How Mark Zuckerberg's Meta failed children's safety, states argue

In April 2019, David Ginsberg sent his boss, Mark Zuckerberg, to E -E -E -e and advised to study and reduce loneliness on Instagram and Facebook's advice and mandatory suggestions.Kingsberg E -E -e stated that the company "is particularly facing the effects of its products in use/dependent and in the youth area". He asked 24 engineers, researchers and other Zuckerberg staff and said Instagram had a "deficit" of such problems. A week later, the company's CFO Susan Li Ginsberg announced that the project was "unsuitable" due to staff restrictions. Adam Mosseri, the head of Instagram, eventually refused to give funds to the project. "Unfortunately, I will not quickly see us financing from Instagram."

Since the main lawyer in 45 states and Columbia -Servant Administrative Regions Since last year, these E -Mail exchanges have only been evidence and quoted in twelve litigation. Each state has accused Meta that unfairly caught young and children on Instagram and Facebook while deceiving the public's injury. The attorney general is using a common law approach to force the Met to strengthen protections for minors, reminiscent of the government's efforts after Big Tobacco in the 1990s.

A New York Times analysis of state court filings, including about 1,400 pages of company documents and letters submitted as evidence in Tennessee, shows how Zuckerberg and other Meta executives repeatedly promoted the safety of the company's platform and downplayed risks to young people despite their denials. requests from staff to strengthen youth services and recruit more staff. In interviews, the attorneys general of several states suing the Met said Zuckerberg pushed his company to increase user engagement at the expense of children's welfare.

"Many of these decisions landed on Mr. Zuckerberg's desk," New Mexico Attorney General Raul Torres said. "He must be clearly questioned and clearly held accountable for the decisions he makes."The state's lawsuit against Meta reflects growing concerns that teenagers and children on social media may be exposed to sexual solicitation, harassment, bullying, body shaming and algorithmically induced compulsive online use. Last Monday, Vivek H. Murthy, the US surgeon general, called for warning labels to be placed on social networks, saying the platforms pose a public health risk to young people.

His warning could add momentum in Congress to pass the Kids Online Safety Act, a bill that would require social media companies to disable features for minors, such as bombarding them with phone messages that could lead to "addiction-like" behavior. (Critics said the bill could impede minors' access to important information. The News/Media Alliance, a trade group that includes The New York Times, helped news sites and apps that produce news videos win exemptions from the bill.)In May, three men were arrested in New Mexico on charges of child sexual abuse after state investigators posed as children on Instagram and Facebook, Torres said. Torrez, a former child sex crimes prosecutor, said Meta's algorithms allowed adult predators to identify children they would not have found on their own.

Meta disputed the states' claims and has filed motions to dismiss their lawsuits. Meta spokesman Liza Crenshaw said in a statement that the company is obliged to welfare of youth and that many teams and experts have a duty to gain youth experience. She added that Meta had developed more than 50 youth security tools and functions, including limited content that limits age and inappropriate by limiting young people under the age of 16 who have received direct information they have not noticed. "We want to reassure all parents that the work we're doing is in their best interest and helping teens have a safe online experience," Crenshaw said, noting that legal complaints from states "use selective quotes and cherry-pick documents to misrepresent the our work."

But parents who say their children have died as a result of online harm have questioned Met's assurances of safety. Mary Roddy says her 15-year-old son, Riley Basford, 7, was sexually extorted by a stranger on Facebook in 2021, posing as a teenager. After a few hours, Lelia died of suicide.

Rodee has sued the company in March, and he said Meta had never responded to a report on his son's death, which was submitted through the automatic channel on the ground. "It's pretty inevitable," she said. Meta has long been struggling to attract and hold teenagers, the main part of the company's growth strategy, according to internal business documents. According to the Tennessee indictment, teenagers became Zuckerberg's main focus as early as 2016, when the company was still known as Facebook and owned apps like Instagram and WhatsApp. That spring, an annual survey of young people by investment bank Piper Jaffray found that the popularity of the disappearing messaging app Snapchat had surpassed Instagram. Later that year, Instagram launched a similar, soon-to-be-defunct photo and video sharing feature called Instagram Stories. According to the Tennessee complaint, Zuckerberg told executives to focus on getting teenagers to spend more time on the company's platforms. "The overall goal of the company is to have teenagers spend their time being teenagers," an employee wrote in a November 2016 email to an executive, according to internal communications that were evidence in the Tennessee case. Participating teams should increase the number of employees dedicated to teen programming by at least 50 percent, the email added, noting that Meta already has more than a dozen researchers analyzing the teen market. "Mark decided that the company's top priority for 2017 was teenagers."

In April 2017, Instagram CEO Kevin Systrom emailed Zuckerberg asking for additional staff to mitigate harm to users, according to the New Mexico complaint. He said he would include Instagram in his plan to hire more staff, but said Facebook faced "more extreme problems." At the time, lawmakers criticized the company for failing to stop disinformation during the 2016 US presidential campaign.

Systrom asked colleagues for examples that illustrate the urgent need for more safeguards. He soon emailed Zuckerberg again, saying Instagram users were posting videos involving "imminent danger," including a boy who shot himself on Instagram Live, the complaint said.

Two months later, the company announced that the Instagram Stories feature had reached 250 million daily users, which is no longer Snapchat. Systrom, who left the company in 2018, did not respond to a request for comment.

Meta said the Instagram team developed and rolled out safety measures and experiences for younger users. The company did not respond to questions about whether Zuckerberg provided additional staff.