Social media giant Instagram is still allowing parents to sell exclusive content of their children, including bikini photos, despite claiming it stopped the practice. Meta, who owns the platform, told a Four Corners investigation earlier this year that it no longer allowed fans to subscribe to child Instagram accounts. But the ABC has found that's not the case.
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00:00So I'm looking at the Instagram account of a 13-year-old girl from the US that's operated
00:06by her mother, and in this account there's many photos and reels of her promoting her
00:11modelling talents, so dressed in revealing clothing and wearing bikinis.
00:17If you pay $8 a month, you can receive exclusive content, including more revealing photos.
00:23And I can tell by looking at some of the comments that many of the subscribers are men.
00:30When you subscribe, as well as getting exclusive photos, you can watch live videos of some
00:35of the children trying on make-up and different outfits.
00:39Some accounts seem to be deliberately sexualised, asking things like...
00:44What type of content do you want to see more of?
00:46Keep it clean!
00:47Child safety advocates say it allows men who are sexually interested in children to form
00:52obsessions with them.
00:54Now not only am I invested in this child and getting all this content for free, well now
01:00I have the ability to feel special and have a special relationship with this child through
01:08subscriptions.
01:09I have more access to have chats with them or get exclusive photos, you know, more photos
01:15of them in bikinis.
01:17Over the course of a day, the ABC found almost 50 child accounts still taking subscriptions,
01:24several of them Australian.
01:26That's despite Meta saying in April it had stopped the practice.
01:31When the ABC alerted Meta, it removed the subscription features on the accounts.
01:36In a statement, a Meta spokesperson said the company was taking action on the accounts
01:40whenever it became aware of them and that enforcement can take time to roll out.
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