Overview
- A consolidated federal lawsuit in the Northern District of California represents more than 1,800 plaintiffs against Instagram, TikTok, Snapchat, and YouTube over alleged harms to children.
- Former Instagram safety chief Vaishnavi Jayakumar testified that accounts could rack up 16 prostitution or sexual-solicitation violations and face suspension only on the 17th, describing the threshold as unusually high.
- Jayakumar also said that as of March 2020 Instagram lacked a simple in-app way to report child sexual abuse material and that fixing it was dismissed as too much work.
- The filing claims Meta misled Congress in 2020 about teen mental health impacts and cites internal material, including a reported 2017 goal to prioritize teen time spent on the platform.
- Meta told USA TODAY it now removes accounts on a first strike for human exploitation, says strike thresholds have tightened since 2019, defends its teen protections, and disputes the allegations as cherry-picked, while the case remains unresolved.