CV NEWS FEED // A recent New York Times report acknowledged a disturbing trend of mothers running social media accounts featuring pictures and videos of their minor daughters with the intention of seeking fame – only to become noticed by thousands of male pedophiles.
The Times published the investigative report by Jennifer Valentino-DeVries and Michael H. Keller on Thursday under the title “A Marketplace of Girl Influencers Managed by Moms and Stalked by Men.”
“Seeking social media stardom for their underage daughters, mothers post images of them on Instagram,” the authors summarized. “The accounts draw men sexually attracted to children, and they sometimes pay to see more.”
The Times noted that for their piece, Valentino-DeVries and Keller “analyzed 2.1 million Instagram posts, monitored months of online chats of professed pedophiles and interviewed over 100 people, including parents and children.”
As the journalists wrote, their investigation found
what often starts as a parent’s effort to jump-start a child’s modeling career, or win favors from clothing brands, can quickly descend into a dark underworld dominated by adult men, many of whom openly admit on other platforms to being sexually attracted to children.
“Thousands of accounts examined by The Times offer disturbing insights into how social media is reshaping childhood, especially for girls, with direct parental encouragement and involvement,” Valentino-DeVries and Keller reported.
They discovered that “[s]ome parents are the driving force behind the sale of photos, exclusive chat sessions and even the girls’ worn leotards and cheer outfits to mostly unknown followers.”
“The most devoted customers spend thousands of dollars nurturing the underage relationships,” the reporters wrote:
The large audiences boosted by men can benefit the families, The Times found. The bigger followings look impressive to brands and bolster chances of getting discounts, products and other financial incentives, and the accounts themselves are rewarded by Instagram’s algorithm with greater visibility on the platform, which in turn attracts more followers.
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“One calculation performed by an audience demographics firm found 32 million connections to male followers among the 5,000 accounts examined by The Times,” added Valentino-DeVries and Keller.
They further noted that some of the male pedophiles in the audience “flatter, bully and blackmail girls and their parents to get racier and racier images.”
The Times reporters also found Telegram chats “where men openly fantasize about sexually abusing the children they follow on Instagram and extol the platform for making the images so readily available.”
Per The Times, one such pedophile wrote in a Telegram message: “I’m so glad for these new moms pimping their daughters out.”
“And there’s an infinite supply of it,” he continued. “[L]iterally just refresh your Instagram Explore page there’s fresh preteens.”
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Instagram is owned and operated by Meta Platforms Inc. (“Meta”), a Big Tech conglomerate run by billionaire Mark Zuckerberg. Zuckerberg serves as Meta’s Chairman and CEO.
In addition to Instagram, Meta also owns and runs Facebook, WhatsApp, and Threads – a new platform it established as a competitor to Elon Musk’s X (formerly Twitter).
The Daily Signal indicated that Zuckerberg “testified in January during a congressional hearing about Instagram allegedly assisting pedophiles in accessing inappropriate child sexual content, and he defended the social media platform’s policies.”
During the hearing, “Zuckerberg stood and apologized to families whose children were victimized,” the Signal added.
