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In 2019, Meta agreed to pay a record $5 billion and alter its data practices to settle charges from the Federal Trade Commission of deceiving users about their ability to control their privacy.Įarlier this year, a former Meta employee testified before a US Senate subcommittee, alleging that the company was aware of the harassment and other harms teens faced on its platforms but failed to address them. The company claimed it doesn’t design products to be addictive to younger users. Meta said in a statement that the complaint misrepresents its work over the past decade to make the online experience safe for teens. In a case from 2019, employee emails showed that the company had not deleted four accounts belonging to a 12-year-old, despite requests and “complaints from the girl’s mother stating her daughter was 12” according to the complaint, as Meta representatives “couldn’t tell for sure the user was underage”.Ĭompany documents cited in the complaint described several Meta officials acknowledging that the company designed its products to exploit youthful traits such as impulsive behaviour, susceptibility to peer pressure and the underestimation of risks, according to the reports. Meta also knew about accounts belonging to specific underage Instagram users through company reporting channels but it “automatically” ignored them, as long as the accounts did not contain a user biography or photos. For example, an internal communication showed charts of the percentage of 11- and 12-year-olds who used Instagram daily. The company tracked many indicators of underage users, according to the filing. This is after Meta executives publicly said in congressional testimony that the company’s age-checking processes were effective and were used to remove underage accounts, the complaint adds.

The filing adds that Meta “continually failed” to set up systems that could detect the age of users, and moreover, it came up with approaches to enable children to set up Instagram accounts because it viewed children as a crucial demographic-the next generation of users-that the company needed to capture to assure continued growth. Meta ‘coveted and pursued’ underage usersĬiting newly unearthed employee chats and company presentations, the complaint alleges that not only did the company know of cases of underage users, it “coveted and pursued” them.

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