Police have issued a warning to Instagram users after a Melbourne woman discovered an image of her 18-month-old child had been posted to a site hosting sexually explicit content.
The woman, who has not been named, found a “fully clothed” image of her daughter had been re-posted to several other accounts, including some that contained sexual comments.
It took two days for Instagram to remove the images, Fairfax reported yesterday.
A spokesperson for the Australian Federal Police confirmed to SBS “there have been instances where images uploaded to social networking sites have been shared on other networks”.
“The AFP acknowledges it can be devastating for victims, and encourages those whose images are taken to first report it to the social networking site,” they said.
Online safety advocate Leonie Smith said parents needed to be more aware of the risks of using social media, and should consider using private settings when posting images of their children.
However she also believes companies such as Instagram need to “move faster” to remove content after it has been reported.
Dr Christine Satchell, a computing and information systems expert at the University of Melbourne, says social media sites should make it much easier for users to report misuse.
“I generally find that [instructions on how to report misuse] are politely hidden away in some fine text at the end,” she said.
“Much clearer ways of reporting this would be really useful, and that's a simple thing to put in place.
“It's a simple technical solution to a really deep, dark problem.”
While sites could make it easier for users to report problems, Dr Satchell believes users of social media sites need to maintain vigilance.
“It's up to the people that use these sites to actively support them, and report incidents,” she says.
“You can't expect Facebook [for example] to be sitting there with some type of algorithm trying to detect something that could be offensive.”
An Instagram spokesperson has been contacted for comment. Instructions on how to report offensive content on the site can be found here.
