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If you’ve spent any time recently on the Instagram accounts of top celebrities and influencers, you’ve probably noticed a growing number of so-called “porn bots” promoting links to certain websites with often sexually explicit language. By learning how to game the Instagram algorithm, these porn bots can often get prominent placement on a page, at times even becoming the top comment on any Instagram post. This is troubling for a number of reasons.
The porn bot problem
First and most importantly, the proliferation of porn bots on Instagram is turning the social media platform into a cesspool of XXX-rated content. Sooner or later, people are going to pick up and leave for a cleaner, better-managed social media platform. It’s gotten so bad that top influencers, celebrities and athletes – all of them with a vested interest in keeping Instagram as clean as possible for advertisers and promoters – are getting mad and making their opinions heard publicly. Even worse, some concerned voices are warning that Instagram is becoming a way for child sex traffickers to do business in plain sight.
In the real world, it would be as if vandals and graffiti artists were spraying sexually suggestive messages all over an upscale or middle-class neighborhood – even the most hardened urban dweller would probably flinch at the idea of having to explain certain terms and images to their kids. You’d probably demand that somebody clean things up immediately. At the very least, business owners in the neighborhood would probably band together to stop the practice, in order to keep a steady flow of foot traffic to their stores.
Instagram dragging its feet on porn bots
So why hasn’t Instagram made any progress in cleaning things up? One big reason, says Instagram, is that the porn bots are so sophisticated, always managing to keep one step ahead of them. In some cases, they are using references from pop culture that are making it impossible for AI-powered algorithms to determine if a reference to a “big booty” followed by a peach emoji and a website link is a porn reference or some reference to a new music video.
Another, more troubling reason, is that the porn bots – while morally repugnant and clearly abusing Instagram’s terms of service – are really just following a classic Internet business model known as affiliate marketing. If the porn bots can get you to click on a link, they make some money. If they can get you to subscribe to a porn site or purchase a webcam experience, they make even more money. It’s the same as a tech gadgets blog inserting lots of links to Amazon products, and making a tiny cut of any purchase on Amazon by readers. Well, not exactly the same, but you get the idea…
Porn and social media
The big question, of course, is how social media platforms can deal with the porn problem on the Internet. Those that fail to get things right are ultimately doomed to failure. Remember when Tumblr was a hot new social media property, and people were proclaiming that this highly visual blogging platform was going to be the next big thing? Well, now Tumblr is arguably just as famous now for being a home for softcore porn and adult NSFW content. If Instagram doesn’t want to go the way of Tumblr, it’s time to clean up its act.
