London: A flood of sexual images is inundating Instagram as users create pornography channels to share a deluge of explicit material.
The site's small team has been overwhelmed by the images under pornography hahstags - a term that collects lewd images in one search - that give users of the site easy access to photos featuring genetalia, women posing provocatively in bed, with their partners or masturbating on camera.
The new craze - dubbed ‘instaporn’ - has spawned tens of thousands of raunchy pictures which can be easily accessed by anyone using the site, according to the Huffington Post.
Users searching for the seedy images with terms such as 'sextagram' will also be led to sex chat services and complete strangers looking for sex online.
And while explicit images are banned by Instagram’s terms of service - which prohibit nude, partially nude or sexually suggestive photos - the team of just 15 full-time employees moderating the site are seemingly unable to police the five million photos uploaded every day.
Terri Senft, a professor specialising in global media at New York University’s Department of Liberal Studies, said: ‘Instagram has moved from a niche thing to something people have heard about, and that means it has a critical mass.
‘Whenever you have a critical mass on the internet, the sex shows up.'
Search terms such as 'instaporn', 'handbra' or 'sextragram' each bring up tens of thousands of sexual images.
The development will concern parents as children as young as 13 are allowed to open an account and there are few safeguards to prevent them seeing such images.
The range of filters, including vintage, sepia and black and white, were originally intended for innocent photos and users flocked to the site to exhibit portraits, pretty sunsets and culinary creations.
Tags such as #instasex and #instaboobs have more than 200,000 photos. Other more graphic tags also have tens of thousands of uploaded images.
And the explicit material is now overtaking ordinary but popular searchers. For example, the are 135,000 photos tagged 'latte', but 201,000 tagged 'instasex'.
There are also thousands of comments on the pornographic images from fellow users urging one another to add more and more raunchy photos or inviting them on to other social networking sites to message privately.
Members are luring strangers for sex by asking them to join in 'Kiksex' on the messaging app Kik, where users exchange rude photos. One user, for example, wrote: ' woke up horny as hell!!!!! Girls who wanna play post a comment and I'll kik you'.
Such was the success of the site that Facebook agreed to pay $1 billion for it and celebrities such as Kim Kardashian used it to swell their fanbases.
Michael Sheehan, author of the HighTechDad blog, recounted how a friend of his elementary school-aged daughter was contacted by an Instagram user who asked her to chat via a different social networking site.
Once they were chatting, the individual 'asked to see this child’s privates' Sheehan wrote.
Visitors can report abusive photos as well as flag up inappropriate comments.
A spokesperson for Instagram, which describes the app as a 'fast, beautiful and fun way to share your photos with friends and family', told the Huffington Post:
‘We rely heavily on users to flag inappropriate content and we do our best to remove any media that we determine to be inappropriate.’
