Content warning: This post discusses animal abuse imagery that appears on seemingly innocuous Facebook groups.
Here is how I found hardcore porn, pirated content, malware, and endless scams on Facebook: I typed “Katy Perry” into the search bar and joined the first group Facebook recommended to me. I then started clicking around the group.
On the “Katy Perry fan page,” an endless stream of users and bots, some of whom operate other nominally “Katy Perry” themed pages, post links to other groups, pages, and events. Some of these posts have random photos of Katy Perry. Some are deepfakes of her. Others are just rolls of cash, bogus giveaways, or thumbnails of hardcore porn. Porn, pirated content, scams, etc. are hidden in every feature Facebook has.
On this page, a Facebook user called Ahmed Husain Ansari created an “Event” called 118h1z8iwzbi,” which looks like it has nothing on it. But in the “Discussion” section of this page they posted a link to a Facebook Group called “Baby Girl” that has 46,000 members and exclusively posts hardcore porn. The direct link hosted in the Discussion section of this random event was then posted to the Katy Perry fan page, which has the effect of showing the hardcore porn on this page that is nominally for Katy Perry fans. The “Baby Girl” group is full of thumbnails for hardcore porn, which is posted to the group by a series of random bots and users. These then link off platform to a series of seemingly random and different URLs (“Regendesign.co.uk,” “carsonvalleycommunities.com,” “drugwarsurvivors.com,” etc.) All of these then redirect to to a site called “Crazyvideotodownload.com” and eventually to the camming site StripChat.