Meta
An unsealed legal complaint alleges that parent company Instagram and Facebook also knowingly allowed underage users to maintain accounts
Monday, November 27, 2023, 7:18 p.m. GMT
Meta, the parent company of Instagram and Facebook, deliberately designed its platforms to addict children and knowingly allowed underage users to maintain accounts, according to a recently unsealed legal complaint.
The complaint is a key part of a lawsuit that the attorneys general of 33 states filed against Meta in late October and was originally redacted. It alleges the social media company knew, but never disclosed, that it received millions of complaints about underage users on Instagram but only deactivated a fraction of those accounts. The high number of underage users is an “open secret” at the company, according to the lawsuit, citing internal company documents.
In one example, the lawsuit cites an internal email thread in which employees discuss why a 12-year-old girl’s four accounts were not deleted after the girl’s mother complained that her daughter was 12 and demanded that the accounts be deleted. Employees concluded that “the accounts were ignored,” in part because Meta representatives “could not say with certainty that the user was a minor.”
The complaint says that Meta received over 402,000 reports from users under 13 on Instagram in 2021, but that 164,000 – well less than half of the reported accounts – were “deactivated due to the potential age limit of 13” this year. had been. The complaint noted that Meta at times has a backlog of up to 2.5 million accounts from younger children awaiting action.
The complaint alleges that this and other incidents violate the Children’s Online Privacy and Protection Act, which requires social media companies to provide notice and obtain parental consent before collecting data from children.
The lawsuit also focuses on long-standing allegations that Meta knowingly developed products that were addictive and harmful to children. This claim was highlighted by whistleblower Frances Haugen, who revealed that internal studies showed that platforms like Instagram were driving children to anorexia-related content. Haugen also stated that the company specifically targets children under 18 years old.
Company documents cited in the complaint described several Meta officials as acknowledging that the company developed its products to exploit flaws in youth psychology, including a May 2020 internal presentation titled “Teenage Basics,” in which certain weak points of the young brain were highlighted that could be exploited in product development.
The presentation discussed the relative immaturity of the teenage brain and the tendency of teenagers to be guided by “emotions, the intrigue of novelty and reward,” and asked how these traits might “manifest.” . . when using the product”.
Meta said in a statement that the complaint misrepresents its work over the past decade to make the online experience safe for teens, noting that there are “over 30 tools to support them and their parents.”
Regarding the exclusion of younger users from the service, Meta argued that age verification is a “complex challenge for the industry.”
Instead, Meta said it advocates shifting the burden of monitoring underage usage to app stores and parents like Google and Apple, particularly by supporting federal laws that would require app stores to obtain parental consent when young people under 16 download apps.
A Facebook security manager raised the possibility that a crackdown on younger users could hurt the company’s business in a 2019 email.
But a year later, the same executive expressed disappointment that while Facebook was willing to investigate the use of underage users for business purposes, it had not shown the same enthusiasm for ways to identify younger children and remove them from its platforms.
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