Jeff Horwitz
@JeffHorwitz
Followers
19,327
Following
1,702
Media
21
Statuses
247
Reachable via non-Meta owned devices on cell/Signal at (202) 480-4453. Also at .
Oakland, CA
Joined June 2011
Don't wanna be here?
Send us removal request.
Explore trending content on Musk Viewer
Birmingham
• 482303 Tweets
Walz
• 290219 Tweets
#WWERaw
• 212665 Tweets
Protecting
• 190824 Tweets
TATI
• 149427 Tweets
Gala
• 118026 Tweets
原爆投下
• 104846 Tweets
Ricardo
• 67764 Tweets
Mariana
• 66355 Tweets
#IRIAMメンテ中のフォロー祭り
• 62087 Tweets
#LaCasaDeLosFamososMx2
• 54291 Tweets
ファミチキ
• 48874 Tweets
Adrián Marcelo
• 41026 Tweets
Goyang
• 38466 Tweets
Stanowski
• 37158 Tweets
ハムの日
• 36132 Tweets
Aiyuk
• 31876 Tweets
Sian
• 24160 Tweets
はだしのゲン
• 19213 Tweets
#BangladeshCrisis
• 17257 Tweets
おたる水族館
• 16799 Tweets
時給2500円
• 15729 Tweets
सुषमा स्वराज
• 15630 Tweets
We looked at what videos Instagram recommends to users who follow preteen gymnast/cheer influencers. These users are often adult men interested in kids and sex.
IG caters to those interests, serving ads for major brands amid child sexualizing content.
9
293
422
Well, more
@wsj
layoffs today. Dow Jones stock is up, margins are up, there’s a new windfall AI deal in place and we’re cutting good reporters.
21
134
318
Instagram has a pedophile problem. It’s not that there are plenty of pedophilic users among its massive user base — of course there are.
It’s that Instagram is actively connecting them, forming a pedophile community.
13
195
264
Meet This“Issa Bee,” a 14 year old from Albuquerque who opened a Facebook account earlier this year. Issa Bee was AI-generated, created by investigators for New Mexico’s attorney general. The state alleges Meta’s platforms actively funnel children to sex predators.
7
100
190
Meta has called our tests manufactured - but it hasn't said why following young kids and users who follow them would trigger the algorithm behind Reels to start consistently recommending pedophilic content.
1
49
153
Ads for Walmart, Disney and dating apps are being served up against Reels promoting purported child pornography, rape videos and adult sex content.
Alongside videos of those young gymnasts and cheerleaders, of course.
1
72
138
All of this is Instagram-recommended "unconnected content" - fed to our tests accts & this community from sources they don't follow.
IG's recommendation systems know what pedophilic users want - and it scours the platform for videos of kids in their underwear to entertain them.
1
64
137
We showed samples of the placements to advertisers.
Match Group and Bumble Inc have suspended all or virtually all advertising on Meta's platforms. Other advertisers offered up statements of concern. A couple went with no comment.
1
31
133
We first told Meta about the problem over the summer, and informed the company last month that it was monetizing child sexualization content. Ads for Disneyland ran next to an adult content creator pretending to have sex with her father.
1
57
129
These aren’t cherry-picked — and the videos are a lot more disturbing than what the above describes in text.
IG’s systems recognize that a community seeking this content exists and the Reels algorithm is built to consistently give it to them.
1
38
130
Meta promised advertisers an "audit" -- really more of a checkup -- after we approached brands about these ad placements. But per the awesome
@CdnChildProtect
and our own tests, they haven't fixed the problem.
1
26
121
There is no question that Meta's systems are targeting ads based on behavioral cues.
Alongside major American brands, IG regularly served our test accounts overtly pornographic ads for paid livestream apps, AI sex chatbots and massage parlors offering "happy endings."
2
37
115
EXTREMELY EXCITED to read this book by
@RMac18
and
@kateconger
about a company that I am EXTREMELY EXCITED is not my beat. (Presale copy also ordered.)
7
27
111
New Mexico just sued Meta, alleging that FB and IG are fundamentally unsafe, built in ways that actively promote inappropriate content to kids and encourage predation. The suit names Mark Zuckerberg personally and there's some intriguing redactions of internal records.
1
21
82
Per the suit, Meta started recommending porn to 13 year old who wasn’t looking for it within a few days of account creation.
As with our past reporting, New Mexico found enforcement issues, too. This suit suggests that Meta’s AI can't reliably recognize an erect penis.
3
17
67
Per New Mexico, Meta didn’t take down that wildly inappropriate and illegal content that she was sent. Even when she reported it. Instead, Meta’s systems noticed her rapid follower growth and suggested she set up a professional account with access to monetization features.
1
22
66
My publisher is publicly claiming I’ve written a book!
This is a tad optimistic, as there’s a lot of fact-checking, source conversations and editing ahead, but the story of how Facebook came to understand/misunderstand itself is pulling together.
6
8
66
Issa Bee, who posted about losing her last baby tooth and the first day of seventh grade, quickly gathered thousands of followers. Mostly adult men. They deluged her with dick pics, invitations to join chat groups for grooming “loli” girls and solicitations for prostitution.
3
18
49
Nick Clegg, internally fretting in 2021 that Zuckerberg's response to the Facebook Files:
"If I was him, I wouldn’t want to be asked 'while your company was being accused of aiding and abetting teenage suicide why was your only public pronouncement a post about surfing?'"
4
15
45
In response to our work, Instagram discovered operational problems — it was mishandling large numbers of child exploitation reports due to a combination of a software bug that discarded reported posts and systemic under-enforcement.
3
10
45
Our story (with
@KatherineBlunt
) on the suit from this morning is here.
This is a separate push from the 40-odd attorneys general suing Meta over alleged addictive design and teen mental health issues (though this suit covers some of that ground, too.)
1
14
40
With the help of
@stanfordio
and Brian Levine’s UMass Child Rescue Lab, we identified how Instagram’s engagement-based recommendation systems were assisting pedophiles in finding each other, potential grooming victims and disturbing content.
The system was working as designed.
3
11
36
Meta spent three years collaborating with outside researchers on politics and polarization-related work. But the academics, Science and the independent rapporteur say Meta's significantly overstated the favorability of their conclusions.
1
16
36
During the lower points of writing Broken Code, one thing kept me going: knowing that, if I persevered, I could one day leave a two-star review of my own book on Goodreads.
Sorry to my excellent editor
@ysoha
, who spent a year hearing me joke about this.
6
7
36
Instagram has now fixed the bug and is revisiting its guidance to moderation staff.
This is good, and getting angry at Meta for acknowledging these problems is unhelpful. They’re working on the enforcement issues via a new task force. So let’s move on to bigger picture stuff.
4
6
31
Thanks to Sarah Adams,
@mom_uncharted
, for sharing the horrifying experience of reporting an account named "Incest Toddlers" to IG, only to see it start getting recommended to her followers as "suggested for you."
3
5
30
Anyhow, party on y'all! I'm guess I'll just go back to work on researching child safety issues on social media from my office in the basement of a Washington pizza parlor which has no basement.
41
1
19
As a substantial portion of this book is about the gaming of recommendation systems, I'd be remiss if I didn't quote tweet myself in an attempt to do so.
If this doesn't work I'm going to have to start appending it to viral animal videos I scrape from Reddit and TikTok.
My publisher is publicly claiming I’ve written a book!
This is a tad optimistic, as there’s a lot of fact-checking, source conversations and editing ahead, but the story of how Facebook came to understand/misunderstand itself is pulling together.
6
8
66
0
5
21
The Journal was always a bit touchy about describing the details of my working relationship with
@FrancesHaugen
. It's not the center of my book, but I'm glad to have put it down in print, and I'm delighted that Rolling Stone ran it as an excerpt!
Excerpt: Inside a Six-Month Espionage Campaign at Facebook
Wall Street Journal reporter
@JeffHorwitz
's new book "Broken Code" reveals why whistleblower Frances Haugen decided to speak up
More:
6
40
74
0
10
18
Well, after an hour the below has received 22 retweets and colleagues can't find my account via
@Twitter
search results. Looks like Twitter is doing some account suppression on me, and thereby our reporting on pedophiles.
Is it that I cite a Mastodon handle in bio?
Instagram has a pedophile problem. It’s not that there are plenty of pedophilic users among its massive user base — of course there are.
It’s that Instagram is actively connecting them, forming a pedophile community.
13
195
264
4
6
19
Here's a non-paywalled link to the story about Arturo Bejar, the engineering director the NYT once branded "Facebook's Mr. Nice." It's adapted from my forthcoming book, Broken Code.
1
12
18
Instagram has long known that minors on its platform are more likely to see unwanted nudity than adults.
We tested the platform with fresh 13 year old accounts and found Instagram started recommending sex content creators within minutes.
2
12
17
I have seen people saying our IG child safety story is confirmation that "pizzagate" was real. My best understanding is QAnon actually popularized the idea of "cheese pizza" as an extremely lazy in-group code, thereby launching it on social media.
Child safety is nonpartisan.
85
8
17
I have to thank Jason here for flagging this thing originally. I left town for the holidays, and would have missed the pre-holiday document drop if he hadn't been following it.
Here is the full Wall Street Journal report. Fortunate to have a reporter like
@JeffHorwitz
able to bring the full context as he literally wrote the book on this topic from the 2021 company whistleblower. 3/3
0
8
20
0
2
16
There are some industry-wide aspects of this, and arguably everyone could pay closer attention. My colleague
@AlexaCorse
wrote this story Monday.
1
13
16
So Instagram is, through the power of black box recommendation systems, creating a specialized content niche for pedophilic users.
Experts say this problem is fixable -- but would reduce recommendation efficiency. There'd be a cost, measured in usage.
0
5
15
All of this is an extension of the work
@KatherineBlunt
and i did in June on Instagram’s tendency to recommend pedophilic users to each other and connect them with minors selling underage sex content.
Experts say this problem is fixable -- but would
2
4
15
After the Journal reported the chloroform groups to Meta, the company took them down. Within two weeks, however, a 1,800 member group specifically devoted to chloroforming children was back in Facebook’s “Groups You Should Join” recommendations.
In it, users posted pictures of
2
10
14
So congratulations: QAnon popularized an emoji that did, for awhile, help lead people to actually bad stuff.
Per talking to Meta formers, the reason the pizzagate term carried a warning label was that adherents of the conspiracy theory themselves posted illegal content.
31
3
14
The Journal podcast team is fantastic. Here’s hoping.
Producers for
@WSJ
’s The Journal podcast and
@sciencevs
have ONE DAY to get a fair contract from Spotify. If you listen to and love our shows, please show your support by sending the company a letter:
2
15
19
1
2
14
So
@LauraEdelson2
was a phenomenal partner and helped quantify the differences between TikTok and IG Reels. While TikTok has its problems, it doesn’t start recommending anal sex related content to 13 year olds who watch videos of women dancing.
I used the Google SafeSearch codebook to code the content the users were shown, and calculated an average 'raciness score' for every 30 second window. There is a clear difference between what my teen and adult persona were shown on TikTok, but this isn't true for Reels.4/5
1
1
4
0
6
13
Trade pubs. They're great and high impact but don't always get respect. Congratulations to the Coindesk team on the Polk.
We supposed to talk publicly about trying and failing to get a Pulitzer?
@CoinDesk
pitched our groundbreaking coverage of Sam Bankman-Fried and FTX, headlined by the
@IanAllison123
scoop that without question led to the collapse. We didn't win.
23
17
219
0
0
13
Evan is a great reporter. Here’s the final story he wrote before his arrest.
0
4
12
Feeling compelled to note that these guys seem to be placing their trust in mainstream news.
0
1
12
The newly unredacted Mass AG's teen mental health suit against Meta contains some incredible stuff -- Zuckerberg nixing his own top product, policy and safety executives' efforts to limit Instagram beauty filters that they believed were harmful to teens.
2
5
12
There are a lot of BuzzFeed Shoutouts in this book. Please be aware of the potential for bias in this review.
Got my copy of
@JeffHorwitz
's new book, Broken Code. As someone who competed fiercely on Facebook/Meta reporting against Jeff, I can’t tell you enough how talented and thorough he is as a journalist. His coverage has changed the industry. Can’t wait to dig in.
1
11
66
0
0
11
I've been meaning to subscribe to
@404mediaco
for a bit, but recent work from
@josephfcox
,
@jason_koebler
and
@samleecole
just wrung the annual $100 out of me. They do top tier, wild stuff all the time. Subscribe!
2
0
7
This was a lot of fun!
Also, I’m supposed to be doing more book promotion than I am, so get in touch if you too wish to interview Jeff Horwitz about social media and his new book Broken Code.
New podcast! I spoke with WSJ tech reporter
@JeffHorwitz
, whose excellent new book detailing how Facebook came to know of its harmful effects on people and what management chose to do with that information was published today. It's titled Broken Code.
1
21
38
0
2
11
Meta’s recommendation systems just can’t stop promoting child sexual abuse at scale.
The story today from
@katherineblunt
and I backs that statement up. But exploring the scope of the problem a little more on here seemed worthwhile.
2
5
11
Pivoting from book hype account to cat hype account: this 2 year old boy got abandoned by a neighbor of my friend JP when the guy moved out of the Bay Area. Jerk.
He’s sweet and likes to cuddle. So…
USED CAT 4 FREE, COMES WITH COMPLIMENTARY COPY OF MY BOOK BROKEN CODE.
0
1
11
Meta has killed this on IG.
This was, in hindsight, not a place where "protecting voice" was a good idea.
2
2
10
Ladies please note that the lead photo for my story on eating poison oak and getting a full body rash includes my wedding ring.
1
0
11
Unredacted sections of the AG lawsuit against Meta alleges the company intentionally cultivated a base of underage users. Meta denies this, and it’s for a court to decide.
But it did seem worth sharing some of my favorite Instagram filters.
2
1
10
You shouldn't eat poison oak.
Me, though? Different story.
1
2
11
“It was a hundred times worse than any of us expected. There were millions of pedophiles targeting tens of millions of children.”
0
3
4
The Texas Tribune has done everything imaginable -- events, sponsorships, festivals and great journalism -- to make the digital regional news model work.
Here's a link to support them in the hopes that this doesn't happen again.
At
@TexasTribune
we had layoffs for the first time, and lost cherished colleagues. There is no way to sugar-coat it. This is still a special place to work, but sadly we’re not immune from the forces reshaping the news industry.
9
34
107
0
3
6
Meta filed the unredacted state AG suit right before the holiday.
Cites presentations on designing for teen “dopamine hits” and someone noting Meta could do better at removing underage users but “you probably don’t want to open this pandora’s box.”
0
2
9
@oliviasolon
It almost doesn't seem necessary to ask.
Been reading Brian Merchant's Blood in the Machine, and am having a hard time seeing this wave of innovation being anything other than a form of hard-to-trace duplication.
1
0
8
This was indeed a hell of a quote.
.
@JeffHorwitz
: Meta sought to design its social-media products in ways to take advantage of known weaknesses of young users’ brains, according to newly unredacted legal filings citing internal company documents.
0
9
4
0
5
8
If you follow Bay Area journalism, this crew is really impressive.
NEW: Open Vallejo is seeking to reverse a Solano County court order after prosecutors failed to disclose crucial information to the judge and the public.
1
9
11
1
2
8
The line between financially motivated distribution of falsehoods and the politically motivated distribution of falsehoods doesn't exist.
The vital Pentagon explosion hoax last month is an alarming sign of things to come: Russian and conspiracy-peddling accounts aligning with financial posters. Our story at the Post:
1
16
42
0
3
6
The publisher allowed me to narrate my own audio book, which was fun and welcome reassurance that I don't unknowingly sound super annoying when I talk.
Thanks to audiobook director Bruce Mann, who refused to let me pause after a typo and say "who the hell wrote this?" on tape.
Wall Street Journal tech reporter
@JeffHorwitz
's BROKEN CODE reveals all 🔐🧑💻
Take a behind-the-scenes look at the manipulative tactics Facebook used to grow its business and the company insiders who found the courage to speak out.
Listen now! 🎧
0
2
1
0
1
8
I guess you get the marketing you pay for.
0
0
8
Yup, regret it already!
Now have pizzagate truthers insisting that I am now covering up for the pedophile network THAT WE WROTE ABOUT YESTERDAY by failing to acknowledge that "Cheese Pizza" got cited by urban dictionary in 2010.
12
0
8
It's worth noting that this was the one observational study.
Regarding the experimental papers: internal Meta research has always struggled to show tie short-term tests with "offline" behavior. But few researchers I've spoken to considered those null findings dispositive.
Lots of outlets are carrying the news of these Facebook studies today. Here's my and
@aishacounts
' take. We focus on one study that we thought was most revealing:
Facebook Misinformation in US Election Reached More Conservatives, Study Says
5
60
137
0
2
8
I like this.
Since the
@InsiderUnion
creator economy/digital culture reporters are on strike and not working, we wanted to take a moment to shout out talented journalists on our beat at other outlets! Reply here with who you are reading as you avoid Insider and hold the digital picket line:
7
30
131
0
2
5
Of personal interest is that some of the same executives who dismissed our 2021 reporting on the company's internal mental health research as cherrypicked and misleading appear to have acknowledged both the seriousness of the problems and the company's underwhelming response.
0
2
7
One final flog for the 7pm "Meet the Author" event at the Rockridge Library tonight with
@KatherineBlunt
. We'll be talking about my book, Broken Code.
Following that I'm buying drinks at a nearby bar that confiscated my fake ID the summer after high school. No hard feelings.
0
0
7
Children turn out to be a high-risk subscription product.
1
4
7
Well, after five years of having to explain to people that Facebook truly wasn't listening to their offline conversations (this was an occupational hazard of FB reporting) it's great to learn that a scrappy startup was boldly moving forward with such a capacity.
New: we’ve found second company that says it is using microphone data to target ads. Tiny 3 man outfit in New Hampshire. They’re deleting product descriptions but we got Google caches.
When it comes to using voice to target ads “we’re the guys” they say
43
663
2K
0
1
7
I had not seen this. I think there's a really important public discussion to be had not about encryption but about *encryption and discovery* paired together.
@JeffHorwitz
Not sure if you saw this investigation I did back 2018. A lot of issues on WhatsApp groups as well
0
0
1
1
2
6
This is a real thing. What digital marketing agencies consider to be sensitive -- and what they don't -- determines quite a bit.
Jezebel died because G/O mismanaged them but also because there is an entire industry dedicated to making sure brands don't advertise on articles that make people sad or angry as defined by black box algorithms
21
377
1K
0
3
6
Instagram tests feature to block explicit images in direct message requests
0
0
6
@SilvermanJacob
reviewed Broken Code for the Washington Post:
“a smartly reported investigation into the messy internal machinations of one of the world’s most important and least understood companies.”
0
2
5
Finally, I’ll close with this one, one of numerous Peppa Pig-themed Instagram filters. Have a good evening!
0
0
6
Quora choosing to serve AI-generated answers above human-written responses seems a lot like a product asking to be euthanized.
0
0
4
Hey everybody, it looks like the publisher of my soon-to-be released book about Meta's Broken Code, has already put out the paperback! Love the art, but their weirdly messed up my name. Fixed it!
Buy the hardcover here:
1
0
6
Here's the editor of Science.
There are some results that should be favorably viewed by Meta. But the company's researcher partners, the work's rapporteur and Science all called Meta's claims about the takeaways overblown, illustrating the need for unmediated access to data.
1
3
5
All right, Rob's doing my marketing from here on out.
For everyone asking me for a sneak peek at my wild book on
@RayDalio
, here's your chance to preorder at a discount from
@BNBuzz
Bundle with one of the upcoming books from
@ZekeFaux
@DanaMattioli
@JeffHorwitz
and shipping is free.
1
0
1
0
3
6
Before diving in, a bit of a warning; the thread’s going to be pretty dark. This reporting feels vitally important, but seeing guys in massive, public groups discuss abusing kids and child exploitation content was rough. So trigger warning and all that.
1
1
5
I will probably regret even acknowledging the craziness of this in a brief thread. But if it's of use to anyone trying to deprogram a Q-pilled uncle, be my guest!
6
1
5
This isn't just "oh no there are bad Groups on Facebook." It's that, as soon as a user touches one of these groups, FB actively recommends more of them as "Groups You Should Join."
1
1
5
This is awesome, and MIT Tech Review went highbrow here. They could have chosen to excerpt the part about the day when Facebook’s senior leadership discovered that the top item of content on the platform one day was a close up of an asshole, but they’re a class act.
Unlike me.
Today we also have an excerpt from
@JeffHorwitz
new book Broken Code on Facebook's move towards AI, and the people that made it happen.
It's a great read.
0
4
7
0
2
5
Meta has described the pedophilic recommendations problem we identified as unrepresentative. But on a platform with three billion users, a fraction of a percent adds up to millions. And its what the members of Facebook's massive pedophile Groups have been consuming every day.
1
2
5
Interesting to see the EFF liken Twitter's desire not to disclose its ranking/moderation policies to a newspaper's desire not to disclose the rationale behind its editorial judgements.
1
0
3