After user reports, Meta still refused to remove AI-generated videos of coaches inappropriately touching young athletes
Meta Is Refusing to Remove AI-Generated Videos of Coaches Inappropriately Touching Young Athletes When Users Report Them
A Futurism investigation found that a large number of accounts on Facebook posted AI-generated videos of coaches inappropriately touching young female athletes, with imagery approaching photo-realistic quality, and some individual videos exceeded 100,000 views. Reporters using an ordinary account reported ten related accounts for adult content and sexual exploitation; a week later they received notice that eight of the accounts were judged by the platform not to violate community standards and would not be removed; only after the reporters contacted Meta's media team were all of these pages removed. Meta responded that abusive or exploitative content, whether real or AI-generated, has no place on its platform, and said that in the last quarter alone it proactively detected and removed 98% of posts harmful to children before they were reported. After the reporters' reports, the platform's recommendation algorithm instead pushed more similar videos to the account used, one of which exceeded 176,000 views within two days of posting. Gymnast and safe-sport advocate Kim Shore commented that such content normalizes abusive interactions between coaches and young athletes and could be used by real-world abusers as a template to disguise inappropriate behavior.
Reporters' testing found that reports from an ordinary account were judged non-violating, and pages were removed only after media involvement; this difference in handling provides a concrete case for evaluating platform reporting mechanisms.