Documents underscore Meta's reluctance to protect children on Instagram

SAN FRANCISCO >> Newly unredacted documents from New Mexico's lawsuit against Meta underscore the company's “historical reluctance” to keep children safe on its platforms, the complaint says.

New Mexico's Attorney General Raúl Torrez sued Facebook and Instagram owner Meta in December, saying the company failed to protect young users from exposure to child sexual abuse material and allowed adults to solicit explicit imagery from them.

In the passages freshly unredacted from the lawsuit, internal employee messages and presentations from 2020 and 2021 show Meta was aware of issues such as adult strangers being able to contact children on Instagram, the sexualization of minors on that platform, and the dangers of its “people you may know” feature that recommends connections between adults and children. But Meta dragged its feet when it came to addressing the issues, the passages show.

Instagram, for instance, began restricting adults' ability to message minors in 2021. One internal document referenced in the lawsuit shows Meta “scrambling in 2020 to address an Apple executive whose 12-year-old was solicited on the platform, noting `this is the kind of thing that pisses Apple off to the extent of threatening to remove us from the App Store.'” According to the complaint, Meta “knew that adults soliciting minors was a problem on the platform, and was willing to treat it as an urgent problem when it had to.”

In a July 2020 document titled “Child Safety — State of Play (7/20),” Meta listed “immediate product vulnerabilities” that could harm children, including the difficulty reporting disappearing videos and confirmed that safeguards available on Facebook were not always present on Instagram.