Brief # 157 Technology Policy | Mindy Spatt | October 4, 2025
Summary:
Complaints about META’s failure to protect children from the ills of social media continue to plague the company. Most recently, unauthorized images of children were used in ads for Meta’s Threads app, and a significant study of the company’s improvements in response to previous concerns criticized its efforts as largely ineffective.
Analysis:
Allegations that Meta doesn’t do enough to protect children from the ills of its social media products are not new. Recent revelations show those allegations haven’t driven META to change course or take any meaningful steps to protect children and teens. Efforts to hold the company accountable for its disregard of youth safety or rein in unsafe practices are not moving forward.
A lawsuit by over 30 State Attorneys General filed in 2023 alleges that Meta deliberately targets young people in its marketing of Facebook and Instagram despite knowing full well that the platforms are potentially harmful to them. After META’s motion to dismiss was denied, the case entered the discovery phase, and a trial or settlement is still far off.
Allegations similar to those contained in the lawsuit were made during a Senate hearing in September, when Arturo Bejar, a former director for Facebook’s Protect and Care program who is now a whistleblower, testified that top company executives were aware of the detrimental impact their platform had on young people. They had been presented with data showing that teenagers and children often experience bullying, sexual solicitation, and body shaming on Meta’s platforms, leading to depression and, in some cases, suicide.
The Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Privacy, Technology, and the Law cited Bejar’s testimony as a compelling reason to advance the proposed Kids Online Safety Act, which, despite bipartisan support and Senate passage, is stalled in the House of Representatives.
In the meantime, with profits up, you might think META would back off from looking toward children for revenue on its own, but you’d be wrong. Parents of schoolgirls were outraged when they recently discovered their own photos of their children had been used by Meta to advertise its social media products, almost exclusively to adult men. One recipient reported seeing girls who appeared to be young teens in short school uniforms with their faces and, in some cases, names visible. According to Meta, its terms of service allowed it to cross-post the parents’ and other users’ photos from their private accounts to its Threads app, where they were visible and, in some cases, were highlighted to an adult male audience as “suggested threads”.
Just days after the Threads issue came to light, a damning report on measures voluntarily instituted by Meta to protect children and teenagers was issued and found the measures “woefully ineffective.” The report, “Teen Accounts, Broken Promises,” analyzed ten years’ worth of supposed efforts by Instagram to promote youth safety and well-being. The groups issuing the report, the Molly Rose Foundation in the United Kingdom and Parents for Safe Online Spaces in the U.S., were founded by parents who claim their children were harmed and, in some cases, died as a result of social media harassment and bullying, or dangerous content, including content about self-harm.
Whistleblower Arturo Bejar was part of the team. Researchers did find that some of the teen account safety features worked as advertised, such as a “quiet mode” meant to temporarily disable notifications at night, and a feature requiring parents to approve changes to a child’s account settings.
That may be cold comfort to concerned parents. According to Clare Morello, Fellow, The Ethics and Public Policy Center, and author of a book on digital harms to teens and kids, “The collective nature of the harms from digital technologies makes it extremely difficult for individual parents to successfully protect their children or even opt out of them entirely.” What Morello does recommend is legal accountability, which hasn’t happened yet. “Parents need legislation from the government to help them effectively protect their children from online dangers.”
ENGAGEMENT RESOURCES
The Tech Exit: A Practical Guide to Freeing Kids and Teens from Smartphones by Clare Morell, Penguin Random House, 2025.
Careless People: A Cautionary Tale of Power, Greed, and Lost Idealism by Sarah Wynn-Williams, Flatiron Books, 2025. (A former employee’s exposé of Facebook’s inner workings).