PARIS--(BUSINESS WIRE)--May 22, 2023--

Meta has launched an investigation into reports that Instagram is promoting child sexual abuse material through its algorithm. Facebook’s parent company set up a taskforce to investigate the claims after the Stanford Internet Observatory (SIO) said it found “large-scale communities” sharing paedophilia content on the platform. The SIO said it discovered the child sexual abuse material (CSAM) following a tip from the Wall Street Journal, whose report on Wednesday detailed how Instagram’s recommendation algorithm helped connect a “vast pedophile network” of sellers and buyers of illegal material. Instagram’s ‘suggested for you’ feature also linked users to off-platform content sites, according to the report, with the SIO describing the site as “currently the most important platform” for these networks. “Instagram has emerged as the primary platform for such networks, providing features that facilitate connections between buyers and sellers,” Stanford’s Cyber Policy Center wrote in a blog post. “Instagram’s popularity and user-friendly interface make it a preferred option for these activities.” Instagram users were able to find child abuse content through explicit hashtags like #pedowhore, which have since been blocked by Instagram. “Child exploitation is a horrific crime,” a Meta spokesperson said. “We’re continuously investigating ways to actively defend against this behaviour, and we set up an internal task force to investigate these claims and immediately address them.” Meta said that it had already destroyed 27 paedophile networks over the past two years on Instagram, as well as removed 490,000 accounts violating child safety policies in January alone. Other social media platforms hosting this type of content were also identified by the SIO, though to a much lesser extent. The SIO called for an industry-wide initiative to limit production, discovery and distribution of CSAM, while also urging companies to devote more resources to proactively identifying and stopping abuse. “Given the multi-platform nature of the problem, addressing it will require better information sharing about production networks, countermeasures, and methods for identifying buyers,” the organisation said. “SIO hopes that this research aids industry and non-profits in their efforts to remove child sexual abuse material from the internet.” Read More Instagram plans ChatGPT-style AI chatbot with multiple personalities Mark Zuckerberg reveals new VR headset ahead of Apple ‘Robot taxi’ with ‘ghost driver’ interacts with pedestrians in new experiment Earth hit directly by brightest explosion ever seen, scientists say

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Scientists have found an array of “dashes” within our universe, all arranged in an unexpected pattern. The vast structures are lying in the middle of our Milky Way galaxy and point towards the black hole at its core. There are hundreds of them, each five to 10 light-years long, researchers say. “It was a surprise to suddenly find a new population of structures that seem to be pointing in the direction of the black hole,” Northwestern University’s Farhad Yusef-Zadeh, who led the research. “I was actually stunned when I saw these. We had to do a lot of work to establish that we weren’t fooling ourselves. And we found that these filaments are not random but appear to be tied to the outflow of our black hole. By studying them, we could learn more about the black hole’s spin and accretion disk orientation. It is satisfying when one finds order in a middle of a chaotic field of the nucleus of our galaxy.” Scientists have no confirmed explanation for where the structures came from, and much about their existence remains a mystery. But one possible explanation is that they were thrown out from after some activity a few million years ago. In the early 1980s, Professor Yusef-Zadeh found a set of gigantic, one-dimensional filaments hanging across our galaxy, near Sagittarius A*, the black hole at the heart of the Milky Way. The new filaments were previously undiscovered, and are much shorter and lie across, spreading out from the black hole. “We have always been thinking about vertical filaments and their origin,” he said. “I’m used to them being vertical. I never considered there might be others along the plane.” The research is described in a new paper, ‘The Population of the Galactic Center Filaments: Position Angle Distribution Reveal a Degree-scale Collimated Outflow from Sgr A* along the Galactic Plane’, published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters. Read More Most powerful space telescope ever built identifies ancient star-studded galaxy Academics prepare for mission to Mars in bid to prove water theory Japan to launch satellite made of wood in 2024

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