Social Media Is Terrible
This WSJ piece about a teenage “influencer” and her audience of grown-ass men is troubling.
The mom started the Instagram account three years ago as a pandemic-era diversion—a way for her and her daughter, a preteen dancer, to share photos with family, friends and other young dancers and moms. The two bonded, she said, as they posted photos of the girl dancing, modeling and living life in a small Midwestern town.The mom, a former marketing manager, oversaw the account and watched as the number of followers grew. Soon, photographers offered to take professional shots for the girl. Brands began sending free apparel for her to model.“We didn’t even have the page for a month, and brands were like, ‘Can we send her dancewear?’” the mom said. “She became popular really fast.”The mom also began to notice a disturbing trend in the data that showed up on the account dashboard: Most of the girl’s followers were adult men.Men left public comments on photos of the daughter with fire and heart emojis, telling her how gorgeous she was. Those were the tamer ones. Some men sent direct messages proclaiming their obsessions with the girl. Others sent pictures of male genitalia and links to porn sites.Sometimes the mom spent two to four hours a day blocking users or deleting inappropriate comments. At the same time, more sponsorships and deals were trickling in. . . .The daughter loved coming up with creative posts. She told her mom she wanted to become an influencer, a “dream job” she could pursue after school and dance practice.“It wasn’t like I was trying to push her to be a star, but part of me thought it was inevitable, that it could happen someday,” the mom said. “She just has that personality.”The mom was torn. To reach the influencer stratosphere, the account would need a lot more followers—and she would have to be less discriminating about who they were. Instagram promotes content based on engagement, and the male accounts she had been blocking tend to engage aggressively, lingering on photos and videos and boosting them with likes or comments. Running them off, or broadly disabling comments, would likely doom her daughter’s influencer aspirations.That was a reason to say no. There were also reasons to say yes. The mom felt the account had brought her closer with her daughter, and even second- and third-tier influencers can make tens of thousands of dollars a year or more. The money could help pay for college, the mom thought.The mom said yes. And with that, she grew to accept a grim reality: Being a young influencer on Instagram means building an audience including large numbers of men who take sexual interest in children. . . .Instagram makes it easy for strangers to find photos of children, and its algorithm is built to identify users’ interests and push similar content. Investigations by The Wall Street Journal and outside researchers have found that, upon recognizing that an account might be sexually interested in children, Instagram’s algorithm recommends child accounts for the user to follow, as well as sexual content related to both children and adults.That algorithm has become the engine powering the growth of an insidious world in which young girls’ online popularity is perversely predicated on gaining large numbers of male followers.“If you want to be an influencer and work with brands and get paid, you have to work with the algorithm, and it all works with how many people like and engage with your post,” said the Midwestern mom. “You have to accept it.”
Read the whole thing. “I am pimping my daughter in front of pedophiles because it brings us closer together” is not a sentiment I have heard before.
I try very hard not to judge other parents. In this case, I’m failing.