(LifeSiteNews) — Social media is now one of the primary pipelines to porn addiction for both children and young adults.
Global Witness, a campaign organization that investigates the impact of Big Tech on human rights, recently conducted a number of tests to determine how quickly children could access pornography on social media platforms.
According to the Guardian, Global Witness conducted one test before the implementation of the U.K.’s Online Safety Act in July, and one after. In just a few clicks, TikTok directed children’s accounts to pornography.
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“Global Witness set up fake accounts using a 13-year-old’s birth date and turned on the video app’s ‘restricted mode,’ which limits exposure to ‘sexually suggestive’ content,” the Guardian reported. “Researchers found TikTok suggested sexualised and explicit search terms to seven test accounts that were created on clean phones with no search history.”
I have seen similar tests conducted myself – a completely new account set up, with no history, and no algorithm as of yet – and highly sexual content was recommended within minutes. The Global Witness investigation found that the “you may like” feature for the children’s accounts included “very, very rude skimpy outfits,” “very rude babes,” and “hardcore pawn [sic].”
A few clicks later, the researchers reported, the pornographic content escalated from “softcore” pornography of bare breasts to hardcore pornography of “penetrative sex.” The group emphasized that “the content attempted to evade moderation, usually showing the clip within an innocuous picture or video. For one account, the process took two clicks after logging on: one click on the search bar and then one on the suggested search.”
Even more disturbingly, Global Witness reported that two of the videos appeared to feature minors; both were sent to the Internet Watch Foundation as potentially criminal online child sexual abuse material.” Ofcom, the U.K. communications regulator, stated that Global Witness’s report has prompted an investigation into potential breaches of the Online Services Act.
But parents should not wait for the government to step in. Social media is a pipeline to porn addiction for children, and we have known this for years. I have encountered countless young people who were first exposed to pornographic material on social media; many teenagers have told me that Instagram is a key on-ramp into pornography.
If they so much as pause for a fraction of a second as they scroll past a sexually explicit image, the pause is detected by the algorithm, and more sexual content is pushed into their feed. That content escalates in explicitness, and the algorithm almost literally reels them in with a conveyor belt of sexual imagery. Many young men who had successfully freed themselves from pornography have told me that going onto Instagram caused relapses into addiction.
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Snapchat is no better. Pornography is easily accessible within five clicks without ever leaving the app. The National Centre on Sexual Exploitation has been urging parents to keep children off of Snapchat for years, and lists the social media app as one of the worst offenders on its annual “Dirty Dozen” list. Snapchat has consistently ignored warnings from lawmakers concerning the dangers of its app as a primary mechanism of sexting, sextortion, and worse offences.
Despite all this – and this evidence has been mounting for years – many parents choose to deliberately turn a blind eye to what their children or teens are doing online; what apps they use; and which social media platforms they have. Having spoken to thousands of teens on pornography, I can state that this abdication of responsibility has led to enormous misery, addiction, and genuine damage, during the formative developmental years.
As Tim Challies wrote years ago already when begging parents not to give their children smartphones: “Please don’t give them porn for Christmas.”Bottom of Form
