Meta Removed Nine Harassment Videos After Being Sent 20. Dozens More Are Still Up.

Since Adam Mosseri's mid-July pledge to remove "harassing" pickup-line videos filmed with Meta's Ray-Ban smart glasses, the follow-through has been thin.

Business Insider sent Meta a list of more than 20 pickup and prank videos from verified and popular accounts in early August. The company removed nine. One creator, who runs the account @thatiscolin and describes himself as a "lifestyle and comedy creator," had used the identical "secret code" pickup line on multiple different women in separate videos. Only one of those got taken down. The rest are still on Instagram.

Meta spokesperson Tracy Clayton told Business Insider the company has removed thousands of pieces of content and banned several large accounts under its existing Community Standards on bullying and harassment. Search terms like "rizz" and "cold approach" are now blocked. Two large pickup-artist accounts were deactivated in the initial wave, though one was mistakenly reactivated days later and had to be re-banned after Business Insider flagged it.

Separate reporting from Futurism, republished by Yahoo Tech, cited an investigation by Oligarch Watch that found hundreds of harassment videos still live on Instagram after Meta's announced crackdown. Some of the specific examples are ugly. One account, _mypointofvue, posted a video of a man approaching a girl who says on camera she's 17, then complaining he "can't do nothing with you, baby" before pivoting to an ad for a crypto casino. Another user, posting as "Justin," filmed himself zooming in on a woman's body at a coffee shop while repeatedly asking for her number. A pickup artist with more than 500,000 followers, "dkdanny," has built a following on videos where he insults women's weight on camera. Oligarch Watch reported some of the flagged accounts came down only after its story published.

Fortune's coverage puts the moderation problem in the context of Meta's broader push into the space. After launching four AI glasses models in 2025, Meta and EssilorLuxottica expanded the lineup again in June 2026 with three new frames across 26 styles starting at $299. Shipments of camera-equipped smart glasses without displays jumped 167% year-over-year in the first quarter of 2026 to roughly 2.25 million units, according to Fortune, with Meta holding 69.2% of that market. More devices in the wild means more of this content, not less.

Meta's defense, repeated across outlets, is that privacy protections are built into the hardware. The company points to a white LED recording light that activates whenever the camera is capturing photo or video and cannot be disabled. A July 7 Meta blog post reiterated that footage stays private unless a user chooses to share it, and that the company has updated its glasses policies accordingly.

The light does mean a bystander has some visible signal they're being recorded, which is more than many hidden-camera products offer. Meta's argument that the underlying problem is user behavior, not hardware, has some merit. A recording light doesn't stop someone from choosing to point a camera at a stranger and posting the result for views. That's a human decision, not a hardware failure.

But Carolina Are, a digital criminologist at the London School of Economics, told Business Insider that Meta's response minimizes its own role by framing this purely as user-generated behavior it can't fully control. The company built and marketed a product optimized for exactly this kind of covert, hands-free recording, then is relying in part on journalists sending it lists of offending videos to enforce its own stated policy.

Meta has not said how many accounts it has permanently banned in total, how many videos remain flagged but unreviewed, or whether it plans automated detection for this content category rather than manual review triggered by press inquiries. The company did not respond to Business Insider's questions about how enforcement of the new policy actually works day to day.

The gap between Mosseri's July promise and the current state of Instagram's search and Reels feed is measurable and public. Dozens of pickup-artist accounts using the "Meta glasses" tag remain active, some racking up millions of views, a month after the company said it would remove them.