Instagram ‘Actively Promotes’ Accounts Encouraging Teen Eating Disorders



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Instagram admitted to CNN that it was promoting accounts glorifying extreme diets and eating disorders, the channel reports, and admitted it shouldn’t have.

The extreme diet accounts were promoted on an Instagram account created by the staff of Senator Richard Blumenthal. The Connecticut Senator team registered an account as a 13-year-old girl and began following diet and eating disorder accounts (the latter of which are supposedly banned by Instagram). Soon, Instagram’s algorithm began to recommend almost exclusively that young teenage accounts follow more and more extreme diet accounts, the senator told CNN.

Blumenthal’s office shared with CNN a list of accounts that Instagram’s algorithm had recommended. After CNN sent a sample of this list of five accounts to Instagram for comment, the company deleted them, claiming they had all violated its policies against promoting eating disorders.

Speaking to CNN on Monday, Blumenthal said: “This experiment shows very graphically how [Facebook’s] claiming to protect children or deleting accounts that may be harmful to them is absolute rubbish. “

The same senator who asked the stupid question about the “Finsta” accounts is now delivering a perfectly executed prick operation on Instagram’s misleading claims about his engagement machine. It won’t be as widely reported, I’m afraid.



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