Zuckerberg 'Ignored' Top Executives Calling For Increased Safety Plans for Kids: Unredacted Lawsuit
Meta’s CEO was told multiple times that it social media platforms Faecbook and Instagram presented a danger to the well-being of minors, according to a complaint filed is Suffolk County Superior Court by Massachusetts Attorney General Andrea Joy Campbell on Monday.
Mark Zuckerberg just didn’t seem to care.
According to the Complaint and Jury Demand, Meta “intentionally designed its flagship social media platforms, especially Instagram, to be addictive to” those under the age of 18.
The suit argues that Meta targeted “young people’s unique psychological vulnerabilities” to coerce them into spending much more time on the social media platform that was consistent with their best well-being.
In fact, the complaint states, Meta was fully aware of how harmful its platforms could be to those who spend too much time on them.
“It [Meta] knows, too, that these dangers and mental and physical health harms are even more acute in younger users, aged 8 to 12 years old, whose brains are at an even earlier stage of development and who lack the skills to regulate their time on social media for their own health and safety,” the complaint says.
Despite this knowledge, the suit alleges, Meta’s top leadership, including Chief Financial Officer Susan Li, refused to allocate funds to support the development of tools that would work to mitigate “problematic use” by minors, even after Vice President of Product, Choice and Competition David Ginsberg emailed Zuckerberg directly in 2019 recommending just such investments.
“Instagram’s and Facebook’s top executives, Adam Mosseri and Fidji Simo, respectively, acknowledged that this lack of investment was the ‘main problem’ for improving well-being, and that as a result, Meta ‘lack[ed] … a roadmap of work that demonstrates we care about well-being,” according to the court filing.
The complaint argues that the lack of ability to demonstrate Meta’s interest in the well-being of its users was directly due to the fact that Meta did not, in fact, care about its users, but rather about retaining users on its platforms.
Even two years later, in 2021, when Vice President of Global Affairs Nick Clegg forwarded a request from members of Instagram’s “well-being” team for more funds to address ““problematic use, bullying+harassment,” and even suicidal behavior exhibited on the app, saying the company “need[ed] to do more.”
“[O]ur wellbeing work is both understaffed and fragmented,” Clegg wrote at the time.
Mosseri also expressed his own concerns about the firm’s apparent lip-service on the topic of well-being, arguing the Meta had been “talking about this for a long time but have made little progress.”
Zuckerberg “ignored Clegg’s request for month,” the suit states, and ultimately the request was denied anyway when Li stated that payroll expenses were already too “constrained” to invest in the well-begin of Instagram’s most vulnerable users, the document says.
You can read the entire 102-page complaint for yourself, below, but the first four pages provide a good summary of the case.
Massachusetts Lawsuit Against Meta by The Western Journal on Scribd
Massachusetts is one of 41 states who have filed suit against Meta, the parent corporation of both Facebook and Instagram, alleging that the companies have intentionally manipulated minors for profit.
A multi-state complaint from 33 states filed on October 24 argues that Meta has ignored its own “overwhelming internal research,independent expert analysis, and publicly available data that its Social Media Platforms harm young users” as it has sought to maximize revenue, and has in fact downplayed the harm its platforms cause to users.
“This is not about money,” Tennessee Attorney General Jonathan Skrmetti said of that complaint, according to USAToday. “This is about protecting kids. What we want is for the company to change its behavior.”
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