Smart glasses have created quite a few ripple effects since becoming popular over the past two years, and one of those ripples has permeated Instagram in particular. Using smart glasses—Ray-Ban Meta AI glasses, to be specific—Instagram has seen a wave of “pickup artist” and prank content in which (mostly women) are filmed without their knowledge, and recently Meta vowed to crack down on it. Despite that promise, however, things on Instagram still seem to be pretty creepy.
According to a report from Business Insider, about a month after Instagram head Adam Mosseri said the platform would begin removing prank/pickup content, Instagram is still rife with it. Business Insider says it identified dozens of “prank” and “pickup artist” videos that seemingly break the rules of the platform. Some of those videos were removed by Instagram after being flagged with the company as part of the report.
Meta, for its part, says that thousands of similar pieces of content have been removed as a part of its efforts to curb harassment, and it’s blocked popular hashtags like “rizz” and “cold approach,” which are often associated with that type of video. As Business Insider notes, two popular accounts promoting “pickup artist” content were also removed last month.
Still, despite those efforts, Meta is clearly struggling to keep a leash on harassing content, which isn’t necessarily surprising. Meta—and every other social media company—is in a constant struggle to police the types of content that make their way to its platform, and the results of that moderation are never perfect. Business Insider notes that the same content also makes its way to TikTok and YouTube, and it violates policies on those platforms as well.
What makes this particular case a little more ironic for Meta compared to other kinds of undesirable content is that it’s seemingly a problem of its own making. After all, the reasons “pickup artist” and prank content have become so popular in the first place are because Meta has given people a relatively accessible way to secretly record people.
The fact is, as long as people have a way to easily record others without their consent, we can probably expect “prank” videos to live on in some capacity—crackdown or not.