Court documents underscore Meta’s ‘historical reluctance’ to protect children on Instagram

San Francisco: Newly unredacted documents from New Mexico’s lawsuit against Meta underscore the company’s “historical reluctance” to keep children safe on its platforms, the complaint says. New Mexico’s Attorney General Raul Torrez sued Facebook and Instagram owner Meta in December, saying the company failed to protect young users from exposure to child sexual abuse material and allowed adults to solicit explicit imagery from them.

In the passages freshly unredacted from the lawsuit Wednesday, internal employee messages and presentations from 2020 and 2021 show Meta was aware of issues such as adult strangers being able to contact children on Instagram, the sexualization of minors on that platform, and the dangers of its “people you may know” feature that recommends connections between adults and children. But Meta dragged its feet when it came to addressing the issues, the passages show.