TAMPA, Fla. — It's the question every parent constantly asks themselves: "Is social media harming my kids?"
Recently, a Wall Street Journal report revealed that researchers at Stanford University discovered Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, is struggling to keep pedophiles off its sites.
Meta has spent months trying to fix child safety problems on both platforms. But it's having a tough time stopping its own system from enabling and, in some cases, promoting a wide network of pedophile accounts.
Stanford researchers learned that Instagram’s algorithm is actually connected to a web of accounts that are creating, purchasing and trading underage sex content.
“When we look at the data around how widespread this is, it comes from the National Center for Missing Exploited Children, and what they found is that in a five-year period, they had an 846% increase in suspected child trafficking cases,” explained Nic McKinley, an expert on human trafficking and former military special operator and ex-CIA operative.
“So the question when you look at that kind of data is why," McKinley continued. "And the reason why is because we gave broadband-connected microcomputers to our children and then put social media applications on them. Which is essentially saying we added algorithms to those computers to make it so that people could find what they were looking for.”
McKinley is now the CEO of Deliver Fund, an organization that disrupts human trafficking by providing intelligence and specialized analytics to law enforcement and the public.
“I think it's important to understand that Meta, Twitter, and all of these various social media platforms, they have a real scale problem. I mean, you're talking billions of users, so their ability to control that is, quite frankly, not as good as they would lead people to believe,” explained McKinley.
Meta says it’s disabled tens of thousands of questionable accounts and removed those that violate its child exploitation policies. The company also says it's improving technology that identifies adult nudity and sexual activity in live videos.
But even Meta admits it’s hard to keep up and keep out the bad actors sometimes.
McKinley doesn't believe it's possible for parents to have more control over the digital world for their kids.
“It's like asking if it's possible for your children to be sent off to college and not be exposed to alcohol or drugs,” said McKinley. “There are parts of the internet that have been unleashed on society, and that genie is just not going back in the bottle."
He believes that it's important for parents to educate themselves.
"Then also have a relationship with their children, where they can talk to their children about these societal dangers and help them understand how to make good decisions around what they encounter on the internet," McKinley said.
