Researchers Show How Meta's 'Pervert Glasses' Are Used to Harass Women

Instagram has become a feed of men using Meta’s smart glasses to film themselves harassing women in public. The setup is often the same: a stranger approaches, delivers a pickup line, the woman looks uncomfortable or tells him to go away, and the clip gets posted as content for pickup-artist accounts.

A University of Sydney team — Joanne Gray, Marcus Carter and Ben Egliston — studied 350 Instagram videos posted between September 2023 and March 2026 and published their paper online as a preprint this week. They focused on unsolicited approaches in public or semi-public places, including clips that may have been staged or comedic, because platform footage is often hard to read and still helps normalize the behaviour.

What they found was blunt. The more covert the filming looked, the worse the harassment tended to be. Their paper argues that the glasses’ unobtrusive design helps create first-person videos that hide the act of filming inside the encounter itself, leaving the subject less aware and the abuse harder for platforms to catch.

That matters because the harm does not stop once the man walks off. The researchers say 93.3% of the posts left comments open, giving the women in the videos a digital afterlife of crude, misogynistic replies, including people blaming them for not being polite enough or arguing that calling it harassment is part of falling birth rates.

Meta has already promised to remove harassing content after Adam Mosseri said last month that the platform would take down “pickup line kind of videos” that exploit people. But 404 Media says it still found page after page of Reels like this almost a month later, plus more clips of smart-glasses users bothering retail workers and shoppers. The company’s little recording light was never much of a plan; now the internet has the receipts.