Parents selling ‘exclusive’ images of kids on Instagram platform

ABC NEWS (Australia)

Parents are still selling content of their children on Instagram, despite claims by the platform it stopped allowing the practice months ago. Some of the content includes sexualised images of girls in bikinis, leotards and revealing clothing.

Transcript

00:00The accounts of child influencers, and these accounts are often run by parents. So in May,

00:07we did an investigation into influencers and we found that a subset of these children are

00:13often into activities like modelling, dance, gymnastics. They were attracting a lot of

00:18adult male followers. And when you looked at these girls' pages, they're often covered

00:23in sexualised comments. Now, some of these accounts are also offering the ability for

00:28people to subscribe. So for a monthly fee, we've seen fees between $1 and $30 a month,

00:34you can pay for more content. And that content includes more videos, more photos, and often

00:41we find that this content is sexualised. Now, in May, Metta told us that they had stopped

00:48this practice, but it only took ourselves, the ABC, as well as two child safety advocates

00:54one day to find almost 50 of these accounts still offering subscriptions. And several

00:59of those accounts are actually of Australian children as well. Seems like Metta doesn't

01:03actually have anything in the back end, if you like, where it can determine which accounts

01:09are child accounts and just disable the subscription. So it's almost doing it manually. When people

01:14are reporting these issues, they're removing the accounts. When the ABC reported these

01:19almost 50 accounts, they did remove the subscription features on those accounts. And in a statement

01:24to us, they said, the new policy is in effect as of early April, and we're taking action

01:29on these accounts as we become aware of them, as with any new policy, enforcement can take

01:34time to fully roll out. Now, child safety advocates say Instagram has been quite lax

01:40on child safety. This is Sarah Adams, a Canadian advocate's take on this.

01:45They've kind of lost control over these parent-ran accounts, and it's kind of hard to see who

01:52is exploiting their children and who is offering subscriptions. And it's like the wild, wild

01:59west out there. And now they're trying to rein it in, and it's pretty hard.

02:03Well, look, it's not only these more revealing shots and videos, you can also exchange direct

02:08messages with these children. And they often do subscriber-only live videos. So I've seen

02:14some of these. You can watch the children put on makeup. Some of the children do various

02:19modelling and outfit changes for viewers. One, I watched a 14-year-old girl was unboxing

02:26things that she'd gotten from various brands, including bikini bottoms and mini skirts,

02:32while subscribers were commenting on this video. And you could tell that many of them

02:36were males. Here are just a couple of the comments. You look so beautiful today.

02:41And another subscriber said, show something, sweetie. So it's quite apparent the type of

02:46people who are consuming this content.

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