Suing Meta: The Ugly Open Secret of Children Using Social Media
Reflections on our digital world, as 33 US states allege Meta is exploiting young people
Over the last decade, it’s become a big, ugly, open secret that children and young teenagers are on social media. They’re reading your aunt’s racist minion memes on Facebook, they’re almost certainly filling their tiny minds with unrealistic depictions of what humans look like on Instagram, and probably getting a warped view of how they act on TikTok.
We all know those little blighters shouldn’t be there, and so too do big tech companies like Meta, who implement the rule that you must be over 13 to join their social media platforms. However, according to the 33 US states suing Meta, the company isn’t doing enough to enforce this rule and is routinely ignoring reports of underage users.
A recently unredacted complaint in the lawsuit states:
“Within the company, Meta’s actual knowledge that millions of Instagram users are under the age of 13 is an open secret that is routinely documented, rigorously analyzed and confirmed, and zealously protected from disclosure to the public.”
The lawsuit also suggests that in 2021 alone, Meta received over 402,000 reports of under-13 users on Instagram but only disabled 164,000 — less than half — of those accounts. The allegations hold that this and other incidents violate the Children’s Online Privacy and Protection Act, which demands that social media companies provide notice and obtain parental consent before collecting data on children.
But if all the allegations are to be believed, negligence in handling reports is arguably the least of the issues regarding how Meta deals with its child users. Instead, the states suing the tech giant allege that Meta is actively engineering its platforms to get children addicted to social media.
These allegations come off the back of evidence presented by whistleblower Frances Haugen, who revealed internal studies that the algorithms on platforms like Instagram drive children towards anorexia-related content. The lawsuit also cites documents that detail Meta officials acknowledging that the company’s products are designed to exploit the psychology of younger people, including the 2020 internal presentation ‘Teen Fundamentals,’ which discussed youngsters tendencies to be driven by “emotion, the intrigue of novelty and reward” and how this could “manifest . . . in product usage.”
Furthermore, the lawsuit claims to have evidence of “charts boasting Instagram’s penetration into 11- and 12-year-old demographic cohorts; an internal report presented to [CEO Mark] Zuckerberg regarding the four million under-13 users on Instagram; emails and policies documenting Meta’s mishandling of known under-13 user accounts; discussions among Meta’s researchers taking pains to avoid uncovering Instagram’s under-13 users through their studies; documents admitting that Instagram’s registration process regularly elicits false self-reported ages from its under-13 users; and data from Meta’s age-estimation algorithms confirming that millions of individual Instagram accounts belong to children under the age of 13.”
If you’ve got a whole lot of time on your hands, you can read the full 233-page lawsuit here:
In response, Meta released a statement arguing that the complaint “mischaracterizes our work using selective quotes and cherry-picked documents.” They also argue that age verification is a “complex industry challenge.” Nonetheless, “Meta could face hundreds of millions of dollars, or more, in civil penalties should the states prove the allegations,” according to a New York Times article.
Of course, Meta is no stranger to these kinds of lawsuits. Even right now, they and other big tech firms are also being sued by a growing number of school districts who allege that these corporations are actively harming children for the sake of profits. They also got hit by eight lawsuits in 2022 alleging much the same.
Just like Meta being sued is nothing new, that exposing young minds to social media might be terrible for their mental health is almost certainly not new information to you either. Frankly, I hope it seems pretty obvious. And let’s be honest, judging by how people act on these apps, it’s also probably not great for those of us with (allegedly) fully developed monkey brains, especially since we’re spending an average of over 2.5 hours on these platforms.
But if you want more evidence, then you can look at the US Surgeon General report issued back in May 2023, which concluded that social media presents a mental health risk to young people.
Now, I’m not a parent, and I’m also not in the business of laying the blame for harm caused by social media at parents’ feet. Sure, there’s probably a point to be made there, but whataboutism doesn’t get us anywhere when it comes to keeping an eye on the actions of tech giants.
I’d like to think that if I had children, I wouldn’t so much as let them touch a smartphone, let alone go on a Meta app (Those hypothetical brats would be using Mastodon on the Fediverse, as is good and proper). But thanks to the power of playground bullying and peer pressure, not giving your child a smartphone has seemingly become unimaginable for many.
One 2021 survey found that 31 percent of responding US 8-year-olds owned a smartphone. According to an Ofcom report, around half of UK 10-year-olds also own a smartphone — and that was back in the all-so-innocent year of 2019. Of course, parental control software exists, so maybe these figures aren’t as immediately alarming as they seem. But how many parents understand, let alone implement these apps effectively is difficult to measure. Clearly, lots of young people, who are probably already far more tech-savvy than old mom and dad, are either getting past these controls or don’t have to deal with them.
A few months ago, an Irish town took the step of “banning” (sort of) smartphones to cut the problem off at its source, finding that strength in numbers made it much easier for parents and schools to say no to phones and control what their kids were watching. These lads and lasses have presumably all gone back to hitting each other with sticks and playing in dilapidated construction sites, just like the happy youth of yesteryear.
In all seriousness, though, the reality for most young people growing up today is that technologies such as the internet, and now AI, are a ubiquitous part of their lives. While the internet and online harms are hardly anything new, young people today face issues that would be alien even to Gen Z and Millennials, such as fellow students creating explicit deepfakes to bully their peers.
Sure, bullying has always been a problem, but I can’t even begin to fathom how awful it must be to experience modern cyberbullying. And where is a large portion of that bullying occurring? On social media, of course.
A lot of poorly thought-out and overzealous legislation gets passed in the name of protecting children from these forms of harm. A lot of the time said legislation does more harm than good. Take the UK’s recent Online Safety Bill, which, in principle, if not practically (because a lot of what it demands is impossible), all but removes its citizens’ right to privacy online and probably won’t stop kids from finding awful content or creating it themselves. But that doesn’t mean we should be letting big tech companies get away with making targeting children part of their business strategy, either.
Whether or not these latest allegations directed at Meta will stick, and if so, if the fines will be significant enough to change anything, remains to be seen. My gut feeling is that, whatever happens, parents and young people are still going to get a raw deal, big tech will keep making billions, and we’re all going to read about it on our phones.
