Meta’s Instagram and Facebook seem to be casting a wide net in order to block child abuse content online.
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When people search for “Adam driver Megalopolis” on Instagram or Facebook right now, instead of seeing posts about Francis Ford Coppola’s latest film, they’re shown a warning, titled, “Child sexual abuse is illegal.”
That bizarre fact was pointed out in a post on X yesterday, and as of today, I’m still seeing it when I search for the phrase. But why? Well, it doesn’t seem to have anything to do with recent Threads moderation failures. Nor are there bombshell revelations about Megalopolis or its main star that I’m aware of.
Instead, Facebook and Instagram seem to be blocking searches containing “mega” and “drive” — I saw it when I searched with those two words together, but not when I searched for “Megalopolis,” “Adam Driver,” or either term mixed with any others. The issue isn’t new, either, as this nine-month-old Reddit post about searching for “Sega mega drive” on Facebook illustrates. (That search seems to work as expected, now.)
It’s not clear why the words are blocked and Meta didn’t immediately respond when we asked. Facebook and Instagram have blocked other innocuous-seeming terms, such as “chicken soup,” because distributors of child abuse materials use it as part of their coded language to evade detection on the platforms.
