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Meta's Child Sex-Trafficking Problem
Maybe not so much a problem for Zuck, who is so very generous to the guy who doesn't want sex-trafficking discussed.
https://www.afterbabel.com/p/metas-child-sex-trafficking-problem
A newly unsealed court filing shows the tech giant connected children to predators on a scale much larger than previously understood
NATHAN WITKIN, DEC 03, 2025
Tinder for Pedophiles
If pushing questionably safe products on children and teens nationwide wasn’t bad enough, previously unknown internal research cited in the filing reveals that Meta did so despite the near certainty that this would mean putting large volumes of young people in harm’s way.
In particular, Meta’s recommendation algorithms put what the company internally calls “IIC violators”—IIC standing for inappropriate interactions with children—in direct contact with millions of minors. At one point in 2023, the Instagram feature “Accounts You May Follow” recommended “‘nearly 2 million minors’” to “adult groomers” in the previous three months. Twenty-two percent of those recommendations, in turn, “‘resulted in a follow request.’” The filing also discusses an internal 2022 audit, which found that Accounts You May Follow “recommended 1.4 million potential IIC violators to teenage users in a single day” (p. 53).
How do we know Meta could have stopped them? Because its own researchers recommended in 2019 that teen Instagram accounts be defaulted to private mode so that young users would not receive (among other things) “‘nwanted messages that were sexual in nature’” (p. 55). But instead of implementing these changes the moment they understood children were in danger, Meta leadership asked its growth team what the “‘growth and engagement impacts’” of the recommended protections would be. Finding that the falloff in engagement would be too steep (“‘this will likely smash engagement, DAP, MAP, etc.’”), Meta decided to put the issue off due to concerns over its bottom line.
If pushing questionably safe products on children and teens nationwide wasn’t bad enough, previously unknown internal research cited in the filing reveals that Meta did so despite the near certainty that this would mean putting large volumes of young people in harm’s way.
In particular, Meta’s recommendation algorithms put what the company internally calls “IIC violators”—IIC standing for inappropriate interactions with children—in direct contact with millions of minors. At one point in 2023, the Instagram feature “Accounts You May Follow” recommended “‘nearly 2 million minors’” to “adult groomers” in the previous three months. Twenty-two percent of those recommendations, in turn, “‘resulted in a follow request.’” The filing also discusses an internal 2022 audit, which found that Accounts You May Follow “recommended 1.4 million potential IIC violators to teenage users in a single day” (p. 53).
How do we know Meta could have stopped them? Because its own researchers recommended in 2019 that teen Instagram accounts be defaulted to private mode so that young users would not receive (among other things) “‘nwanted messages that were sexual in nature’” (p. 55). But instead of implementing these changes the moment they understood children were in danger, Meta leadership asked its growth team what the “‘growth and engagement impacts’” of the recommended protections would be. Finding that the falloff in engagement would be too steep (“‘this will likely smash engagement, DAP, MAP, etc.’”), Meta decided to put the issue off due to concerns over its bottom line.
We seem to have a common interest.
5 replies
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