Meta glasses harassment videos still on Instagram after ban

A month after Adam Mosseri, the head of Instagram, said the platform would take down harassment videos filmed with Meta's Ray-Ban smart glasses, a Business Insider reporter kept finding them. That is the framing of Business Insider's follow-up, and it is a more useful data point than the original policy announcement, because it shows what the ban is actually worth in production.

The policy itself is clear enough. Mosseri said that "if you're posting content that is taking advantage of people and harassing them, like a lot of these pickup line kinds of videos that we've heard of and seen, then we're going to take the content down." Two pickup-artist accounts with more than a million followers each have already been deactivated, thousands of posts have been pulled, and Instagram now restricts searches for terms like "rizz" and "cold approach." That is not nothing.

The enforcement gap is the story. Business Insider flagged more than 20 potentially problematic videos to Meta, and only nine were removed. According to the reporting, dozens of pickup and prank clips are still available on Instagram weeks after Mosseri's comments, some from popular or verified creators, several showing women being approached and recorded in public through the glasses. Two experts in our Who's Who directory have shared the piece, and Digital Trends made the same observation in its own scan.

Meta has not said how the policy is being enforced, what precisely counts as a violation beyond the pickup-video archetype, or whether takedowns depend on user reports, automated systems, or something in between. The hardware side is not straightforward either: the Ray-Ban Meta glasses use a small LED to signal recording, but it is easy to miss in daylight, and older units could reportedly be defeated with tape or a drilled hole before Meta shipped a fix that disables the camera when the indicator is blocked.

The takeaway is not that Meta was insincere. It is that a policy line drawn around a wearable-camera device is only as good as the moderation pipeline behind it, and Meta has not yet shown that pipeline exists. As Meta and its rivals put more camera-equipped glasses on more faces, whoever builds enforcement that scales with the hardware, rather than trailing behind it, wins the trust argument.