Social media influencer exposes dark side of kid content online

A social media influencer has ditched the world of beauty tips and clothing hauls videos to expose the dark side of popular social media platforms, which has lead to numerous complaints, comments, and threats of having her pages taken down.

Social media influencer Jade Wilson has ditched beauty tips and clothing haul videos to reveal the dark side of social media platforms.

Her own investigation into the dark underworld of predators trawling social platforms – posted in a series to her 800,000 TikTok followers – has led to threats from other social media users who have tried to have her account pulled down.

Ms Wilson said the Instagram algorithm began feeding child videos to her explore page out of the blue.

“I started getting child modelling videos coming up on my page, which I thought was really strange because I don’t have any kids, I had never looked up a child’s product or anything,” she said.

Social media influencer Jade Wilson is taking matters into their own hands to protect children from being exploited online. Picture: David Swift

“So I started going through the comments and noticed there were a lot of men, and when I went onto their profiles, they were following hundreds and hundreds of little girl accounts.

“The videos that were getting promoted on my page led me to child modelling accounts, but when I reported these accounts, that are so blatantly child exploitation and were linked to child porn websites, they didn’t get taken down.”

Ms Wilson said she was “in disbelief”, prompting her to act.

She said she uncovered a hidden world of secret forms of communication used by online predators, including the emoji cheese pizza (acronym for child porn) as well as links to more horrific content.

The AFP has also identified the cheese pizza emoji as an example of code used in the dark underworld of child image sharing.

Ms Wilson found multiple accounts which prompted users to contact other users via the social messaging app Telegram.

She said she found links in comments to pay viewpoints and to Telegraph accounts.

“And they basically say if you enjoy this, or if you like what you see, click on this telegram link, and these are on these child modelling pages, some of them have hundreds of thousands of followers,” she said.

“Once you get to the niche child pages with tens of thousands followers and go into their comments and their likes and followers, a lot of them promote ‘cheese pizza’, and some appear to be parents as well.”

The social media giants have systems in place to flag and deleted these types of users, however Ms Wilson has been repeatedly able to find them at large.

“So I posted a video exposing her which has since been taken down by TikTok for bullying.”

But she said many parents had thanked her for educating them about the dangers.

“A lot of people don’t realise that even things that seem so innocent to a normal person can be turned into something much darker to someone with a predator mindset.”