To think Instagram needs to change?

[FuckItPassMeTheWine]

I have a 13 year old niece who is your typical lovely , excitable impressionable teen , she is on Instagram but some of the things she shows me that appear on her explore page are really nothing short of porn. She follows a couple of gym type accounts that are fine but then "suggested similar accounts " pop up which are not so fine and show pictures of naked women , these accounts are open , not locked and anyone can see the content.

I reported the one picture she shown me for nudity and Instagram come back with the standard "this isn't nudity and doesn't breach our guidelines" crap.

I really worry that by exposing 13 year olds to these images it sets the wheels in motion for body conscious issues and also could make a young girl think that uploading images if her own nakedness to a web full of strangers is "no big deal". I've attached the Instagram image so you can judge for yourselves . 💁🏻

Anyone else feel like this or just me?

Very interesting stuff. And timely for us too.

how to you propose parents police it?

That's a cop out & you know it - if you're really that worried that they'll see porn/be groomed you'd delete if from their phones & put up with the sulking - other parents do.

Your kids don't need Instgram, maybe stop trying to be their friend & actually be a parent eh??

But no, you'd rather take the "parenting lite" option and moan on a forum & expect a raft of modifications to the app that would make it more of a pain for legitimate users, but would still be easy for kids to circumvent.

Yes, I also think IG should take responsibility for the fact that they allow children 13 and over to have accounts and police things better.

@IIIustriouslyIllogical what would be so bad with ensuring that a profile that has sexually explicit content is kept as a private profile rather then open and for all to see, would that really hinder your user experience so badly? I don't think you are looking at this holistically , we are enabling young children to be exposed to a lot of sexualisation at a very impressionable age. I think you're just trying to normalise it , it isn't normal !

I agree with @IIIustriouslyIllogical

Yes, I do think Instagram should up the age. And parents should take more responsibility.

As someone who doesn’t use Instagram in a pornagraphic way, but some may find a little too much for their taste, I don’t see why I should put my profile on private for a parents benefit? If you don’t think content on their is suitable for your child, then you are responsible for you child here.

@IIIustriouslyIllogical I don't have children so your nauseatingly coy insinuations about my parenting are pretty irrelevant.

You're acting as though the only two choices here are to ban kids from the internet until they are adults, or just accept that they'll be exposed to porn, violence, eating disorders etc and just need to get on with it. But there is a middle way, which involves companies like Instagram promoting responsible use.

I refuse to believe that your Instagram experience would be irreparably damaged by Instagram insisting that porn pages be private and rigorously deleting the posts that don't follow that rule. And if you absolutely have to have random porn photos cropping up in your feed to enjoy the site, maybe Instagram isn't the right platform for you?

Parents are responsible for their children and they can teach them about internet safety and pornography and eating disorders etc, but that doesn't stop them from being exposed to harmful content which has no place being where it does. All we're suggesting here is that Instagram does a better job of enforcing its own rules that already exist.

@TheDrinksAreOnMe it's not really pages like yours that are the issue IMO. The thing that causes me most concern is when a popular hashtag is used on explicit photos because it drives traffic to that page. It happened when Taylor Swift's album came out - #reputation was flooded with porn because so many people were searching that tag on Instagram. And it was hours and hours before Instagram were able to get ahead of the situation and sort it out. I don't think we just have to accept this an an inevitable feature of Instagram - we can ask them to do better.

We had an issue with Instagram only last week.
My daughters account is set to private, location turned off. I regularly check her page, whose following her etc. What I failed to realise is anyone can send her a direct message.
She was sent a message from someone, to begin with she thought it was a friend playing a prank, asked her friend who said it wasn't her and she needed to tell me. The person then sent my daughter inappropriate images, a cartoon of a willy and then a photo. At this point she deleted everything and blocked the user. She sadly still didn't tell me. Ironically I went through her phone about 8pm that evening, this started at 9pm
Her friend however was bloody brilliant, got into school and told a teacher, they go to different schools. Her friends school called her school, they called me and within less than an hour it was reported to the police who insisted on coming out and taking a statement.

I was upset my daughter didn't tell me, she said she was embarrassed but I am so glad she has a strong network of friends and they did the right thing for her.
My daughter has been told never to open a direct message again and I will continue going through her profile and checking. I know its possible for me to miss things, I know it's impossible for Instagram and Facebook to control everything all we can do is educate our children on what to do because I can't watch what she is doing all the time. A great feature improvement to me would be private profiles can't get direct messages unless you follow each other, similar to Facebook

For anyone wanting to know, if your child gets horrible messages do not delete, take note of the persons instagram profile URL and hand it all over to the police.

I don't have children so your nauseatingly coy insinuations about my parenting are pretty irrelevant.

LOL, no surprise there!!

But if Instagram do pander to your whims and introduce a "click this box to hide porn" feature I fear you'll be sorely disappointed when the kiddies work out how to circumvent this complicated feature & get on with their lives as normal!

I do find your naivety particularly endearing though!

@IIIustriouslyIllogical You're so patronising it must be annoying even to yourself, surely?

Anyway, to answer your point - I didn't suggest a 'click to hide porn' feature. I've simply said that Instagram should be doing more to enforce its own guidelines.

It's actually not within the rules to post porn to public Instagram accounts. They wouldn't be allowed to open the platform to 13 year olds if they did, for one thing.

All I'm saying is that Instagram needs to do better when it comes to enforcing its own rules, because at the moment it's too easy for people to post inappropriate content in places where children are almost guaranteed to see it, and they are far too slow to address these incidents when they happen.

I don't think it would be 'pandering to my whim' for Instagram to find a solution to the problem of large numbers of people totally disregarding the rules of the site.

In Instagrams PM function they DO have a feature that blurs any “sensitive” photos being sent to the recipient. I get why they don’t do this on more of a grander scale though - it isn’t watertight, and their censorship is a bit pathetic, some of it isn’t even nudity etc. I’ve seen people banned from their own accounts for nothing. Genuinely. Instagram don’t give a shit. Complain all you want but they won’t respond.

It’s not Instagram you should have specific issues with. It’s just internet access in general. And people will do whatever it takes to get noticed these days. You can’t avoid that. There will be a new tactic next month and as parents we just need to keep up with that and ensure our children’s internet safety.

TheDrinksAreOnMe you said "In Instagrams PM function they DO have a feature that blurs any “sensitive” photos being sent to the recipient."
Is that something I can turn on as a setting to blur any photos I receive?

Don't expect any kind of response from instagram. I've reported accounts from when my account got hacked by accounts selling followers to sad posers. It's often taken 8 months just for instagram to review the report - whether it's drug use, nudity, violence or spam. And that's the totality of their customer service.

They make money off us viewing the advertising they sell. They hold our personal information and they allow young people to hold accounts with them. Of course that makes them responsible!

Instagram also has a feature that allows anyone to send a message as a story, with a time limit on it before it disappears , I think this functionality just encourages creeps and groomers in general. Messaging should be restricted to when users are both following each other .

The user experience wouldn't suffer either from this.

I spend about an hr a week going through insta and reporting #proana and #cutting posts.

More worried about them than naked women. Insta are brilliant at deleting those types of posts

To the posters advising "this will ruin my Instagram experience "
I thought I was on an adult forum where I would assume that trying to help and steer our younger generation as much as possible and not expose them to inappropriate material would be the obvious choice here ...but as long as you can post risqué pictures of yourself , applying 12 Instagram filters , pouting away finalised with a Snapchat filter I guess everything is ok.

@Pilferedminibar I agree the pro anorexia and self harm pics are also disturbing

I thought I was on an adult forum where I would assume that trying to help and steer our younger generation as much as possible and not expose them to inappropriate material would be the obvious choice here

That's YOUR job, not Instagrams.

I was shocked that the age restriction on IG is 13. Mine are just older and I don't allow it. I also find everyone doing ads really annoying. (Not even the really high follower accounts...but IF listers are at it too.)

There are a number of public health reports coming out recently from the UK and the US citing increases in mental health problems , particularly in young girls as a result of social media and the messages it sends.
The focus on the need for validation from peers, the idea that being beautiful, thin, rich with lots of followers is how to "win" at life is very damaging. For the first time in a while, there is a rise in the number of suicides in teenage girls, and a sharp rise in self-esteem and body issues.
Instagram itself has only been around for about 7 years. Social media is like a giant social experiment with no parameters. No one knows what the long term effects will be on individuals but it doesn't look positive.

However it is not just Instagram. Musical.ly is as porny and inaapropriate as all hell, Snapchat an excellent way to bully your peers and share inappropriate images, Yubo/Yellow is tinder for teenagers, Sarahah essentially an app to anonymously harass your peers .... none of it is great.

But your petition idea will achieve nothing. Instagram perhaps should up the age recommendation for sure, but again as it's not enforceable (other than accounts getting deleted because the user is underage if reported via their web page ) there's really no point. There is no way for Instagram to check the account holder details , and most children lie about their age to get particualr social media accounts anyway. Why waste your time?

For younger teens and children parenting properly is the answer. It's not the fault of the app , the schools, the government or anything else - it's the choices people make as parents. Educating yourself, adequate supervision, not succumbing to the "but everyone else has it" mentality , would be a start.

Keep in mind that the age restrictions these apps provide are only recommendations, not legally enforceable and are the BARE minumum they can get away with. The app warns that there is nudity, sexual content etc before downloading. It was not designed with tweens /teenagers in mind.

#freethenipple turned into a penis horror show in days, and any trending or popular topic searched has roughly a week at most before it's inundated with porn. The moderators cannot keep up with the content.

As said above, there are settings that can be used to blur content, and block bad words which might be an idea for your niece.
What would be better is her parents had not allowed her to get the account in the first place, apparent appropriate age or not. If half the parents I deal with bothered to educate themselves about the various social media apps they let their kids loose on, social media wouldn't be half the problem it is.

Yes it's worrying but parents need to talk to their kids about these things and to take responsibility (as far as its possible). I use Instagram - and I'm old - but have never seen the slightest hint of porn etc, guess it is targeted at certain groups.

Parents need to take the responsibility and monitor their children.

And sorry OP but saying it isn't normal. You sound like the woman on the simpsons saying "who'll think of the children"

There are many things that are becoming normal now, regardless of what you like. Hopefully the Puritan, religious Victorian attitude to a lot of things will change. But I guess you will start a petition about that too.

@Ohbehave1 how can a parent monitor what a child is up to when the app itself has messages that disappear after viewing ? Even if a parent was going through a child's feed every hour they wouldn't find it.

Don't you find it slightly disturbing that a stranger can reach out and messsge any child they wish with pictures that can be erased after viewing ?

And to be honest I don't care what I sound like, they're our future generation, we are the adults , we set the standard so why aren't we?!

@Ohbehave1 or are you saying that in order to not be "Victorian / puritan" people should be able to message much younger users who they don't know ?

FuckItPassMeTheWine Instagram has the option of running up to 5 accounts from a single email address.This means that a child or a tween may have an account running concurrently with their parent. That is an excellent way to control your childs activity on Instagram and view everything that is going on.

And yes , individuals can message whomever BUT the message initially appears as a request in the Inbox. Deny the the request. Teach the teen do this if evertime they do not recognise the name of the account sending it. And then no grotty message will be viewed.
Allow the request and from then on messages go straight to inbox. So your niece shouldn't have accepted the request really.

Train the child to screenshot anything dodgy. Then the parent can later go to that individuals account and block it, and also read the message.

There should be an option to switch off direct messaging, but given the app is not designed for children anyway - it may not be a priority. And yes the age rating needs to be upped but it's not enforceable anyway so ...... If a parent is not aware that Instagram has dodgy content, and has the Direct Messenging feature, and a location tracker - they are being irresponsible allowing a child to use something they have NFI about.

I really don't think you can allow a child to utilise what is fundamentally an app for adults, then moan that it isn't safe for children. Simply put, if you find it disturbing , don't allow a child to be on Instagram. Problem solved.