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

It’s the brightest explosion ever seen in the universe, but until now it’s been a mystery that couldn't be explained. Telescopes observed an enormous blast in October which was regarded as the biggest of all time. It was identified as a gamma-ray burst, named GRB 221009A, which came as a result of a massive star collapsing into a black hole. At the time it was a mystery as to why the explosion shone so brightly. Now, further research published in the journal Science Advances has uncovered the reason it was so bright is due to the fact it was facing directly at us and also pulled stellar material along with it. Sign up to our free Indy100 weekly newsletter Hendrik Van Earthen from the University of Bath said: “The slow fade of the afterglow is not characteristic of a narrow jet of gas, and knowing this made us suspect there was an additional reason for the intensity of the explosion, and our mathematical models have borne this out. “Our work clearly shows that the GRB had a unique structure, with observations gradually revealing a narrow jet embedded within a wider gas outflow where an isolated jet would normally be expected.” The research into GRB 221009A has the potential to further the study of huge gamma-ray bursts, which can produce as much energy as the Sun will in its entire lifetime in the space of just a few seconds. “GRB 221009A represents a massive step forward in our understanding of gamma-ray bursts, and demonstrates that the most extreme explosions do not obey the standard physics assumed for garden variety gamma-ray bursts,” Brendan O’Connor, GW graduate student and lead study author, said. “GRB 221009A might be the equivalent Rosetta stone of long GRBs, forcing us to revise our standard theories of how relativistic outflows are formed in collapsing massive stars.” Have your say in our news democracy. Click the upvote icon at the top of the page to help raise this article through the indy100 rankings.

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