The National Post reports in its Wednesday edition that Instagram's Reels, which recommends an endless stream of videos to social media users, is also serving up sexually suggestive content to accounts that follow preteens, according to a new investigation. The unbylined item says that the Wall Street Journal found that test accounts that followed only young gymnasts, cheerleaders and teen and preteen influencers, received recommendations from Instagram's algorithm that included "risqué footage of children" and overtly sexual adult videos, served among ads for American brands. The Journal set up the accounts after observing that "thousands of followers of such young people's accounts often include large numbers of adult men." Many of those men, the paper alleged, "also had demonstrated interest in sex content related to both children and adults." The newspaper reported that in the stream of recommended videos, a test Instagram account came across an ad for the dating app Bumble. That ad appeared between a video of a person stroking a life-size latex doll and a video of what the paper calls a "young girl" flashing her midriff to the camera. Ads appearing beside potential inappropriate content include Disney and Walmart.
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