I’ll say this at the top: I’m not an anti-porn crusader.

I think pornography is, on its own, a perilous thing for some people to consume. I think there can be enormous harm done to people, particularly women, who appear in it and are exploited for it. That being said, online porn, like any kind of sex work, can be financially beneficial to women, especially if they control every step of the process and make money from it.

But I think you could say – and this will come as no surprise to anyone who knows me or follows me on social media – I am an anti-hypocrisy crusader.

And yes, for my own little hypocrisy declaration, I am on social media, including Instagram and Facebook. I think the latter, much like modern-day Twitter, has done a lot to spread lies and disinformation that have ultimately hurt this country and our democracy. I’m on social media to promote my work and the work of friends (although the effectiveness of social media has never been great).

Having issued all those disclaimers, I’ll say that I was surprised recently to notice that Instagram in particular (and fellow Meta platform Facebook also; I don’t know about Threads) is running ads that include hardcore sex footage.

I’m not talking about the “I’ll be your AI girlfriend” ads that run on those platforms. Those are insulting (“I’ll never say no,” all those pretty pixel princesses coo) to everyone concerned but they’re not what I’m talking about here today.

I’m talking about explicit ads, usually popping up between Instagram stories, that are marketing something, I’m not quite sure what (I know that advertising fails if you don’t remember what product the ad is advertising) but this is a “click this link” medium, not a “hop on your Schwinn and pedal down to the corner sin store and ask for it by name” medium. And I didn’t click on any embedded links. So I’m not quite sure what they’re advertising. Pornhub or something? Dunno.

The screenshot at the top of this piece I have heavily cropped so you can’t see the bottom of the screen and its graphic depiction of oral sex. As for the top half, is that actress Sydney Sweeney? I wonder if she’s aware she’s used in porn ads?

But the fact that IG in particular is running ads with graphic sexual content when it bans that content among its users is hypocritical to say the least.

One account I know, for a genuinely legit artist and model, has to blur out her nipples in photos she posts. Yet IG users could conceivably see, after they see one of her IG stories, completely explicit sexual activity.

Even after seeing repeated examples of these ads – and yes, I’ve forever broken my algorithm in doing this research – I couldn’t quite believe what I was seeing. But I found a couple of news articles from 2025 that reported about the graphic ads, including a piece from Le Monde. “Thousands of pornographic ads go unmoderated on Facebook and Instagram” is the headline. (I’m not linking because most of the article is behind a paywall, but a cursory search found it.)

I’m very explicitly NOT calling for action or any kind of boycott of Meta social media platforms, especially Instagram and Facebook, that are running these ads. But I think people should know that Meta has two sets of standards: one for its users, who must toe the line over content, and one for its advertisers, who can follow an “anything goes” practice.

What’s the moral of the story? A friend of mine who has in the past placed ads on Instagram for legitimate, mainstream brands notes that the Meta platforms have been painstakingly trivial in their criteria for and criticism of said ads.

So I guess the bar is lower when it comes to the many, many dollars that can be made.