In a dramatic capitulation, the owner of Facebook and Instagram agreed to the financial penalties for violating federal child privacy and states’ consumer protection laws, the states announced. Meta also agreed to limit how long teenagers can spend on its platforms and to bans on features that stoke mental health issues, striking at the heart of the company’s business of engagement for advertising. #Digital Wellness 📱🧘
Meta’s extensive internal records documenting its actual knowledge of its under-13 Instagram users and collection of data from those users include the following:
(1) charts boasting Instagram’s penetration into 11- and 12-year-old demographic cohorts;
(2) an internal report presented to Zuckerberg regarding the four million under-13 users on Instagram;
(3) emails and policies documenting Meta’s mishandling of known under-13 user accounts;
(4) discussions among Meta’s researchers taking pains to avoid uncovering Instagram’s under-13 users through their studies;
(5) documents admitting that Instagram’s registration process regularly elicits false self-reported ages from its under-13 users; and
(6) data from Meta’s age-estimation algorithms confirming that millions of individual Instagram accounts belong to children under the age of 13.
Separately, Meta said on Wednesday that it settled with Texas for about $1 billion over similar allegations. The company still faces numerous other lawsuits from school districts and individuals, some of which are scheduled for trial in the coming months.
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