When people search for “Adam Driver MegalopolisOn Instagram or Facebook, instead of posting about Francis Ford Coppola's latest film, they are currently seeing a warning with the heading “Child sexual abuse is illegal.”
This bizarre fact was pointed out in a post on X yesterday, and to this day I still see it when I search for the phrase. But why? Well, it seems unrelated to the recent thread moderation errors. There are no bombastic revelations about it either Megalopolis or its main star I know.
Instead, Facebook and Instagram seem to block searches that contain “mega” and “drive” – I saw it when I searched with those two words together, but not when I searched for “Megalopolis,” “Adam Driver,” or any of them I was looking for a combination of both terms with all the others. The problem isn't new either, as this nine-month-old Reddit post about searching for “Sega Mega Drive” on Facebook shows. (This search now appears to be working as expected.)
It's not clear why the words are blocked and Meta didn't respond immediately when we asked. Facebook and Instagram have blocked other seemingly innocuous terms like “chicken soup” because distributors of child abuse material use them as part of their coded language to avoid detection on the platforms.