Shocking details about Meta’s approach to child safety are documented in a lawsuit filed by the New Mexico Attorney General. The company owns Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp.
New Mexico Attorney General Raúl Torrez sued Meta in December. He alleged that the company failed to protect young users from exposure to child sexually exploitative materials allowed adults to have contact with minors that led to their abuseThe prosecutor’s office published the content of the lawsuit on Sunday evening. The documents highlight the company’s “historical reluctance” to ensure the safety of children on its platforms.
Meta knew about child abuse
As we read, “Over the years, Facebook has been used to exploit children in various ways, including grooming or recruiting children to participate in sexually abusive practices.” The prosecutor’s office emphasizes that Meta was aware of the vast amount of inappropriate content being shared between adults and minors they did not know. In an internal presentation from 2021, cited by the prosecutor’s office, it was estimated that 100 thousand children receive online sexual harassment every day. This includes, for example, photos of adult genitalia;
The documents relied on by the prosecutor’s office prove that Meta managers (at that time the company was still operating under the name Facebook) they are perfectly aware of the problem. What’s more – she, in a sense, created it, using an algorithm that recommends friends. It’s about the “People You May Know” (PYMK) function. “In the past, PYMK contributed to up to 75% of all inappropriate adult-minor contact,” one employee wrote in an internal conversation. Another replied: “How come we didn’t just turn off PYMK between adults and children?”
In correspondence from 2020, one of the people quoted by the prosecutor general writes: “what exactly are we doing to prevent child grooming (I just heard that there is a lot going on on TikTok on this topic)”? The answer quoted in the lawsuit is shocking: “Somewhere between zero and almost nothing. “Child safety is clearly not the focus of this semester.” So what was the priority? The documents contain opinions of Facebook employees, which show that the number of active users (Daily Active Users) is increasing.
One internal document shows that Meta only started dealing with the problem of adults picking on children when it meant serious problems for it. In 2020, the victim was an employee’s child, “they threaten to remove us from the App Store,” one of the employees writes in an internal email.
Illusory age verification on Facebook
The documents cited in the lawsuit also reveal that the employees are fully aware that they are responsible for harming minors illusory age verification. Children are massively registering on Facebook and Instagram as older than they actually are.
The New Mexico lawsuit is just one of many Meta is facing. As many as nine of them were launched in October. One of them was submitted by a total of 33 states, 8 decided to apply individually. According to prosecutors, Mark Zuckerberg’s company profited from designing its platforms in a way that maximized their use time. For teenage users, this meant harm to their mental health. For the company – increasing advertising revenues. Their sale is the basis of Meta’s business model. Only in the second quarter of 2023, the company recorded another record – advertising profit amounted to USD 31.2 billion. The company’s annual advertising revenues are higher than, for example, Slovakia’s GDP.
