Meta blocked the search terms and left the videos up: nine takedowns from a list of 20-plus

Adam Mosseri said in mid-July that Instagram would remove "harassing" pickup videos filmed on Meta glasses under the platform's existing bullying and harassment rules ^{[1] [2]}. A month later, Business Insider's Katie Notopoulos sent Meta a list of more than 20 such videos still live, and the company took down nine ^{[3] [4]}.

That ratio is the article. Fewer than half the items on a hand-delivered list from a reporter were actioned ^[12]. The most instructive removal, per Business Insider, involved a creator who had used the same line on several different women across several videos: Meta deleted the one on the list and left the others up ^[11]. That is not a policy being applied. That is a queue being cleared.

Meta is doing things. A spokesperson, Tracy Clayton, said thousands of pieces of content have been removed and several large accounts taken down ^[5]. Instagram now blocks searches for "rizz" and "cold approach", the slang terms for the genre ^[6]. Gizmodo, citing the same Business Insider reporting, noted that two popular accounts promoting pickup-artist content were removed last month ^[7]. But one large account deactivated in the first wave reappeared a few days later; Meta called that an error and re-banned it after Business Insider pointed it out ^[13]. A second account, with 174,000 followers, was deactivated the morning after it appeared on the reporter's list, appealed, and was back a day later with its videos restored ^[14]. Enforcement that depends on a journalist maintaining a spreadsheet is not enforcement.

Other platforms received the same material and did roughly the same thing. TikTok took down two of the four videos it was sent, citing bullying and sexual harassment ^[8]. YouTube removed several videos and pulled one channel from its monetisation programme ^[9].

The part that should worry anyone who ships a ranking model: Notopoulos reports that once she sought out and interacted with these videos, Reels began serving her more of them until her feed was almost entirely the genre ^[15]. Search terms stopped being necessary. Meta blocked the words and its own recommender restored the supply ^[16]. Moderation removes items; recommendation decides how many people see the ones that survive ^[17]. Blocking a query defeats deliberate hunting and does nothing to a model optimised for whatever holds attention ^[18].

Carolina Are, a digital criminologist at the London School of Economics, told Business Insider that Meta frames this as user behaviour or an enforcement error and does not acknowledge the systemic causes ^[19]. Four University of Sydney researchers, Joanne Gray, Milica Stilinovic, Marcus Carter and Ben Egliston, watched hundreds of the videos and published a preprint, "Harm Through the '#RizzCam': Smart Glasses, Ambient Capture and Invisible Harassment", reported by 404 Media on 12 August; it has not been peer reviewed ^{[20] [21]}.

The commercial context explains why Mosseri delivered the message personally while his counterparts did not. Meta sells the camera and runs the feed ^[10]. Glasses sales topped 7 million units in 2025, more than triple the prior year, with Counterpoint Research putting Meta clearly ahead in smart glasses ^[22]. That makes them a rare bright spot in a Reality Labs division still losing money and cutting jobs this year ^[23], and Mark Zuckerberg has argued that people without AI glasses will be at a cognitive disadvantage ^[24]. A $2 sticker already defeated the recording light ^[25].

Watch whether Meta ever says anything about ranking rather than removal, whether reinstated accounts stay reinstated, and whether the peer-reviewed version of the Sydney paper quantifies distribution rather than volume.