The disturbing way some teens are really using Instagram

March 03, 2015 01:36

Jessie discovered it accidentally.

"It was on the popular page," he said. "I thought it was just a hot guy with his shirt off."

Jessie, a 20-something male in New York, had clicked on what he thought was an innocuous selfie on Instagram, the kind of photo we've come to expect from a generation which thinks the best way to prove your worth is to purse your lips while staring into a water-stained bathroom mirror. But the image, it turned out, wasn't of a "hot guy" -- it was of a young boy.

"Like, 11-years-old young boy," Jessie said.

Jessie was creeped out, but what he noticed next disturbed him most: The picture had received thousands upon thousands of likes.

"A lot of [the likes] came from other young people, teenagers," he said. "But a lot of them weren't. Accounts with blank profile photos, or of older men. People who obviously didn't know this boy but were getting off to him."

Jessie had stumbled upon the dark underbelly of Instagram, where adults prey on teenagers whose intimate photos sit in plain sight among the sierra-filtered fall foliage and #skinnyarm besties. In the four years since its creation, Instagram has become a welcome mat for sexual predators, the result of a perfect storm: validation-hungry teenagers who distribute sexualized images publicly and lecherous adults who know that showering them with likes and follows is the best way to lure them closer.

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