5.1 Instagram
Instagram appears to have a particularly severe problem with commercial SG-
CSAM accounts, and many known CSAM keywords return results.
Search results for some terms return an interstitial alerting the user of potential CSAM content
in the results; while the warning text is accurate and potentially helpful, the
prompt nonetheless strangely presents a clickthrough to “see results anyway”
(see Figure 4). Instagram’s user suggestion recommendation system also readily
promotes other SG-CSAM accounts to users viewing an account in the network,
allowing for account discovery without keyword searches.
Figure 4: The interstitial clickthrough offered by Instagram when searching for
a CSAM-related hashtag.
Due to the widespread use of hashtags, relatively long life of seller accounts and,
especially, the effective recommendation algorithm, Instagram serves as the key
discovery mechanism for this specific community of buyers and sellers. The
overall size of the seller network examined appears to range between 500 and
1000 accounts at a given time, with follower, like and view counts ranging from
dozens to thousands.
Also of note is the seller’s heavy reliance on transient media such as Stories;
accounts will often have one or no actual posts, but will frequently post stories
with content menus, promotions or cross-site links. Stories are censored to
obscure any explicit content; some sellers also seem to suspect that the overlaid
text is being scanned, as indicated by the self-censorship to obscure possible
“trigger words” (see Figure 2 on page 5). It is unclear whether Instagram is actually
performing this detection—if not, it would be a useful Trust and Safety signal to
implement.
__________________________________________
Twitter:
These detected instances
were automatically reported to NCMEC by our ingest pipeline, and the overall
problem was communicated to members of Twitter’s Trust and Safety team. As
of the latest update to this paper, this problem appears to have largely ceased due
to subsequent fixes to Twitter’s CSAM detection systems.
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Maybe Instagram should fire their 3rd party moderators and buy Elon's software.
Hey and btw... those moderators are suing META because apparently they get worked like slaves, are underpaid, and some sleep in beds with bedbugs. Horrible working conditions.
