Instagram’s former head of safety and well-being alleged in newly unsealed testimony that Meta had a lax policy for banning accounts that engage in “trafficking of humans for sex.” Vaishnavi Jayakumar testified that it would take 17 strikes on an account for Meta to delete it. “You could incur 16 violations for prostitution and sexual solicitation, and upon the 17th violation, your account would be suspended,” she reportedly testified, according to Time. She added that “by any measure across the industry, [it was] a very, very high strike threshold.” The lawsuit, filed against Instagram, TikTok, Snapchat, and YouTube, represents more than 1,800 plaintiffs. It was filed in the Northern District of California, and the plaintiffs claim that their allegations align with the company’s internal documentation. The suit also alleges Jayakumar reported the platform not having a simple way to report child sexual abuse content, but it was dismissed as being too difficult to solve. In addition, the suit accuses Meta of having “lied to Congress” in 2020 about their platforms heightening levels of anxiety, depression, and loneliness in teen girls, since Meta found conflicting results in a study on users who quit the platforms. Zuckerberg even suggested at one point that “teen time spent be our top goal of 2017,” per a company executive quoted in the brief.
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