Anywhere children go, predators are lurking. Last week, the Wall Street Journal published an investigation showing that Instagram’s Reels algorithm has the capacity to serve sexually inappropriate content involving minors to platform users, and particularly those who may have deviant interest in children.

If you aren’t familiar with the Reels feature, it displays short videos in succession based on what the algorithm predicts the user wants to watch. Using new devices, the Wall Street Journal set up test accounts to follow teenage and preteenage influencers, gymnasts, and cheerleaders after noticing that these types of accounts were often followed by large numbers of adult men. Some of the videos subsequently suggested to the test accounts included disturbing content, such as "an adult acting out having sex with her father" and a man on a bed with his arm around, according to the caption, a 10-year-old girl. Interspersed with this content were ads for a variety of mainstream products, including dating apps, a children’s theme park, and erectile dysfunction drugs.

These findings follow an earlier report that found Instagram enables a "vast network" of people to sell and purchase child sexual abuse material. In a statement , Meta (the owner of Instagram) said, "Child exploitation is a horrific crime," and in January of this year disabled close to 500,000 accounts for violating its child safety policies and, as of 2022’s fourth quarter, had removed more than 34 million pieces of sexually exploitative content involving children from its Instagram and Facebook platforms.

Thirty-four million pieces of content. At that scale, it can be difficult to comprehend how and why this problem is so horrifically widespread. As someone who has conducted research and worked clinically with people convicted of child sexual offenses, I believe it’s critical for the public to know that sexual interest in children is hard-wired in the architecture of the brain and cannot be changed. I also don’t believe we should entertain social justice activists’ push to normalize pedophilia as a benign sexual identity or as a minority group deserving of legal protections.

Parents often erroneously believe that if a child is physically present in the family home, they are safe, not realizing the ease with which predators operate, particularly online. The most powerful ways to prevent sexual abuse involve being aware of how often it is perpetrated by trusted adults, how easily it goes undetected, and the importance of keeping kids off the internet for as long as possible.