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Hundreds of Instagram accounts push graphic real-life violence to millions

Matthew Stevens didn’t want to watch anyone die.

Late one night in February, the 19-year-old was in bed, scrolling on Instagram. Amid his feed’s usual mix of memes and movie clips, the app recommended a video of two men fighting – a brutal, graphic brawl that left him shaken.

He quickly scrolled past the post, but the Instagram algorithm kept showing him more.

“Every time you scrolled, it just kept going further and further with more graphic and violent fights,” Stevens said. Online, users worldwide reported the same experience: On Feb. 26, their feeds were suddenly filled with video after video showing real human suffering and death.

Instagram’s parent company, Meta, apologized after the incident, which affected Instagram Reels, the company’s short-form video feature similar to TikTok. A spokesperson said they’d “fixed an error that caused some users to see content in their Instagram Reels feed that should not have been recommended.”

But Feb. 26 was the tip of the iceberg. Violent and shocking content often referred to as “gore” remains easily accessible on Instagram today, a CBS News investigation found.

Instagram Reels hosts a thriving gray‑market economy driven by graphic violence, people who post violent content on Instagram told CBS News. Banned advertisers — gambling sites, crypto apps, porn agencies — evade Meta’s ad rules by paying graphic-content pages to embed illicit promotions among the gore.

Between February and April 2025, CBS News identified more than 600 Instagram accounts that post real-world violence packaged into short-form meme videos. The accounts post horrific videos that are viewed by millions of users –  some of whom told CBS News they didn’t want to see them.

Even elementary school students were exposed to violence on Instagram, said Nate Webb, a school counselor in Tooele, Utah. On Feb. 26, he said some fourth graders were joking around about the content they were seeing.

“It was shocking to me that such graphic content disturbs me, and I’m a full-grown adult, that didn’t really faze some of those kids,” he said. “It made me wonder, how much more are you seeing and how much more often are you seeing it?”

The violent imagery can “saturate” a person, overwhelming the brain and even leading to PTSD-like symptoms, said Laura Van Dernoot Lipsky, an expert on trauma who founded the Trauma Stewardship Institute.

“There are no words to describe how profound and damaging and powerful that impact is, even if we’re just bringing it down to neuroscience and a brain perspective,” she said.

It can be especially troubling if someone is shown gore content involuntarily, according to Joanne Lloyd, a researcher at the University of Wolverhampton in England.

“The people that seem to be most distressed by it were the people who had not gone looking for it,” Lloyd said.

CBS News interviewed Instagram users around the world and reviewed dozens of social media posts complaining about graphic content on the platform. Each said the Instagram algorithm showed them horrific violence they didn’t want to see — both before and after the incident in February.

Meta declined to make anyone available for interview for this story, but said in a statement that it invests heavily in safety and security, with 40,000 staff and more than $30 billion dedicated to those issues over the last decade. The company said it restricts the monetization of violent content and adds warning labels, aiming to shield teens and those who don’t want to see graphic posts – while acknowledging that not all disturbing material meets their threshold for removal.

In addition, Meta said it expanded teen protections in an October policy update, nowautomatically hiding more graphic content such as dead bodies, medical injuries, and dyinganimals. Teens will also be blocked from following or interacting with accounts that share age-inappropriate material, including those linked to adult platforms such as OnlyFans.

Judge in Don Lemon indictment asks to see grand jury records, adding to growing scrutiny of Justice Department cases

By CNN
(CNN) — A federal judge in Minnesota will probe this week whether grounds exist to toss the Justice Department’s case against journalist Don Lemon. It’s the latest example of judges’ growing skepticism of whether the department is behaving ethically behind closed doors in grand jury proceedings.Judges across the country have signaled they are willing to give far less deference to federal prosecutors than in previous administrations and have raised concerns about DOJ’s apparent abandonment of regular practices.Federal judges in Wyoming, Illinois and Virginia have either thrown out charges or seriously admonished federal prosecutors for missteps in front of the grand jury. The botched grand jury presentments have prompted a historical review of cases in Chicago and, in some courts, new rules requiring defendants to be notified when a grand jury declines to indict.On August 18, Minnesota federal Judge Laura Provinzino issued a short but extraordinary order demanding the Justice Department provide her a wide swath of grand jury materials related to Lemon and his co-defendants, including presentations made by prosecutors and case agents, and the totality of communications prosecutors had with grand jurors resulting in their indictments.Provinzino set a Tuesday deadline to provide her with the presentation by federal prosecutors and case agents related to grand juries empaneled in January and February. Further, Provinzino told DOJ to provide any introduction, legal instructions, witness testimony, closing arguments, and answers to questions from grand jurors.Lemon’s team has aggressively pursued obtaining grand jury materials and had asked for either grand jury records to be provided to the defense or, at a minimum, reviewed by the judge privately, citing “irregularities” in the grand jury that resulted in his indictment.“There is substantial evidence of grand-jury irregularities in this case,” Lemon’s team wrote in a recent filing.“Multiple judges, including at the Eighth Circuit, found there was no probable cause to charge Lemon” and his co-defendant Georgia Fort, the filing said.Mark Wolf, a former Massachusetts District Court judge and federal prosecutor, said it is rare for defense attorneys to ask for grand jury transcripts in federal court. It is even more rare that judges grant the motions, he said.“There is a high bar to getting grand jury materials,” Wolf said. “You have to have some direct or circumstantial evidence that there has been some defect in the grand jury proceeding.”In her two-page order, Provinzino wrote that she weighed the necessity of maintaining grand jury secrecy against whether grounds may exist to dismiss the case due to a “matter that occurred before the grand jury.”She did not say she had already found evidence of any misconduct.The Justice Department’s initial attempt to charge Lemon in January for appearing alongside protestors who disrupted a church service in St. Paul, Minnesota, was rejected by a federal magistrate judge, which “enraged” then Attorney General Pam Bondi, according to a source who spoke to CNN at the time.Lemon, a former CNN anchor, was later indicted by a grand jury along with several other defendants, including independent journalist Georgia Fort. Lemon has been charged with conspiring to violate someone’s constitutional rights and violating the FACE Act, which prohibits the use of force or threats to intentionally interfere with someone expressing their First Amendment right to practice religion.Lemon has pleaded not guilty to both charges. His team has aggressively pursued obtaining grand jury materials throughout the case, and earlier this month filed a motion to dismiss the case altogether.Justice Department losing credibilityWolf told CNN he does not believe the Justice Department’s credibility remains intact.“For good reasons, the Department of Justice’s reputation with judges generally has been injured,” Wolf said.In Chicago, defense attorneys urged Judge April Perry to release grand jury transcripts in the highly publicized case against protestors at an ICE detention facility outside the city.After reviewing those transcripts, Perry found federal prosecutors engaged in inappropriate actions, such as interacting with grand jurors outside the proceeding, ordering some jurors to leave in another hearing, and “vouching” to the grand jurors.Vouching is a practice where prosecutors present their own reputation while delivering their case to a grand jury. It is forbidden in grand jury proceedings because the practice effectively asks jurors to trust the prosecutor personally rather than only on the merits of evidence.“I have never seen the types of prosecutorial behavior before a grand jury that I saw in those transcripts,” Judge Perry said during a May 21 hearing.US Attorney Andrew Boutros then dropped the case against the protestors. Later, after reviewing the prosecutor’s conduct, Boutros opted to drop at least two more criminal cases, ordered a historical review of more than 100 grand jury transcripts, and launched reforms such as more training on grand jury presentations.“If I was a federal public defender or a private defense attorney, every case I get that’s indicted, I’m going to file a motion that is asking the judge to review the transcripts,” said Mike Fox, a current Cato Institute fellow and former Colorado public defender.“In my view, at this point, it doesn’t matter in which court it is, doesn’t matter if I have binding case law,” Fox said. “Every single case, the defense attorney should be filing, and the judge should be inquiring.”In May, a panel of three federal judges in Wyoming dismissed felony drug and gun indictments against nine defendants after the judges found the acting Wyoming US Attorney referred to defendants as “bad guys,” and “murderers,” and handed out business cards to jurors outside of the proceeding.Prosecutors opted not to appeal the judges’ order. Later, Wyoming federal prosecutors empaneled a new grand jury which issued a new indictment. The case remains ongoing.Fox believes the remedy is a more engaged judiciary where judges routinely witness grand jury proceedings.The current law doesn’t require judges to listen to proceedings, but some courts are issuing new local rules to ensure greater oversight. This spring, the Northern District of Illinois, where Boutros is US Attorney, enacted a rule requiring grand juries to alert a magistrate judge when a grand jury fails to issue an indictment.A spokesperson for the Justice Department told CNN in an email the executive office of the US Attorney provides training for prosecutors which includes grand jury practice.“On rare occasions where there is an issue, as noted in our Chicago US Attorney’s office, we took immediate corrective action and provided renewed, in-depth instruction on ethics and grand jury practice,” the spokesperson wrote.“Our US Attorneys will always follow the law and prosecute cases without fear or favor. Nobody is above the law, regardless of political affiliation. Beyond that, we don’t comment on pending litigation.”Grand jury presentments in the spotlight last yearLast fall, in the most high-profile and politically charged example of a problematic grand jury presentment, then-interim US Attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia, Lindsey Halligan, took a proposed indictment against former FBI Director James Comey through a grand jury on her own. A magistrate judge in Alexandria, Virginia, reviewed the transcript and found Halligan may have incorrectly presented the law to the grand jury. The judge called the debacle “profound investigative missteps … to potentially undermine the integrity of the grand jury proceeding.”Halligan later admitted to a judge the grand jury hadn’t supported the initial version of the proposed indictment of Comey, and the full grand jury hadn’t signed off on the final charging document. That Comey case was dismissed for a separate reason, when a federal district judge determined Halligan wasn’t serving as a legitimate prosecutor. The Justice Department is appealing.But the grand jury handling in the Comey case and other cases continues to hover over prosecutors.Comey’s defense team, for instance, is attempting to pry into grand jury records in the separate, newer case against him, out of Eastern North Carolina. He is charged there with threatening the president by posting on social media a photo of the numbers “8647” written in seashells on a beach.The phrase 86 is sometimes used to say nix or get rid of something. Trump is the 47th president. Comey has denied wrongdoing in the case.“The highly irregular procedures that led to the indictment create a significant risk that the government misrepresented key issues of fact and law to the grand jury,” Comey’s lawyers wrote in a recent court filing, citing federal searches of Comey that they question.If Comey’s defense cannot gain access to the grand jury transcript, they at least want a judge to look at it to check the Justice Department’s work.Wolf said he is deeply troubled by the Justice Department’s recent actions and told CNN he believes it shows the American people that the department will use the law for partisan purposes.“It sends a message that a Department of Justice that should institutionalize our ideal of equal justice under law is not doing that,” Wolf said. “And that means anybody is vulnerable.”The-CNN-Wire™ & © 2026 Cable News Network, Inc., a Warner Bros. Discovery Company. All rights reserved.
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