A journalist in India opened a fresh Instagram account. No history. No searches for anything dark. She followed a few women who posted about food, weather, and daily life. Then she just scrolled.
Within a week, the app made its move. It served her ads for child sexual abuse material. The ads linked out to Telegram. There, the BBC found, the material was on sale for about a dollar.
Then came the part that should end careers. The BBC reported one of these ads through Instagram’s own tool. A day later, the review team replied. The ad “does not go against our community standards.” The machine surfaced it. A person looked at it and let it stay.
This is from a BBC Eye investigation released in July 2026. It is called “The Careless Machine.” Nobody went looking for the worst thing online. An ordinary account, used in an ordinary way, was walked straight to it.
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Here is the part most headlines skipped. Meta already knew.
A Journalist Flagged a Child Abuse Ad on Instagram. Meta Said It Was Fine.
In 2019, a Facebook researcher built a fake user. Her name was Carol Smith. On paper she was a conservative mother from North Carolina. She liked Fox News and Donald Trump. She had never shown any interest in conspiracy theories.
The researcher did one thing. She let Facebook’s own engine decide what Carol should see.
It took two days. The feed started pushing Carol toward QAnon. Within a week it was full of groups and pages that broke Facebook’s own rules. The internal report had a name that reads like a confession. “Carol’s Journey to QAnon.”
So the BBC did not uncover a secret. They repeated Meta’s own test. Then they published the answer Meta had locked in a drawer.
You might want to make this a story about the other political side. Meta’s own notes will stop you.
The researchers did not only build a conservative. They also built a liberal, Karen Jones. The same engine fed her a steady diet of her own outrage. They built a third account for India, their biggest market. Three blank people. Three different holes, dug in three directions.
That is the whole point. The algorithm has no politics. It has an appetite. It learns what holds you, then gives you more of it. Nothing holds a person like fear, anger, and the sense that someone is coming for the kids. So the engine drifts toward the most extreme version of whatever you already are. Left. Right. Hindu. Muslim. American. Burmese. It does not care which door you go through. It only cares that you keep walking.
We already know the endpoint. It has happened.
Between 2016 and 2017, the same kind of engine ran in Myanmar. In much of that country, Facebook was the internet. The feed filled with posts that stripped the Rohingya of their humanity. Amnesty International found that Meta’s algorithms amplified the hate and helped drive the violence that followed.
Villages burned. Women were raped. More than seven hundred thousand people ran for their lives. Many of them walked to camps in Bangladesh. That is a few hours from where I sit.
I do not raise Myanmar to shock you. I raise it because it is the same sentence, finished. A disturbing ad is the early sign. An emptied province is the disease at full strength. Same machine. Same appetite. Nobody willing to switch it off.
None of this is a glitch. This is the product doing its job.
A company that sells your attention wants one thing. It wants to hold you longer than anyone else can. The fastest way to hold a person is to scare them or enrage them. Extreme content is simply the best fuel. So an engine built for engagement becomes an engine built for extremes. No villain. No one typing evil commands. Just the design.
That is why “the algorithm made a mistake” is the wrong way to put it. The machine was not broken. It was working. Carol Smith was not a bug report. She was a preview. The company watched the preview, understood it, and kept the engine running. The engine is the business.
So the test never really ended. It only left the lab. Every day you open the app, it builds a fresh Carol Smith. This time she is you.
I am not going to tell you what to do. You get to choose. As far as I can see, there are three honest paths.
Stay. Keep using it the way you do now. There is no shame in that. Billions of us are here. Just go in with open eyes. Know what it is doing while you scroll.
Use it on purpose. Stay, but change the terms. Follow only what feeds you. Post only what helps someone. Treat your attention as yours, and spend it by choice. On paper, this is the smartest option. You keep the reach and drop the harm.
Walk out. Delete all of it. Every Meta product, gone.
I picked the third one.
I know the second one sounds wiser. Keep the tool, use it well. But I do not fully trust myself inside that machine, and I am not sure most of us should. The pull is real. Even when you use it with care, it keeps tugging. I watch it every day. People’s thoughts are being shaped by the feed. They repeat what it hands them. They stop thinking their own thoughts.
So I scheduled the deletion. Not as a protest anyone will notice. Not because one person leaving hurts a company worth trillions. I left because I finally saw what I was giving away. Not my data. My attention. The one thing I cannot make more of. They were spending it for me, steering me toward the person I was about to become.
I would rather choose that myself.
If you take one small thing from this, take this. Watch what the feed gives you for one week. Ask who it is trying to turn you into. That question is free, and it belongs to you.
I am not only walking out. I am trying to build the opposite.
It is a book app. The working name is “Shantir Boi.” The name may still change. The idea will not.
We want one place to read and to listen. A better home than Kindle and Audible, both under one roof. Built on a simple rule. People matter more than profit.
We are early. A few books are in there now. We are still building the audiobooks, the text to speech, author’s corner, and a few features I am excited about. The one I care about most is a small social network inside the app. Not built around outrage. Built around good books.
You can take a quick look here:
The app is one answer to all of this. A live room is the other.
We are holding the next session of World Peace Coalition: Peace Talks, and you are invited.
This is not a lecture. It is a working conversation. Everything above is about attention being pulled out of you. This is the opposite. A room where people think together, out loud, in real time. So come and be in it. I will also give the first public look at the book app during the session.
Register here: us06web.zoom.us/meeting/register. It takes about ten seconds, and your personal join link arrives by email.
You can also join our Signal group: World Peace Coalition on Signal.
Please check your own time zone carefully. For most of North America and Europe, this falls on Friday, August 14, not the 15th.
Dhaka, Bangladesh: Saturday, August 15, 12:00 AM to 2:00 AM
New York and Toronto (Eastern): Friday, August 14, 2:00 PM to 4:00 PM
Chicago (Central): Friday, August 14, 1:00 PM to 3:00 PM
Denver (Mountain): Friday, August 14, 12:00 PM to 2:00 PM
Los Angeles and Vancouver (Pacific): Friday, August 14, 11:00 AM to 1:00 PM
Halifax (Atlantic Canada): Friday, August 14, 3:00 PM to 5:00 PM
London: Friday, August 14, 7:00 PM to 9:00 PM
Paris, Berlin, Madrid: Friday, August 14, 8:00 PM to 10:00 PM
Athens, Helsinki: Friday, August 14, 9:00 PM to 11:00 PM
Perth: Saturday, August 15, 2:00 AM to 4:00 AM
Adelaide: Saturday, August 15, 3:30 AM to 5:30 AM
Sydney, Melbourne: Saturday, August 15, 4:00 AM to 6:00 AM
We will try to stream live on Substack, Facebook, and YouTube. Live streams have a way of not cooperating, so if it fails, the recording goes up as soon as it is ready.
The machine will still be there when you get back. The last seven years settled one question. We now know what it does to a blank account left alone with it. Meta answered that in 2019. The BBC confirmed it in 2026. Now you know it too.
BBC World Service, The Careless Machine: Exposing Instagram’s Darkest Secret, Divya Arya, July 3, 2026.
Democracy Now!, Exposing Instagram’s Darkest Secret: BBC’s Divya Arya on Ads for Child Sex Abuse Material in India, July 10, 2026.
The News Minute, Meta pushes child sexual abuse material on Instagram, finds BBC investigation, July 2026.
Newslaundry, Meta pushes child sexual abuse material on Instagram, finds BBC investigation, July 4, 2026.
NBC News, What Facebook knew about how it radicalized users (the “Carol’s Journey to QAnon” report), October 2021.
CBS News, Facebook researchers saw how its algorithms led to misinformation (the Carol Smith, Karen Jones, and India test accounts), 2021.
Amnesty International, Myanmar: Facebook’s systems promoted violence against the Rohingya; Meta owes reparations, 2022.
TIME, Myanmar’s Military Used Facebook to Incite Genocide Against the Rohingya, 2022.
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