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.”

  • AmbitiousProcess (they/them)@piefed.socialEnglish
    8·
    12 hours ago

    Videos, images, and text can absolutely compel action or credible harm.

    For example, Facebook was aware that Instagram was giving teen girls depression and body image issues, and subsequently made sure their algorithm would continue to show teen girls content of other girls/women who were more fit/attractive than them.

    the teens who reported the most negative feelings about themselves saw more provocative content more broadly, content Meta classifies as “mature themes,” “Risky behavior,” “Harm & Cruelty” and “Suffering.” Cumulatively, such content accounted for 27% of what those teens saw on the platform, compared with 13.6% among their peers who hadn’t reported negative feelings.

    https://www.congress.gov/117/meeting/house/114054/documents/HHRG-117-IF02-20210922-SD003.pdf

    https://www.reuters.com/business/instagram-shows-more-eating-disorder-adjacent-content-vulnerable-teens-internal-2025-10-20/

    Many girls have committed suicide or engaged in self harm, at least partly inspired by body image issues stemming from Instagram’s algorithmic choices, even if that content is “just videos, and images.”

    They also continued to recommend dangerous content that they claimed was blocked by their filters, including sexual and violent content to children under 13. This type of content is known to have a lasting effect on kids’ wellbeing.

    The researchers found that Instagram was still recommending sexual content, violent content, and self-harm and body-image content to teens, even though those types of posts were supposed to be blocked by Meta’s sensitive-content filters.

    https://time.com/7324544/instagram-teen-accounts-flawed/

    In the instance you specifically highlighting, that was when Meta would recommend teen girls to men exhibiting behaviors that could very easily lead to predation. For example, if a man specifically liked sexual content, and content of teen girls, it would recommend that man content of underage girls attempting to make up for their newly-created body image issues by posting sexualized photos.

    They then waited 2 years before implementing a private-by-default policy, which wouldn’t recommend these teen girls’ accounts to strangers unless they explicitly turned on the feature. Most didn’t. Meta waited that long because internal research showed it would decrease engagement.

    By 2020, the growth team had determined that a private-by-default setting would result in a loss of 1.5 million monthly active teens a year on Instagram, which became the underlying reason for not protecting minors.

    https://techoversight.org/2025/11/22/meta-unsealed-docs/

    If I filled your social media feed with endless posts specifically algorithmically chosen to make you spend more time on the app while simultaneously feeling worse about yourself, then exploited every weakness the algorithm could identify about you, I don’t think you’d look at that and say it’s “catastrophizing over videos, images, text on a screen that can’t compel action or credible harm” when you develop depression, or worse.