Instagram is {in}famous for its bikini babes, a not insignificant fraction of which advertise their "availability" in various cities. How this has never come up in the various congressional hearings about protecting children mystifies me, reddit, twitter and instagram all have a culture of onboarding young women into sex work.

> reddit, twitter and instagram all have a culture of onboarding young women into sex work.

That's quite a claim.

Two things are both true:

- sex work is against Instagram TOS and they take active efforts to ban people doing it, including design features such as limiting people to exactly one offsite link per account which may not be to onlyfans

- because that's where the audience is and advertising there is effective, there's an entire industry in working out how to promote sex work on Instagram without getting banned

=> Insta ends up as part of the sales funnel despite actively trying not to be. See also Twitch. There is of course no evidence of them intentionally onboarding people into this, it's an emergent feature of being a site that posts images. Then have to censor aggressively, and even then sex work exists at a sort of "censorship shoreline".

On the other hand, Reddit and Twitter have never really cared, and only with some campaigning effort have they been made to censor nonconsensual intimate images. Twitter made its pornbot problem worse by selling bluetick promotion.

Thanks for the elaboration, it's in line with what I meant to get across, it's not a company culture or intentional, it's just where the audience is.

I don't especially know what these platforms could do to stem the issue, I just think it's one more reasons 13 year olds should play outside

> limiting people to exactly one offsite link per account which may not be to onlyfans

I think this has more to do with Instagram wanting people to stay on Instagram than discouraging sex workers. I'm guessing there's a long list of things the offsite link isn't allowed to be aside from porn. Hate groups and gambling sites come to mind.

"There are sex workers on Instagram" is a far cry from "they all have a culture of onboarding young women into sex work"

maybe I was too imprecise in my language

It is not THE culture of $SOCIALMEDIA to onboard young women into sex work, but once you find the bubble of thirst posting and find out there's money in it, it is an attractive pathway that the people in that subculture are happy to introduce you to, same as porn has always been, it's just that marketing and connecting to new talent is now much cheaper than it used to be

Can't that be said about any industry?

I know very little of Insta.. but thought I'd seen a story, so did a DDG and first result includes:

"Stricter private messaging settings for teens To help protect teens from unwanted contact on Instagram, we restrict adults over the age of 19 from messaging teens who don't follow them, and we limit the type and number of direct messages (DMs) people can send to someone who "

With things like this, and now several states requiring that you must be 18 to use any social media, (because parents can't parent apparently?)

I wonder how much of a problem this really is?

I get it that smart teens will find ways to access naughty things no matter how many barriers are put in front of them..

But at some point we must look at parents and ask why 'children' would find it fine to spend lots of time staring at thirst traps.. I know kids that if someone was to put stuff like that in front of them they would push it away and tell multiple adults about it..

Of course I have also known parents that let their kids play grand theft auto at 6 years old.

So while I have tried to tell parents for years about what exists on game consoles and the internet and how they need to not only pay attention, but have open dialogue about sharing what they see and such.. it seems to me that most parents actually do not care what their kids see on the internets..

You could of argue that parents did not know what could be found online 20 years ago, but today's children had their parents grow up with unfettered access (most of them I believe) - and so they know and they don't care (again most I believe).

There are some vocal small groups screaming that there is a need to save the children, but I would assume most of them have kids with cell phones without any blocking systems installed.

That's not to say all. I do know a family that does not let any of their children watch TV, use the internet or cell phone - all their kids, 6yrs - 16 ..no TV even not at all and they would not even think about sneaking to use a cell phone behind their parents back.

Sadly as far as the world having a culture that onboards into sex work I believe has more to do with the rent is too damn high, food costs too much and people want designer / name brand things. If most women (and men) could easily earn a living wage within a few blocks of where they live, there would be much less onboarding period.

Sadly I have given up hoping that rent will be cut in half and wages will double anytime soon, if anything, I'd bet that if the wages double I think we'll see the same with the rent and food.

What exactly is there to protect children against? Instagram forbids nudity and regularly cracks down on it by banning accounts. I don't recall seeing any advertisements for prostitution on Instagram either. And of course, young women have been recruited into sex work long before social media or the internet.

You may not have experienced this but as soon as you're cute online you get direct messaged solicitations for photos, some offering hundreds of dollars for nudes. Once you've quit your job because your OnlyFans page took off you're stressed about keeping your numbers up so you start asking strangers to "collaborate" with to produce more content.

I know its progressive to consider sex work a perfectly good career choice but some of us still think its worth encouraging children to have some degree of modesty and keep sex a taboo topic to be explored with someone you trust.

And if you haven't noticed prostitution on instagram and twitter you just don't know the lingo, but basically city names + dates in the bio is a solicitation to DM for rates. "NYC 9/12-9/22, Miami 10/20-31", that kind of thing. Actually the one thing that impressed me about twitter is how much of a bubble this is, you don't stumble upon porn accounts in general, but once you follow a couple of accounts that promote sex work even politically (which I think people totally have the right to do, I do prefer the nordic model to whatever america is doing) you'll see hundreds of these.

We must not have used the same Instagram. Every time i post a picture it is "liked" by several robots trying to sell sex under fake accounts which name would look suspicious to a 3 lines long perl script. I used to report and block them, now i just have all notifications permanently off.

Not surprising at all, considering the origins.

The trouble is there is no way to turn it off. I've nothing against that kind of thing in the right place, but for me Facebook is not that place, and it sneaks in no matter how hard you try and prevent it.

Here's some funny fail videos...of girls in bikinis. Here's some sport images for the sport you are interested in, with far too revealing angles/images.

So I don't use Facebook any more, and feel much better for it.

Makes sense financially!

Isn't that the winning formula on Instagram?

That seems to be what every social platform eventually turns into

Like all other physical systems, social networks are subject to entropy.