Meta estimates about 100,000 children using Facebook and Instagram receive online sexual harassment each day, including “pictures of adult genitalia,” according to internal company documents made public late Wednesday.
The unsealed legal filing includes several allegations against the company based on information the New Mexico attorney general’s office received from presentations by Meta employees and communications between staff. The documents describe an incident in 2020 when the 12-year-old daughter of an executive at Apple was solicited via IG Direct, Instagram’s messaging product.
“This is the kind of thing that pisses Apple off to the extent of threatening to remove us from the App Store,” a Meta employee fretted, according to the documents.
Photo: AFP
A senior Meta employee described how his own daughter had been solicited via Instagram in testimony to the US Congress late last year. His efforts to fix the problem were ignored, he said.
The filing is the latest in a lawsuit initiated by the New Mexico attorney general’s office on Dec. 5, which alleges Meta’s social networks have become marketplaces for child predators. Raul Torrez, the state’s attorney general, has accused Meta of enabling adults to find, message and groom children. The company has denied the suit’s claims, saying it “mischaracterizes our work using selective quotes and cherry-picked documents.”
Meta issued a statement in response to Wednesday’s filing: “We want teens to have safe, age-appropriate experiences online, and we have over 30 tools to support them and their parents. We’ve spent a decade working on these issues and hiring people who have dedicated their careers to keeping young people safe and supported online.”
A 2021 internal presentation on child safety was also referenced in the lawsuit. According to the suit, one slide stated that Meta is “underinvested in minor sexualization on IG, notable on sexualized comments on content posted by minors. Not only is this a terrible experience for creators and bystanders, it’s also a vector for bad actors to identify and connect with one another.”
The complaint also highlights Meta employees’ concerns over child safety. In a July 2020 internal Meta chat, one employee asked: “What specifically are we doing for child grooming (something I just heard about that is happening a lot on TikTok)?” According to the complaint, he received a response: “Somewhere between zero and negligible.”
Meta’s statement also says the company has taken “significant steps to prevent teens from experiencing unwanted contact, especially from adults.”
The New Mexico lawsuit follows a Guardian investigation in April that uncovered how Meta is failing to report or detect the use of its platforms for child trafficking. The investigation also revealed how Messenger, Facebook’s private messaging service, is used as a platform for traffickers to communicate to buy and sell children.
Meta employees discussed the use of Messenger “to coordinate trafficking activities” and facilitate “every human exploitation stage (recruitment, coordination, exploitation) is represented on our platform”, according to documents included in the suit.
Yet, an internal 2017 email describes executive opposition to scanning Facebook Messenger for “harmful content” because it would place the service “at a competitive disadvantage vs other apps who might offer more privacy”, the lawsuit states.
In December, Meta received widespread criticism for rolling out end-to-end encryption for messages sent on Facebook and via Messenger. Encryption hides the contents of a message from anyone but the sender and the intended recipient by converting text and images into unreadable cyphers that are unscrambled on receipt. Child safety experts, policymakers and law enforcement have argued encryption obstructs efforts to rescue child sex-trafficking victims and the prosecution of predators. Privacy advocates praised the decision for shielding users from surveillance by governments and law enforcement.
The US war on Iran has illuminated the deep interdependence of Asia on flows of oil and related items as raw materials that become the basis of modern human civilization. Australians and New Zealanders had a wake up call. The crisis also emphasizes how the Philippines is a swatch of islands linked by jet fuel. These revelations have deep implications for an invasion of Taiwan. Much of the commentary on the Taiwan scenario has looked at the disruptions to world trade, which will be in the trillions. However, the Iran war offers additional specific lessons for a Taiwan scenario. An insightful
The problem with Marx’s famous remark that history repeats itself, first as tragedy, the second time as farce, is that the first time is usually farce as well. This week Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Chair Cheng Li-wun (鄭麗文) made a pilgrimage to the People’s Republic of China (PRC) “to confer, converse and otherwise hob-nob” with Chinese Communist Party (CCP) officials. The visit was an instant international media hit, with major media reporting almost entirely shorn of context. “Taiwan’s main opposition leader landed in China Tuesday for a rare visit aimed at cross-strait ‘peace’”, crowed Agence-France Presse (AFP) from Shanghai. Rare!
Sunflower movement superstar Lin Fei-fan (林飛帆) once quipped that the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) could nominate a watermelon to run for Tainan mayor and win. Conversely, the DPP could run a living saint for mayor in Taipei and still lose. In 2022, the DPP ran with the closest thing to a living saint they could find: former Minister of Health and Welfare Chen Shih-chung (陳時中). During the pandemic, his polling was astronomically high, with the approval of his performance reaching as high as 91 percent in one TVBS poll. He was such a phenomenon that people printed out pop-up cartoon
What is the importance within the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) of the meeting between Xi Jinping (習近平), the leader Chinese Communist Party (CCP), and Cheng Li-wun (鄭麗文), the leader of the KMT? Local media is an excellent guide to determine how important — or unimportant — a news event is to the public. Taiwan has a vast online media ecosystem, and if a news item is gaining traction among readers, editors shift resources in near real time to boost coverage to meet the demand and drive up traffic. Cheng’s China trip is among the top headlines, but by no means
RSS