The creep economy still thrives on Meta

Meta’s smart glasses armed with discreet cameras, combined with its video sharing platform, have created a powerful toolkit for seedy men to record, disseminate, and monetize videos of themselves harassing women.

This novel content genre, in which self-identified pickup artists film in first person their attempts to approach women and — in some cases — underage girls, has exploded in popularity. It has also spawned a new nickname for Meta’s line of AI-powered shades: “pervert glasses.”

In response, Meta, the Mark Zuckerberg-led parent company of Facebook and Instagram, announced earlier this month that it would ban users who post videos of themselves harassing strangers.

Meta has since taken down at least two popular accounts belonging to pickup artists. But many similar accounts and hundreds of videos from pickup artists remain active on Instagram, an Oligarch Watch investigation revealed. The company’s sparse enforcement also extends to its powerful recommendation algorithm, which continues to automatically feed videos of pickup artists to Instagram users.

“We designed our AI glasses with privacy and safety features built in from the start — informed by engagement with safety experts, including women’s safety organisations,” Meta said in a statement. “We also remove accounts and content that violate our policies when we become aware of them, including content meant to degrade or shame.”

In Instagram videos that have amassed millions of views and likes, men that appear to be wearing Meta glasses have filmed themselves approaching women in public to non-consensually capture footage of their children, ridicule their weight, chase after them, record their buttocks or breasts, demand that they only “speak when spoken to,” and convey a litany of sexually aggressive comments.

In one video, a man grabs a visibly intoxicated woman by her face and tells her, “You’re gonna have my kids.” It is also common for the tens of thousands of Instagram users who reply to the videos to use vile language to describe the women and girls being filmed.

Just last week, a pickup artist posted a video of him approaching a girl in a shopping mall. “Goddamn… I had to say something to you. You beautiful, baby,” the man, who goes by the username “_mypointofvue,” tells the girl. “How old are you?”

“I’m 17,” the girl, who appears unaware that she’s being recorded, replies.

“That’s crazy. I can’t do nothing with you, baby,” he says back. The man grumbles that he “can’t believe that ho was 17” before pulling out his phone to perform an advertisement for Shuffle, a Curaçao-based gambling company that provides online casino games. (The video was removed only after Oligarch Watch contacted Meta for comment.)

In a video from another pickup artist, a man tells a girl walking on the street that she is “very beautiful.”

“How old are you?” the man, 27-year-old Julian Gulchuk, asks the girl.

“16!” the girl shouts as she walks away.

“She definitely did not look 16,” Gulchuk insists in the video, which is captioned, “Pov: Women look older in Miami.”

As is often the case with pickup artist clips shared on Instagram, an official label from Meta appeared just below Gulchuk’s username, indicating that the video of him hitting on a 16-year-old girl was shot using Ray-Ban Meta glasses. (EssilorLuxottica, the parent company of Ray-Ban and Oakley, has a partnership to create Meta’s most popular smart glasses.)

The label includes a silhouette of Ray-Ban’s iconic Wayfarer frame and doubles as a visual and interactive advertisement. Tapping it directs users to an online store where Meta sells its “cutting-edge” AI glasses.

Earlier this month, Instagram head Adam Mosseri announced that the platform would begin taking down content “that is taking advantage of people and harassing them, like a lot of these pickup line kind of videos that we’ve heard of and seen.”

“We don’t want people to be surreptitiously taking videos of other people and harassing them and then posting them on our platform. So we’re trying to fight that every way we can,” he added in an Instagram Story posted on his account.

So far, Instagram’s “fight” against such content has been largely hollow.

To test the policy, Oligarch Watch created a new Instagram account to search for content posted under hashtags related to Meta’s smart glasses and the pickup artists who wear them, including #metas, #metaglasses, #confidence, and #rizz. Soon after, the platform’s algorithm began recommending a scrollable stream of first-person content from pickup artists.

One of the clips that Instagram fed the new account depicts a man named Justin using a pair of Meta glasses to capture a zoomed-in shot of a woman’s buttocks. The woman is ordering coffee from a sidewalk shop, apparently unaware that she is being filmed. “I’m so sorry to interrupt you, but you just too damn beautiful,” Justin, now standing close behind the woman, says. He then repeatedly asks for her contact information, forcing the woman to reject his advances several times over.

While sharing the video on Instagram, Justin only referred to the woman by describing her buttocks to his tens of thousands of followers. “Shawty had the gyat,” he wrote in a caption. He has posted dozens of similar videos on Instagram in the days since Mosseri announced the platform’s ban on public harassment content.

There are several dubious offshore gambling companies that appear to be incentivizing creepy men to film and post their antisocial behavior online. Companies like Shuffle, Rainbet, PackDraw, and Stake are among the leading sponsors.

For example, the website linked to Justin’s Instagram account directs users to Shuffle, the Curaçao-based online casino. Other men with the same modus operandi often insert ads for gambling apps in the middle of their interactions with women.

These videos commonly begin with a man approaching a woman on the street. He asks for her number. He then pauses the conversation to play a hand of blackjack on his phone, while making sure to say the name of the sponsoring casino out loud and have his Meta glasses show viewers the app he is using to gamble. (The most likely audience for pickup artist videos is boys and young men, a demographic that has the highest rate of online gambling.)

The promotional schemes appear to violate Meta’s terms of service. The company prohibits ads for online gambling companies unless they receive “prior written permission.” Meta also requires creators to disclose whether their content is sponsored. In the scores of sponsored pickup artist videos reviewed for this article, none disclosed that a gambling company is paying them for promotion.

Meta’s apparent failure to police its own policies comes as the company has offloaded much of its content moderation to its artificial intelligence models.

One Instagram user who has avoided consequences from Meta’s nominal ban on “pickup line” videos is “dkdanny,” a pickup artist with 571,000 followers. Some of his most popular videos, which have been viewed and liked millions of times, depict him wearing Meta glasses as he hurls weight-related insults at women on the street. “You don’t get to talk, OK,” he tells one woman. “You already look big enough. Don’t talk big, too.”

Another popular pickup artist on Instagram, “moreno.rizz,” has shared a video of himself approaching a woman to say, “Excuse me, have we fucked before? I’m just kidding. I just thought you were really pretty.” His videos, which are still available on Instagram, feature aspirational messages to his viewers. “When you see that girl and your mind is telling you all these excuses of why you shouldn’t talk to her,” he wrote in the caption of one of his “cold approach” videos. “Take that as a sign that you should go up to her.”

Self-described social media pranksters are also using Meta glasses to film antisocial stunts in which they harass service and retail workers. In one popular trend, users on Instagram have filmed themselves whipping out sex toys in front of shopkeepers and placing them on the checkout counter or rubbing them against credit card readers.

Following the publication of this story, a Meta spokesperson shared the following statement: “Our glasses are proving to be very popular with people to listen to music, make calls, and even get live translation on the go. We’ve built privacy into the camera for the glasses from the ground up — a capture LED will blink bright white when you take a photo or video you can save or share. This light has no off switch so both people wearing the glasses and those around them feel comfortable.”

This post has been updated to include a statement from a Meta spokesperson.