“We want teens to have safe, age-appropriate experiences online, and we have over 30 tools to support them and their parents. Related article New Mexico lawsuit accuses Meta of creating ‘breeding ground’ for child predators
Meta headquarters is pictured on February 2, 2023, in Menlo Park, California. Meta pushed back against that assertion in a statement Thursday. The anecdote is one of several in the newly unredacted complaint, which alleges that Meta employees have repeatedly raised alarms that the company was not doing enough to protect young users from exploitation. Apple did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Meta’s apps still appear on the Apple App Store, and it’s not clear whether the company itself ever questioned Meta about the issue directly. It continued by “asking whether there was a timeline for when ‘we’ll stop adults from messaging minors on IG Direct.’” “This is the kind of thing that pisses Apple off to the extent of threatening to remove us from the App Store,” the internal Meta document said, according to the complaint. According to the complaint, after the Apple executive flagged the issue to Meta, then known as Facebook, at least one Meta employee raised concerns internally that the incident could put the company at risk of having Facebook removed from the Apple App Store - a potentially devastating blow. The 2020 incident - which is detailed in the newly unredacted complaint citing internal documents - is part of a years-long history of people inside and outside of the social media giant run by Mark Zuckerberg raising concerns about young users’ exposure to sexual and inappropriate content, the attorney general alleges. The lawsuit accuses Meta of creating a “breeding ground” for child predators. An Apple executive in 2020 alerted Meta that their 12-year-old child had been “solicited” on Facebook, according to a newly unredacted version of the complaint in a lawsuit against Meta brought by New Mexico’s Attorney General in December.
