'Creep glasses’ videos keep surviving Meta’s crackdown
Instagram's harassment crackdown on Meta glasses content remains inconsistent, an investigation finds
In mid-July, Instagram head Adam Mosseri said the platform would remove harassing "pickup line" videos filmed using Meta's AI glasses, content showing men approaching women on the street while secretly recording them.
A month later, dozens of similar videos remain live across popular, verified accounts, even as Meta insists thousands of pieces of content have already come down.
Meta spokesperson Tracy Clayton said the company has taken down thousands of pieces of content and several large accounts under its existing rules against bullying, harassment, and content that sexualises other adults.
Search terms tied to pickup-artist slang, including "rizz" and "cold approach", are now blocked on Instagram. Yet after one journalist flagged more than 20 harassing videos to Meta directly, only nine came down, and one creator whose video was removed had used the identical pickup line on multiple other women in videos that remain untouched.
However, in the case of two large pickup artist profiles, both of which got suspended initially as part of the enforcement push, one got reactivated several days later without any notice from Meta, but only after another report.
In another instance, where a user’s profile had been reported on the basis of videos showing this individual paying women who claimed to be escorts in order to watch videos on his laptop,
That profile got suspended one day and reinstated completely the very next day.
TikTok removed two of four flagged videos, citing its bullying and sexual harassment policies, while YouTube said it took down "several" flagged videos and pulled one channel from its monetisation programme.
Digital criminologist Carolina Are of the London School of Economics said Meta's pattern of response, acknowledging a problem publicly while treating individual failures as isolated errors, avoids confronting how its own products and policies enable the behaviour in the first place.
The stakes are unusually high for Meta because the backlash directly implicates a hardware line the company has bet heavily on.
The sales of AI glasses by Meta saw an increase to more than 7 million units in the previous year compared to their performance before.
The devices were nicknamed "creep glasses" and "pervert glasses" by some users after Kylie Jenner made public remarks about wearing a pair of the glasses on her Instagram page.
Meta had suggested that AI moderation would be used as one of the solutions to address the problem in the future, having told the Financial Times in June that their automated systems found more violations while making fewer mistakes than human reviewers.
Sarah T. Roberts of UCLA's Center for Critical Internet Inquiry commented that the rules set out by Meta allowed them discretion when it comes to enforcing them.
