2023-11-27 15:02:09
Despite the 1.1 million reports received since the start of 2019 concerning accounts held by users under the age of 13, Meta would not have any “disabled only a fraction”according to the complaint from the attorneys general of thirty-three American states against the company, consulted by the New York Times. Although it dates from October, the details of this complaint filed with a Californian court, which accuses the Facebook and Instagram applications of harming the “mental and physical health of young people”, were not all immediately made public, the complainants preferring to gradually reveal the different aspects.
According to the latter, “within the company, The fact that millions of Instagram users are under the age of 13 is an open secret, documented numerous times, duly analyzed and confirmed. Among the extracts from emails, conversations and presentations revealed on Wednesday, November 22, the state attorneys general rely in particular, to demonstrate that Meta is aware of the existence of such accounts, on a graph on which appears the percentage of Internet users aged 11 or 12 using Instagram every day.
States also criticize the moderation of the social network for having ” automatically “ ignored reports concerning accounts operated by minors under the age of 13 if they did not contain photos or biographies which would have allowed their age to be established with certainty. According to the plaintiff States, these documents contradict the testimony of Meta executives who, before the American Congress, had expressed confidence in the effectiveness of their age verification system, ensuring that user accounts under the age of 13 years old were systematically removed.
In a press release sent Sunday to New York Times, Meta says it has been working for ten years to make online browsing safer, especially for teenagers. According to the company, the States’ complaint “presents our work in a negative light, relying on truncated citations and biased selection of documents “. The company also explains that it would, according to it, be more logical for American law to require application stores to obtain parental authorization for young people under 16, rather than leaving each application responsible for do this check.
The plaintiff American states mobilized in the fall of 2021 after the publication of documents showing that Meta had data supporting the idea that Instagram creates addiction problems among young people and has an impact on the image and self esteem. A former Facebook employee, engineer Frances Haugen, had raised the alarm about the practices of her former company, leaking more than 20,000 pages of internal documents.
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