According to the report, content on Instagram is promoted for eating disorders in children

According to a report by a children’s advocacy group, content on Instagram is promoting eating disorder content to children as young as 9 years old…

Algorithms recommend content that promotes extremist approaches to weight loss, says Fairplay For Kids in a report titled Designing for Disorder: Instagrams Pro-Eating-Disorder-Blase. She accuses Instagram parent company Meta of profiting from this harmful content.

Algorithms profile children and young people to serve them images, memes and videos promoting restrictive dieting and extreme weight loss. And in return, Instagram promotes and recommends content related to childhood eating disorders to half a million people worldwide. The promotion and reach of this content is clearly not in the best interests of children and young people.

Meta’s eating disorder bubble is neither an isolated incident nor a terrible accident. Rather, it is an example of Meta systematically prioritizing profit over the safety and well-being of young people without proper controls and counterbalances. Meta’s decisions regarding hosting and recommending content related to eating disorders may bring small but steady gains to shareholders, but they have significant real-life ramifications for children and teens.

Documents revealed in the Facebook files indicate that Meta has been aware of this issue since at least 2019 and has not acted.

The report says the scale of the problem is huge.

• The pro-eating disorder bubble on Instagram spans 90,000 unique accounts and reaches 20 million unique followers on the platform. This could be one of 75 Instagram users following someone in this bubble.
• The bladder is young. This research found Children from 9 and 10 years three or more eating disorder accounts follow, with an average age of 18. A third of Instagram’s pro-eating disorder bubble is underage, and they have over half a million followers.
• Meta derives an estimate $2 million in sales per year from that bubble and $227.9 million from everyone who follows that bubble. That revenue includes that from underage users — Meta earns $0.5 million per year directly from the pro-underage eating disorder bubble and $62 million in revenue from the people who run these underage pro-eating disorder accounts follow.

The report calls for action by both state and federal lawmakers, including supporting proposals that would require tech platforms to prioritize children’s interests.

Proposals to the California Assembly (California Age Appropriate Design Code Act, AB 2773) and Congress (The Kids Online Safety Act, and Protecting the Information of our Vulnerable Children and Youth Act) could help ensure platforms are designed and designed act in a manner that prioritizes the best interests of children. These bills do not regulate the content but deal with the design and systems of digital services. These are long overdue and demonstrably necessary to incentivize action against algorithms promoting eating disorder content. This type of regulation can introduce requirements to assess and mitigate the risks posed by algorithms and prohibit the use of children’s data to train malicious algorithms.

above CNET