According to a recently made public court case, Facebook’s parent company Meta Platforms purposefully designed its social media networks to appeal to children.
Based on a newly unsealed legal complaint detailed in reports from The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times, Facebook parent company Meta Platforms knew it had received millions of complaints about underage users on Instagram but never disclosed this information. Meta Platforms also purposefully designed its social platforms to appeal to children.
The complaint, which was first made available to the public in redacted form, served as the first move in a lawsuit that the attorneys general of 33 states filed in late October.
According to reports from company documents cited in the complaint, a number of Meta officials acknowledged that the company intentionally created its products to take advantage of flaws in young people’s psychology, including impulsive behavior, vulnerability to peer pressure, and an underestimation of risks.
Some acknowledged that children under the age of thirteen, who were prohibited from using Facebook and Instagram by company policy, were also big users of these platforms.
In a statement to The Associated Press, Meta claimed to have “over 30 tools to support them and their parents” and said the complaint misrepresented the work the company has done over the past ten years to ensure that teens can safely use the internet.
Meta claimed that age verification presents a “complex industry challenge” in relation to excluding younger users from the service.
Rather, Meta stated that it supports federal legislation that would force app stores to get parental consent before allowing minors under the age of 16 to download apps. This would transfer the onus of monitoring underage usage to parents and app stores.
In a 2019 email, a Facebook safety executive hinted that the company’s bottom line might suffer if it cracked down on younger users, according to the Journal report.
However, a year later, the same executive expressed dissatisfaction over Facebook’s lack of enthusiasm for finding ways to identify younger children and remove them from its platforms, despite Facebook’s willingness to study underage users’ usage for business purposes, the Journal reported.
According to newspaper reports, the complaint stated that Meta occasionally has a backlog of up to 2.5 million accounts of younger children that are waiting for action.
