Jackson Weimer, a college student and the founder of several meme pages, says he wasn’t surprised that meme accounts discovered the alleged problem before moderators from the platform itself. He posted several memes about it to his page, and reported the offending accounts. “It’s just disgusting,” says Jacob, a 16-year-old who runs the meme account After searching the hashtag #dropboxlinks himself, Jacob said he was shocked at what it revealed. Read: Instagram has a massive harassment problem We work with Instagram and other sites to ensure this type of content is taken down as soon as possible.” When reached for comment on Tuesday, a Dropbox spokesperson said, “Child exploitation is a horrific crime and we condemn in the strongest possible terms anyone who abuses our platform to share it. “We do not allow content that endangers children, and we have blocked the hashtags in question.” The platform also said it is “developing technology which proactively finds child nudity and child exploitative content when it’s uploaded so we can act quickly.” “Keeping children and young people safe on Instagram is hugely important to us,” an Instagram spokesperson said. Late Monday night, after an inquiry from The Atlantic, Instagram restricted the hashtags #dropboxlinks and #tradedropbox. One memer who posted using the hashtag received a message from another user with links to illicit material, asking if he wanted to “trade boys.” While they waited for Instagram to take action, meme-account holders banded together to spam related hashtags with memes. On Saturday, an account with the username posted “DM if u want young girl links.”Īccording to screenshots shared with The Atlantic, several memers who reported the accounts received messages from Instagram claiming that the platform’s terms had not been violated. “Young boys only,” another user posted several times. Many others commented “HMU to trade dropbox links” on various throwaway accounts. “I’ll trade, have all nude girl videos,” one user commented in September 2018. The accounts that and other memers surfaced, which can also be found on the hashtag, contain blank posts with captions asking users to DM them for Dropbox links, which allegedly contain child porn or nudes. The alleged child-porn-trading users set up anonymous accounts with throwaway usernames or handles such as (which has since been removed). As he investigated the account, he discovered that it was following the hashtag #dropboxlinks. Jack claims that he saw a call for Instagram users to report an account that “posted very sexually explicit photos of boys” over the weekend. “This is going to be an actual serious video,” says Jack, the 16-year-old founder and admin of who, like all minors in this piece, is referred to by his first name only because of privacy concerns. The viral campaign started when the Instagram meme account uploaded a video to Youtube on Monday morning.

Dropbox nudes teen