Name: Meta ignored child safety red flags, court filing alleges
Uploaded: 2025-11-25T09:21:03.595Z
Duration: 5 min 50 s
Description: Newly unsealed court filings allege that Meta knew for years about significant risks facing young users on its platforms, but never disclosed those risks to families or lawmakers.

Newly unsealed court filings allege that Meta knew for years about significant risks facing young users on its platforms, but never disclosed those risks to families or lawmakers.

California

Recently unsealed court filings allege that Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, was aware for years of the potential harm its platforms posed to young users, including risks of addiction, eating disorders, and self-harm. Plaintiffs, including families, school districts, and state attorneys general, claim Meta failed to disclose these risks to the public or lawmakers and accuse the company of prioritizing engagement over child safety.

The lawsuit, unprecedented in scale, is based on testimony from former and current Meta employees, internal research, and company memos. Meta has denied the allegations, stating that the claims are misleading and that the company has implemented protections for teens. Other tech companies, such as TikTok, Snapchat, and YouTube, are also named in the filings, though details about their involvement remain limited due to redactions.

Meta ignored child safety red flags, court filing alleges

A newly unsealed court filings show the social media giant Meta may have known for years that its platforms were harming young people. It alleged that the company kept those risks under wrap. Thousands of plaintiffs across families, school districts, and state attorneys general allege links to addiction, eating disorders, and self-harm, and say that the company failed to disclose this information to the public or to Congress. Business and tech correspondent Maura Barrett has been digging through those documents. She joins me now. And Maura, a lot of new information coming to light, but what are some of the highlights? Andrew, yeah, and I should warn, pretty disturbing information too. There's hundreds of pages of court filings that have recently been unsealed over the weekend. There still is some redactions included, so we don't necessarily have the full picture, but it's also important to note that this is all according to the plaintiffs. There are hundreds of parents and children, families, parents and teachers, school districts, as well as state's attorneys general that are all looking into this. It's been going on for a few years, and it's a massive lawsuit, unprecedented in size across the country. And so some of these details that we're learning, they say, is from testimony from former and current Meta employees, as well as internal research and internal memos. And so when we talk about the details that's being learned, again, kind of disturbing to think about the way that they are alleging in this that the company knew about how addictive social media can be, and they actually pushed that for kids. There was repetitive pushing of the things you mentioned, the eating disorders, other mental health issues, going so far as to lack of safety monitoring when it comes to violations. One of the former Meta staffers that they interviewed at a senior level pointed out that in reviewing sex trafficking conversations, anyone who made violations there, there was a really high bar until they got booted from the platform. She said in testimony, according to these filings, that you could have those violations up to 16 times before a user faced ramifications in that sense. And so basically, there's a lot of details we've learned, a lot of interviews that they've gone through in which people as high as VP level within Meta said that they didn't think that Meta cared about the safety of kids, and they just were going to ignore that as they put these policy, these new iterations of their product into place. And so very serious allegations, obviously. And so I reached out to Meta to get their take, and they undeniably said that they are not true. They said they strongly disagree and say that the quotes were cherry picked along with misinformed opinions in an attempt to present a deliberately misleading picture. They went on to say that the full record will show that for over a decade, Meta has listened to parents, research issues that matter most, and made real issues to protect teens. They went on to detail the work that they've rolled out in terms of teen accounts, parental controls. But as you might remember, we've covered testimony on the Hill from whistleblowers from inside Meta that directly said that certain research looking into these types of safety implications was canceled. And so those, these are separate lawsuits, right? These are separate instances when it comes to all the other whistleblowers that we've heard from in the past. But none of this, the theme of this discussion is necessarily new. It's these details, these really graphic details that we're getting in some cases that are quite jarring, Andrew. Yeah. And Maura, what about those other tech companies named? How are they responding? Right. So this is not just a solo specific to Meta, TikTok, Snapchat, and YouTube were named as well. Google is YouTube's parent company, so they're named in the filings too. But like I said, a lot of the details there are still redacted, and so we're not getting nearly as much information as we do about Meta in these filings. But there are situations in which they call out YouTube for saying that they are prioritizing kids' safety, but then they're actually behind the scenes pushing content to get kids addicted to the types of videos they're watching. Similar to Snapchat, just that addictive factor and the lack of controls of mental health, given that these are newer platforms, this is the first time a lot of kids are interacting with these. Snapchat did get back to me and said that they also disagree that they purposely built their platform to not be as addictive as other social media platforms. I did not get a response from YouTube, Google, their parent company, or TikTok. And so it is likely more documents in this lawsuit, the other plethora of lawsuits we've been filing that are similar in this case, might bring more details alleged by plaintiffs to light. And that's something that there are likely to be requests in as this lawsuit goes through the process. But I think it's important to contextualize in both the whistleblowers we talked about, the testimony that we've seen. There's also this push by several lawmakers on the Hill to get regulations in place for tech companies specifically to focus on child safety. We've seen a lot of pushback there. And so getting additional information, or at least allegations, that lawmakers can try to then corroborate might feed into the bigger purpose that they're looking for. And so it's really just important to keep getting these facts and understanding what's going on behind the scenes when it comes to these tech companies. Because that's why lawmakers are making this argument that they need to be the ones putting regulations into place if the tech companies aren't going to regulate themselves. Yeah, obviously a huge storyline, not just for the users of these platforms, but certainly the parents of the users as well for those teens. Business and tech correspondent Maura Barrett for us. Maura, thank you.

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