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Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg “ignored” top executives who called for bolder action and more resources to protect it Users, particularly children and teens, even as the company faced increasing scrutiny of its security practices, a recent unredacted legal complaint said.
Nick Clegg, Meta’s president of global affairs, and Instagram boss Adam Mosseri in 2021 urged those around her directly According to an updated 102-page complaint filed this week by Massachusetts Attorney General Andrea Joy Campbell (D), executives including Zuckerberg should dedicate more staff and resources to combat bullying, harassment and suicide prevention.
Campbell is one of 42 state attorneys general who filed lawsuits last month accusing Meta of endangering children by building addictive features into its popular social media platforms Instagram and Facebook.
According to the new court filing Clegg forwarded the resource request to Zuckerberg, calling for “additional investments to strengthen our position” in this area. Zuckerberg “ignored Clegg’s request for months,” the complaint says, even as “Meta’s leadership continued to advocate the need to invest in welfare.” Ultimately, Meta Chief Financial Officer Susan Li rejected the proposal, saying the company’s staffing levels were too “limited,” according to the filing.
In another exchange in October 2021 about Clegg’s welfare plans, Instagram boss Adam Mosseri expressed concern about the company’s approach to protecting users, telling another senior executive that the company had “been talking about this for a long time but made little progress.” The executive, Meta’s vice president of product management Emily Dalton Smith, responded that the company had not received “new welfare funding for 2022” and needed to consider “tradeoffs over other priorities,” the complaint says.
Meta has more than 30 tools and resources “to protect and protect teens from potentially harmful content or unwanted contact,” Meta spokeswoman Liza Crenshaw said in a statement Wednesday.
“The complaint contains selected quotes from hand-picked documents that do not provide the full context of how the company operates or the decisions made,” it added.
While 33 states, including Colorado and California, filed a joint lawsuit in federal court, Massachusetts and other states filed individual lawsuits in local courts, part of a sweeping legal broadside against the tech giant. The flood of complaints represents the largest effort yet by state law enforcement to curb the potential impact of social media on children’s mental health.
As Meta tracked younger users, employees raised security concerns
Campbell’s first complaint last month was heavily redacted, obscuring details about exchanges between executives about Meta’s security investments in 2021. Molly McGlynn, a spokeswoman for the attorney general, said that while her office entered into a confidentiality agreement with Meta while investigating its practices, the company ultimately agreed to remove nearly all redactions in the legal text Complaint.
“We allege that Meta knowingly targeted and exploited young people just so the company could make a profit — and the public can now see exactly how they did it,” Campbell said in a statement to The Washington Post on Wednesday .
The new details in the legal filings offer a rare glimpse into the way executives at Meta discuss — and sometimes argue — how best to protect vulnerable users on their sprawling social media networks while preserving their ability to do so can drive growth and engagement on these platforms. The allegations could bolster arguments from advocates and lawmakers who argue that the company’s executives often ignore internal investigations and warnings from their own employees about the dangerous effects of social media.
Arturo Béjar, a former senior engineering and product executive at Meta, testified before a Senate Judiciary subcommittee on Tuesday that senior executives failed to heed his warnings that Meta needed to take a different approach to address high rates of bullying, harassment or Dealing with unwanted sexual advances from teenagers.
In his email to Zuckerberg in 2021, Clegg said they “need to do more” to protect the well-being of users. Meta’s efforts in this area have been understaffed and fragmented,” Clegg wrote.
The lawsuit also alleges Zuckerberg has rejected calls from his senior leadership to ban some beauty filters that could harm the mental health of women and young people.
An email from November 2019 states: Margaret Gould Stewart Meta’s vice president of product design called on Meta executives, including Mosseri and former Facebook CEO Fidji Simo, to ban cameras Filters that “mimic plastic surgery” because mental health experts worried about negative impacts on the “mental health and well-being” of “vulnerable users,” the lawsuit says.
The proposal “received unanimously positive support” until Andrew Bosworth, Meta’s chief technology officer, said he had discussed the idea with Zuckerberg, who “may want to evaluate before implementing” because he questioned whether these filters would actually ” “constitute real harm,” the lawsuit says.
Before an April 2020 meeting with Zuckerberg to discuss the removal of the filters, the company distributed a document titled “Effects of Cosmetic Surgery Pre-Read,” which cited 21 experts who “generally agree that “These impacts raise concerns for mental health and wellbeing.”
But the meeting was canceled a day before the scheduled date. Instead, according to the lawsuit, Zuckerberg sent an email vetoing the proposal. Zuckerberg said there was “clear demand” for the filters and that he had seen “no data” that suggested they were harmful, the court filing said.
Stewart expressed her reservations to Zuckerberg.
“I respect and will support your decision in this regard, but I would just like to state on the record that I do not believe this is the right decision given the risks,” Stewart said, according to the lawsuit.
“I just hope that in a few years we look back and feel good about the decision we made here,” she added, according to the lawsuit.
Crenshaw, the Meta spokeswoman, said the company bans filters that directly promote cosmetic surgery, including skin color changes or weight loss.
“We clearly notice when a filter is used, and we are working to proactively review the impact of these rules before they go into effect,” Crenshaw said.
Several of the alleged exchanges took place just weeks after Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen released internal studies showing that the company knew that its image-sharing app Instagram was at times leading to teenage girls dating felt their body image worse. The revelations, first reported by The Wall Street Journal, launched a political battle over the company’s approach to child safety.
“These unredacted documents prove that Mark Zuckerberg has no interest in protecting the privacy or security of others,” said Sacha Haworth, executive director of the Tech Oversight Project, an advocacy group critical of the tech giant and funded by the charity Omidyar Network . “The rot goes all the way to the top.”
Massachusetts is using the evidence to accuse Meta of making misleading statements about the security of its platforms in violation of state law.