Uh oh.
Meta loves to decry that it does its best to protect children on its platform. After all, kids under 13 can’t even sign up for Instagram or Facebook because of the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act of 1998 — but that doesn’t actually stop most kids from signing up because lying online is a classic American pastime.
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And we know that Meta knows this. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said at a congressional hearing in March 2021 that “there is clearly a large number of people under the age of 13 who would want to use a service like Instagram.” This is part of the reason the platform has considered creating Instagram Youth. In October, a group of states sued Meta for getting children under the age of 13 hooked to its platforms. On Wednesday, The New York Times reported on an unsealed complaint alleging that Meta “coveted and pursued” children under the age of 13 to use its platforms. According to that document, Meta failed to disable many underage users’ accounts after they were discovered and continued to harvest those users’ data.
“Within the company, Meta’s actual knowledge that millions of Instagram users are under the age of 13 is an open secret that is routinely documented, rigorously analyzed and confirmed, and zealously protected from disclosure to the public” the complaint read, according to the Times. Engadget reported the complaint alleged that when Meta “received over 1.1 million reports of under-13 users on Instagram” from 2019-2023, it “disabled only a fraction of those accounts and routinely continued to collect children’s data without parental consent.”
Meta told Mashable in an emailed statement that Instagram doesn’t allow users under the age of 13 to use the app and that it has “measures in place to remove these accounts when we identify them.”
“However, verifying the age of people online is a complex industry challenge,” Meta’s statement read. “Many people — particularly those under the age of 13 — don’t have an ID, for example. That’s why Meta is supporting federal legislation that requires app stores to get parents’ approval whenever their teens under 16 download apps. With this approach, parents and teens won’t need to provide hundreds of individual apps with sensitive information like government IDs in order to verify their age.”
This comes years after research has unequivocally shown that social media isn’t great for kids. Facebook’s own research that was released in 2021 found that “Instagram is harmful to a sizable percentage of [teens], most notably teenage girls.”