Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta knew Instagram was steering underage users toward online creeps and other harmful content – even as it shot down requests by co-founder Kevin Systrom and others to commit more resources for safety, according to bombshell documents that surfaced at the FTC’s antitrust trial.
The little-noticed trove included internal emails exchanged between Zuckerberg, Systrom and other top Meta executives as well as internal reports – the most damning of which was an alarming June 2019 report titled “Inappropriate Interactions with Children on Instagram.”
In the report, Instagram researchers found that nearly 2 million accounts operated by minors had been recommended to “groomers” – a term referring to adult sickos who target kids for sexual purposes – within a single three-month period.
“27% of all follow recommendations to groomers were minors,” the report said. “We are recommending nearly 4X as many minors to groomers. 22% of those recommendations resulted in a follow request.”
In the same report, Meta said it compiled 3.7 million user reports of inappropriate comments over a three-month span – about one-third of which were reported by minors. In 54% of those cases, the minor was reporting an adult. The company’s own tests showed Instagram “recommended a minor..to an account engaged in groomer-esque behavior.”
Systrom – who testified that he felt Zuckerberg treated the app’s success as a “threat” to Facebook while shooting down his requests for more employees – was among those who raised alarms behind the scenes.
In a 2017 email addressed to two other executives, Systrom expressed his concerns that Zuckerberg wasn’t paying enough attention to protecting young users despite red flags.
“I don’t think Mark understands the urgency of working on integrity related issues on IG,” Systrom wrote at the time. “Do you guys have anecdotes and links I can send? I’m assuming the child killing himself on live is an important one, but I think there were others (a suicide?).”
“My point to him will be that it’s happening and he’s just not as close to it, but my goal is to build empathy.”
The documents lent support to one of the FTC’s core arguments at the antitrust trial – that Facebook didn’t provide unique expertise or support to help Instagram become a safer product as it exploded in size. Instead, the feds allege that Facebook starved Instagram of much-needed resources.
“This six-year-old research shows just one piece of the work to improve our child safety efforts, which we’ve significantly expanded since then,” a Meta spokesperson said, referring to the 2019 internal report.
“We’ve spent years refining the signals we use to detect these accounts and prevent them from finding, following or interacting with teen accounts – or with each other – and we continue to focus on understanding these evolving behaviors,” the spokesperson added. “Our launch of Teen Accounts last year also places teens under 18 into the safest automatic protections, which limit who can contact them and the content they see.”
Meta said the document’s references to “groomers” referred to accounts that were removed from Instagram for policy violations and did not mean the app was deliberately linking minors with creeps.
In May 2018, Meta executive Guy Rosen fretted in an email to Adam Mosseri – who replaced Systrom as head of Instagram – that the app had a “groomer” problem.
“Harmful Behavior… e.g., grooming especially — this really worries me given we’re finding a lot of, umm, opportunity on FB, and given IG’s younger audience I bet we’ll find we have work to do there…” Rosen wrote.
Months later in 2019, Rosen flagged concerns that Instagram was still “understaffed as an app-surface when compared to Facebook.”
Concerns about inappropriate content spreading on Instagram began surfacing internally not long after Facebook bought the app for $1 billion in 2012.
In an email dated May 14, 2014, Instagram executive Miguel Velazquez warned that Apple “concerned about the amount of pornographic content on IG and how easily accessible it is” and the company had received “several complaints at the ‘exec level’ about this.’”
The FTC has accused Meta of using a “buy or bury” strategy to crush social media upstarts to protect a monopoly and wants US District Judge James Boasberg to unwind its acquisition of Instagram and WhatsApp.
Meta’s critics argue that the safety issues are a side effect stemming from the company’s monopoly over social media, which, they say, has made it easier for Zuckerberg to wave away the public’s concerns.
“Meta’s persistent failure to protect young people from predators on Instagram reveals deep and dangerous flaws in its platform, one that stems from the unchecked power it holds as a social media monopoly,” said Zamaan Qureshi, co-chair on the online safety watchdog Design It For Us.
Regardless of what happens in the FTC case, the newly surfaced documents could result in more headaches for Meta on Capitol Hill.
During a tense Senate hearing last year, Zuckerberg was forced to stand up and apologize to the family members of teen users victimized by “sextortion” plots on his apps.
Despite their explosive revelations about Meta’s own internal response to its “groomer” problem and other safety issues, it’s unclear if the documents will move the needle in the antitrust case.
The case is expected to come down to whether Boasberg agrees with the FTC’s attempt to narrowly define Meta has dominant over social media apps built on friends-and-family connections, with Snapchat as its only real direct competitor.
Meta’s attorneys have pushed back, arguing that the company faces tough competition from the likes of TikTok and YouTube and that its acquisitions of Instagram and WhatsApp helped rather than hurt their growth.
Last week, Meta asked the judge to throw out the case midway through trial, asserting that the FTC had failed to prove its argument. Boasberg shot down the request.
As it stands, the trial is expected to wrap up as soon as next week. If Boasberg ultimately sides with the FTC, a second trial would be held to determine appropriate remedies to break up Meta’s monopoly.
