I added 1 letter to an industry-known CSAM keyword, and Instagram delivered me the network.

Part 2 of Lowest Hanging Fruit moves the investigation from Facebook to Instagram. There were no groups to infiltrate this time, so I flipped the model: I built a decoy 14-year-old around an AI-generated face pulled from the platform itself, posted with the hashtags predators search, and let them come to her. Then I mapped what followed, accounts openly soliciting child sexual abuse material (CSAM), follow graphs that work like bookmark lists, and a recommendation engine that finished the map for me under a banner reading "Suggested for You."

A month after I filed my findings with the New Mexico Attorney General's office, I went back for one more look. My decoy was untouched. The WhatsApp number attached to her had taken more than 250 calls and messages in ten days. And at trial, Meta's own documents showed the company had measured from the inside what I was mapping from the outside. In its own words, from 2019: "26% of the people we recommend to Groomers were Teens."

Everything in this episode was done with a laptop and a browser. It should've been more difficult.

The written version of Part 2, including the evidence, is on my LinkedIn.

Content notice: This series includes descriptions of predatory behavior towards children. Listener discretion is advised.

Everything this series earns goes to the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children.

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The views expressed here are my own and do not represent those of any organization, entity, or client.

Meta tells parents it keeps adults from contacting teens they aren't connected to.

In 2023, as a former Meta safety investigator I decided to find out whether that held up. Going undercover on Facebook with a decoy profile of a 14-year-old girl, I set out to answer one question: how easily could a predator reach a child on Meta's platforms, and would anything stop them?

What I found became part of the evidence in a landmark New Mexico case against Meta, the first time a U.S. state took a major tech company to trial over child-safety failures and won.

In this episode I retrace the investigation step by step: the purchased accounts, the unguarded teen groups, and a recommendation engine that could match a jogger to a running club but couldn't tell a hobby group from a pipeline to child exploitation.

It's a firsthand account of where the safeguards were supposed to be, and what was there instead.

Content advisory: this series includes descriptions of predatory behavior toward children. Listener discretion is advised.

Disclaimer: Disclaimer: The views expressed here are my own and do not represent those of any organization, entity, or client.

If this work matters to you, please consider donating to the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children: https://give.missingkids.org/campaign/732297/donate

Support the show

The views expressed here are my own and do not represent those of any organization, entity, or client.

I spent close to eight years as a military Psychological Operations officer, learning how adversaries think, and how to change their behavior. Then I took those skills to Silicon Valley, to protect users from people running the same playbook.

Hi everyone i’m Tony and This is Community Standards. A true crime podcast about how malicious actors think, and the behavioral signals that enable us to find them. Every case takes you inside a world you thought only existed in movies, where the features you use every day get turned into a playground for exploitation.

The first case case you’ll hear is one that got a lot of attention last week.

In [2023], I went back to the platform I once defended from the inside as a Meta safety investigator — this time, from the outside. I built decoy accounts that looked like children. What those accounts recorded became evidence in the State of New Mexico v. Meta Platforms.

Lowest Hanging Fruit is A two-part series. Part 1 is the investigation into Facebook. Part 2 is Instagram. WhatsApp shows up in both, because that’s where the predators wanted to take the conversation.

Fair warning: some of what you’ll hear is disturbing. It stays in, because it’s evidence.

Part 1 drops Tuesday, August 11. Part 2 lands a week later. Everything this series earns goes to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children.

Follow Community Standards now, and the first episode will be waiting for you on Tuesday.

Support the show

The views expressed here are my own and do not represent those of any organization, entity, or client.