US state says children on Instagram, Facebook are often targets of sexual harassment: Report
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The US state of New Mexico has said that children using Instagram and Facebook have been frequent targets of sexual harassment. According to a report by The Wall Street Journal (WSJ) on Wednesday (Jan 17), an internal Meta Platforms presentation in 2021 estimated that 100,000 minors each day received photos of adult genitalia or other sexually abusive content.
This finding is among newly unredacted material about the company’s child-safety policies in a lawsuit filed by New Mexico last month.
The lawsuit alleged that Meta recommended sexual content to underage users and promoted underage accounts to predatory adult users. In a 2021 internal document, Meta employees noted that "People You May Know" (PYMK)- one of the recommended algorithms of the platform, was known among employees to connect child users with potential predators.
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According to the lawsuit, the above finding had been flagged to the executive several years earlier. The report said that the executives rejected a staff recommendation that Meta adjust the design of PYMK to stop it from recommending minors to adults.
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'Meta failed to address widespread predation'
New Mexico alleged that Meta has failed to address widespread predation on its platform or limit design features that recommended children to adults with malicious intentions. The state's lawsuit further said that instead of publicly acknowledging internal findings, the company falsely assured people that its platforms were safe.
The report said that much of the internal discussion in the unredacted material focused on Instagram.
In an internal email in 2020, employees reported that the prevalence of “sex talk” to minors was 38 times greater on Instagram than on Facebook Messenger in the US. The employees urged Meta to enact more safeguards on the platform.
Also watch |Meta's Instagram under fire for showing sexual videos of young users
In that year, a presentation called “Child Safety: State of Play” said that Instagram employed “minimal child safety protections” and described policies regarding “minor sexualisation” as “immature.”
Meta officials did not take action to prevent adults from sexually soliciting children until late 2022, the lawsuit further alleged.
The WSJ report also said that rather than broadly stopping recommendations ofthe accounts of children to adults,Instagram and Facebooksought to block such suggestions to adults who already demonstrated suspicious behaviour towards children.
Apart from New Mexico, over 40 other states in the US sued Meta in October last year alleging the company misled people about the dangers that its platforms posed to young people.
(With inputs from agencies)