From Fortune Magazine:

Newly unredacted documents from New Mexico’s lawsuit against Meta reveal the company’s “historical reluctance” to keep children safe on Facebook and Instagram. The complaints show Meta was aware of the dangers posed to children by adults soliciting explicit imagery and failing to protect them from child sexual abuse material. There are internal exchanges that show Meta was dragging its feet when it came to addressing these issues.

One of the documents referenced in the lawsuit shows Meta “scrambling in 2020 to address an Apple executive whose 12-year-old was solicited on the platform, noting ‘this is the kind of thing that pisses Apple off to the extent of threating to remove us from the App Store.’” Instagram, for instance, began restricting adults’ ability to message minors in 2021, but Meta knew that adults soliciting minors was a problem on the platform yet dragged its feet to address the situation.

The lawsuit also detailed Meta’s failures to address other issues related to child safety, such as the sexualization of minors on that platform. Meta’s internal data and presentations show the problem of child solicitation and sexual exploitation is severe and pervasive, despite the company’s insistence that it is working to safeguard young people.

The complaint from New Mexico follows a lawsuit filed in October by 33 states that claim Meta is harming young people and contributing to the youth mental health crisis by knowingly and deliberately designing features on Instagram and Facebook that addict children to its platforms. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, along with the CEOs of Snap, Discord, TikTok and X, formerly Twitter, are scheduled to testify before the U.S. Senate on child safety at the end of January.



Read more: Meta documents revealed in New Mexico court case said to underscore tech giant’s ‘historical reluctance’ to protect children on Instagram