age? Does Instagram have a child porn problem?
Instagram takes tiny steps to stop things like this and always has. Search for something like “boobs” and you won’t get a result, but basically by just putting “insta” in front of things like “cleavage,” “boobs,” and “pussy” will return tens of thousands of results. And Instagram is not only on mobile phones anymore. Websites like Extragr.am make looking at photos even easier and seem to employ different search restrictions, complicating the problem even further.
Instagram doesn’t require an age check. People of all ages can post photos from their crib, dorm room, or retirement home, but by being open to everyone the possibility that things that shouldn’t get posted will increases dramatically. So does that mean Instagram has a child porn problem? Maybe not in such drastic words, but does Instagram have a potential problem with under age nude photos of boys and girls floating around on its site? Well, search a couple of those hashtags and I think you’ll find an answer quickly.
Does Instagram have a child porn problem?
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This article was originally posted on Planet Ivy .
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