Internal metadocuments warn that about every day 100,000 children are victims of sexual harassment via Facebook and Instagram. The note came to light this Wednesday and is part of the evidence collected by the New Mexico State Attorney General's Office, which is investigating Mark Zuckerberg's company.
And the prosecution received a large amount of information related to presentations and communication the company's employees. The data shows both the severity of the problem and the knowledge Meta had about it.
A case of particular importance occurred in 2020, when A 12-year-old girl was harassed on the social network Instagram. The youngest was the daughter of an Apple manager. One of Meta's employees noted, “This kind of thing makes Apple so angry that it threatens to remove us from its store.”
In an internal chat from mid-2020, an employee asks: “What do we do about child grooming (which I hear happens a lot on TikTok)?”. The response he received was “anywhere from zero to virtually not effective at all.”
A document from 2021 indicates that the company did not invest enough the fight against the sexualization of minors on Instagram. On this network, a major problem has been identified in the comments on the videos posted by minors.
The New Mexico Attorney General's Office's investigation began after a Guardian report showed Meta was unable to recognize anything when their platforms were used to traffic minors.
Meta, for its part, denies these allegations and assures us of this “mischaracterizes our work through selective citations and carefully selected documents”.
In a statement, the company said: “We want teens to have safe, age-appropriate online experiences, and we have more than 30 tools to support them and their parents.” We have spent a decade working on these issues and hiring people who have dedicated their careers to ensuring the safety and support of young people online.”
