(SAN FRANCISCO) — Facebook parent Meta Platforms deliberately engineered its social platforms to hook kids and knew — but never disclosed — it had received millions of complaints about underage users on Instagram but only disabled a fraction of those accounts, according to a newly unsealed legal complaint described in reports from The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times.
The complaint, originally made public in redacted form, was the opening salvo in a lawsuit filed in late October by the attorneys general of 33 states.
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Documents mentioned in the complaint stated that several Meta executives admitted that the company intentionally created its products to take advantage of weaknesses in the psychology of young people, like impulsive actions, vulnerability to peer influence, and underestimating risks, as per the reports.
Others acknowledged Facebook and Instagram also were popular with children under age 13 who, per company policy, were not allowed to use the service.
Meta, in a statement to The Associated Press, expressed that the complaint inaccurately portrays its efforts over the last ten years to ensure a secure online environment for teenagers. They highlighted having “over 30 tools” designed to assist teens and their parents in navigating the platform safely.
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With respect to barring younger users from the service, Meta argued age verification is a “complex industry challenge.”
Instead, Meta mentioned that it prefers transferring the responsibility of monitoring young users to app stores and parents. This involves endorsing national laws that would make it mandatory for app stores to get parental consent whenever individuals under 16 years old download apps.
One Facebook safety executive alluded to the possibility that cracking down on younger users might hurt the company’s business in a 2019 email, according to the Journal report.
But a year later, the same leader shared their disappointment that even though Facebook eagerly examined how young users engaged with the platform for business purposes, they didn’t demonstrate a similar eagerness to find ways to spot younger children and take them off their platforms, as per the Journal’s report.
The report mentioned that sometimes Meta has a queue of up to 2.5 million accounts of younger kids waiting for attention, as per the news articles.
