Whenever a celebrity posts on Instagram, it’s increasingly common to see the first comments filled with explicit spam—often posted by porn bots. These automated or semi-automated accounts are designed to exploit visibility, generate clicks, and promote adult content while skirting platform regulations. In this article, we investigate the performance and adaptability of a small porn bot network within Instagram, focusing particularly on how these bots operate under the platform’s evolving content moderation policies.
Rather than simply labeling such bots as fake or harmful, we explore how they blend programmed sexuality with the aesthetics of social media authenticity. We refer to this hybrid digital performance as part of Instagram’s evolving “Instagrammatics”—a term used to describe the unique social, technical, and communicative affordances of the platform.
Methodology: Tracking Bots in Action
Our analysis draws on a manually curated dataset of 30 porn bot accounts active in the comments of five Instagram posts by @justinbieber from June 2022. For each account, we collected metadata including:
- Profile names and images
- Comments and the number of ‘likers’
- Followers, followings, and content
- Profile bios and embedded external links
We used Phantombuster’s Instagram modules to extract this information and examine how bots maneuver within Instagram’s technical boundaries. We focused on how bots amplify their visibility using automated likes and how they imitate the patterns of real users to remain undetected.
The Performance of Gender, Sexuality, and Authenticity
Porn bots on Instagram don’t simply spam explicit content; they perform gender and sexuality within tightly regulated boundaries. These bots often present themselves using hyper-feminized imagery and bios like “24/7 horny & training,” tailored to mimic the sexualized norms already accepted on the platform—such as those often portrayed by influencers.
Their performance is paradoxical: to gain attention, bots must appear “authentic” enough to pass as real users, yet avoid being too visible, which would risk detection or deletion. This tightrope walk between visibility and invisibility reveals a deeper tension in Instagram’s governance: while it cracks down on nudity and automation, it still sustains a hyper-sexualized, heteronormative aesthetic culture.
Instagram’s Normative Order and the Problem of “Good Enough Publics”
Bots thrive by exploiting Instagram’s structural contradictions. Despite Meta’s official guidelines restricting explicit sexual content and spam, bots still manage to imitate platform-sanctioned norms of desirability. As a result, while bots often go undetected, human users—particularly women, queer creators, and educators—face disproportionate content removals or shadow banning.
This dynamic reflects Instagram’s conservative approach to sexuality: sexuality is acceptable as long as it aligns with a sanitized, mainstream visual code. Bots have learned this language and adapted to it. Meanwhile, content from real users who don’t conform to these norms is often marginalized.
From Real vs. Fake to Relational Authenticity
We propose moving beyond binary labels like real vs. fake, and instead examine porn bots through a relational lens. Bots use Instagram’s own mechanisms—likes, comments, hashtags, follow-unfollow patterns—as tools for selective amplification. These methods are no longer exclusive to bots; they mirror the strategies employed by influencers, spammers, and marketers alike.
Instagram’s metrics-driven architecture thus enables bots to operate within the system, and in doing so, they mirror and reinforce the very norms the platform attempts to regulate.
Conclusion: Social Automation and Platform Power
The story of porn bots on Instagram isn’t just about spam—it’s a window into how platforms define, moderate, and monetize sexuality. Bots act as automated reflections of the values Instagram promotes: visibility, desirability, and controlled sexual expression. Their survival within a tightly governed ecosystem demonstrates both the resilience of automation and the limitations of platform governance.
By analyzing these porn bots as part of a broader system of social automation, we uncover how bots not only exploit Instagram but also help define its culture—raising pressing questions about authenticity, identity, and control in the age of platform capitalism.
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