Meta KNEW of Potential Harms to Children – and Did NOTHING

This week, two former Meta employees testified in a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing that Meta knowingly suppressed research on child safety.

The hearing came just one day after a Washington Post exposé that detailed internal documents and memos from Meta whistleblowers that allege Meta lawyers, in the interest of maintaining “plausible deniability,” interfered with research that could have called attention to the negative impact of Meta’s products on children.

In his opening remarks, Senator Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn), a co-sponsor of the Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA) said, “The metaverse is a cesspool filled with pedophiles, exploiters, groomers, traffickers and Meta knows it. They know it, and they have stifled and suppressed the research and truth telling that would provide Congress with all of the facts that are needed to support the Kids Online Safety Act and other measures that will protect children.”

But none of this is new or surprising.

A 2017 BBC investigation of Meta’s Virtual Reality headsets found that pedophiles were using VR headsets to view and store CSAM (child sex abuse material). Shortly after Meta’s 2021 launch of the “Metaverse,” there were numerous reports of young women being sexually harassed, sexually assaulted and even gang-raped in the Metaverse – in some cases, within minutes of joining.

Research on Meta’s VR platforms Horizon Worlds and Horizon Venues conducted in May 2022 by SumOfUs found rampant virtual groping and gang-rape on a platform that was easy for children to access. Researchers said, “Given the failure of Meta to moderate content on its other platforms, it is unsurprising that it is already seriously lagging behind with content moderation on its metaverse platforms. With just 300,000 users, it is remarkable how quickly Horizon Worlds has become a breeding ground for harmful content.”

More recently, The Wall Street Journal reported that Meta’s AI chatbot “will engage in and sometimes escalate discussions that are decidedly sexual—even when the users are underage or the bots are programmed to simulate the personas of minors. They also show the bots deploying the celebrity voices were equally willing to engage in sexual chats.”

Time and time again, Meta has proven they will do nothing to keep kids safe online unless they are forced to.

That’s why it’s so important for Congress to prioritize and pass the Kids Online Safety Act.

The Kids Online Safety Act establishes a duty of care and requires social media companies to turn on the strictest parental controls and content filters by default.

We need your help again to ensure KOSA also gets passed this year.

There’s still so much we need to do to make meaningful change to create a safer media environment for children and to protect them from online harm.