The plaintiffs’ brief alleges that Meta was aware that its platforms were endangering young users, including by exacerbating adolescents’ mental health issues. According to the plaintiffs, Meta frequently detected content related to eating disorders, child sexual abuse, and suicide but refused to remove it. For example, one 2021 internal company survey found that more than 8 percent of respondents aged 13 to 15 had seen someone harm themself or threaten to harm themself on Instagram during the past week. The brief also makes clear that Meta fully understood the addictive nature of its products, with plaintiffs citing a message by one user-experience researcher at the company that Instagram “is a drug” and, “We’re basically pushers.”
Perhaps most relevant to state child endangerment laws, the plaintiffs have alleged that Meta knew that millions of adults were using its platforms to inappropriately contact minors. According to their filing, an internal company audit found that Instagram had recommended 1.4 million potentially inappropriate adults to teenagers in a single day in 2022. The brief also details how Instagram’s policy was to not take action against sexual solicitation until a user had been caught engaging in the “trafficking of humans for sex” a whopping 17 times. As Instagram’s former head of safety and well-being, Vaishnavi Jayakumar, reportedly testified, “You could incur 16 violations for prostitution and sexual solicitation, and upon the seventeenth violation, your account would be suspended.”
I would say that’s irrelevant for the crimes committed. And not just Americans would struggle to find Myanmar on a map. Or really care what’s going on there unless it’s rooting out phishing farms using abducted foreigners.
I commend your view on the matter, that when it comes to their children they will do something. That may turn out to be true. However, that’s not going to be enough to get anyone at meta convicted under the current laws. They are running under a cover of diffuse authority and supervision internally and section 230 externally. Abhorent drug pusher comments are not admissions of guilt. They have good lawyers. We need new laws, more regulation, and fines that make Wall Street worried.
Irrelevant to the crimes themselves, but very relevant to the political pressure that can be applied to force action.
We all know the law doesn’t just get applied because it should be. Especially not against the rich. It gets applied, or at least has a chance to be, when enough people are paying attention and demanding justice.
Also, section 230 doesn’t apply to criminal prosecution (it may not even apply to the ongoing civil case), and there is strong evidence from the civil case that it was the executives themselves that explicitly chose not to implement safeguards that Meta employees were calling for.
Absolutely. We need all of that plus way stronger antitrust. And we need the current law applied to bad actors, regardless of their riches.