'It could be catastrophic': Woman says natural supplement contained hidden painkiller drug
A Manitoba woman thought she found a miracle natural supplement, but said a hidden ingredient wreaked havoc on her health.
Instagram says it prohibits drug sales, but accounts advertising the sale of Xanax, ecstasy, opioids and other drugs are still widespread and easy to find on the platform, including for young users, according to a report released by tech advocacy group the Tech Transparency Project (TTP) on Tuesday.
The revelations came ahead of a Senate subcommittee hearing on Wednesday with Instagram head Adam Mosseri, who is set to testify to lawmakers about the platform's impact on children and teens. It also follows months of reporting on a trove of internal documents leaked by whistleblower Frances Haugen, some of which showed that Instagram can damage young users' mental health and body image, and can exacerbate dangerous behaviors such as eating disorders.
As part of the report, TTP carried out an experiment in which it set up seven Instagram accounts appearing to belong to teenage users, ages 13 to 17. It found these accounts were easily able to navigate to pages openly advertising the sale of illicit or pharmaceutical drugs.
"Not only did Instagram allow the hypothetical teens to easily search for age-restricted and illegal drugs, but the platform's algorithms helped the underage accounts connect directly with drug dealers selling everything from opioids to party drugs," the report states. "The findings highlight another aspect of Instagram's failures when it comes to children."
Responding to the report, Stephanie Otway, a spokesperson for Meta, Instagram's parent company, reiterated to CNN Business that the platform prohibits drug sales.
"We removed 1.8 million pieces of content related to drug sales in the last quarter alone, and due to our improving detection technology, the prevalence of such content is about 0.05 percent of content viewed, or about 5 views per every 10,000," Otway said in a statement. "We'll continue to improve in this area in our ongoing efforts to keep Instagram safe, particularly for our youngest community members."
TTP did not attempt to actually go through the process of purchasing drugs on the platform, so it's unclear whether they would have actually arrived. Still, the experiment is yet another demonstration of the challenges Instagram, Facebook and the company's other platforms face in enforcing their own policies.
The report may also only add to the pressure on Meta to address concerns about its platforms' potential harms to young users. In addition to Mosseri's Wednesday hearing, a bipartisan group of state attorneys general last month launched an investigation into Instagram's impact on children and teens. (A Meta spokesperson said at the time that the allegations made by the attorneys general in announcing their probe were false.)
According to the TTP report, when one hypothetical teen user started typing the phrase "buyxanax" into Instagram's search bar, the platform started auto-filling results for buying Xanax. When the hypothetical user clicked on one of the suggested accounts, they instantly got a "direct line to a Xanax dealer," the report states. The entire process took seconds, according to the report, and the same thing happened when the user searched for "buyfentanyl." (Fentanyl is an extremely potent opioid that has been a rising factor in drug overdose deaths across the United States.)
In some cases, purported drug dealers even reached out to the teenage accounts through direct messages or Instagram voice calls after they began following them, TTP said.
"In all cases, despite the fact that these were minor accounts, Instagram did nothing to prevent them from searching for drug-related content—and the platform's automatic features even sped up the process," the report states.
According to the report, Instagram told TTP that 36 of the 50 posts it submitted as part of its investigation did not violate its community guidelines. The platform ultimately removed 12 of the posts and told TTP that it took down one account that had violated its policies, although TTP claimed the account remained active even after Instagram said it would be removed.
The report also found that while Instagram bans some drug-related hashtags, other similar ones are still readily available. For instance, while Instagram removed the hashtag #mdma for the party drug also known as ecstasy, when you type the hashtag into Instagram's search bar, the first page of results shows #mollymdma — referencing another name for the same drug — as an option, CNN Business found Wednesday, the day after the report noted the problem.
When CNN Business on Wednesday typed "buyxanax" into the Instagram search bar, it popped up with a warning noting that "this may be associated with the sale of drugs" and included a link to "get help." But the warning also allows the user to click through to see the results, which included accounts offering to sell the drug, some of which included WhatsApp numbers to contact purported dealers. (WhatsApp is also owned by Meta.)
Meta told CNN Business it has blocked the hashtags #mdma, #buyfentanyl and #buyxanax on Instagram, and is reviewing additional hashtags for potential violations of its policies.
"Instagram is still allowing drug dealers to do business on the platform, in violation of its Community Guidelines which prohibit the 'buying or selling non-medical or pharmaceutical drugs,'" TTP said in its report. "What's more, Instagram allows teens—one of its most vulnerable user populations—to jump into this marketplace with no guardrails."
A Manitoba woman thought she found a miracle natural supplement, but said a hidden ingredient wreaked havoc on her health.
Hospital chaplain J.S. Park opens up about death, grief and hearing thousands of last words, and shares his advice for the living.
The World Health Organization is likely to issue a wider warning about contaminated Johnson and Johnson-made children's cough syrup found in Nigeria last week, it said in an email.
Police have released video footage of a dramatic takedown of a group of teens wanted in connection with an attempted carjacking in Markham earlier this month.
Canada called for 'all parties' to de-escalate rising tensions in the Mideast following an apparent Israeli drone attack against Iran overnight.
A woman who recently moved to Canada from India was searching for a job when she got caught in an online job scam and lost $15,000.
More money will land in the pockets of some Canadian families on Friday for the latest Canada Child Benefit installment.
The World Health Organization and around 500 experts have agreed for the first time on what it means for a disease to spread through the air, in a bid to avoid the confusion early in the COVID-19 pandemic that some scientists have said cost lives.
American millionaire Jonathan Lehrer, one of two men charged in the killings of a Canadian couple in Dominica, has been denied bail.
At 6'8" and 350 pounds, there is nothing typical about UBC offensive lineman Giovanni Manu, who was born in Tonga and went to high school in Pitt Meadows.
Kevin the cat has been reunited with his family after enduring a harrowing three-day ordeal while lost at Toronto Pearson International Airport earlier this week.
Molly Knight, a grade four student in Nova Scotia, noticed her school library did not have many books on female athletes, so she started her own book drive in hopes of changing that.
Almost 7,000 bars of pure gold were stolen from Pearson International Airport exactly one year ago during an elaborate heist, but so far only a tiny fraction of that stolen loot has been found.
When Les Robertson was walking home from the gym in North Vancouver's Lower Lonsdale neighbourhood three weeks ago, he did a double take. Standing near a burrow it had dug in a vacant lot near East 1st Street and St. Georges Avenue was a yellow-bellied marmot.
A moulting seal who was relocated after drawing daily crowds of onlookers in Greater Victoria has made a surprise return, after what officials described as an 'astonishing' six-day journey.
Just steps from Parliament Hill is a barber shop that for the last 100 years has catered to everyone from prime ministers to tourists.
A high score on a Foo Fighters pinball machine has Edmonton player Dave Formenti on a high.
A compound used to treat sour gas that's been linked to fertility issues in cattle has been found throughout groundwater in the Prairies, according to a new study.