At least two different Meta employees requested Mark Zuckerberg and other executives grant additional funding and staffing to put in place stronger safety guardrails for youth users. 

This revelation comes in light of more than a dozen lawsuits filed by attorneys general in 45 states and the District of Columbia since last year that have accused Meta of deceiving the public about the dangers posed by Instagram and Facebook to teenagers and children, failing to put adequate safety features in place, and its intentional effort of attracting teenagers onto its platforms. 

Mounting evidence collected in the state lawsuits reveals the concerns that teenagers and children on social media are sexually solicited, body-shamed, and become addicted to the sites due to its algorithms are all based in reality. Just on Monday, the U.S. Surgeon General, Dr. Vivek H. Murthy, made an announcement that social media platforms pose a public health risk for young people and called for warning labels to be placed on the platforms. 

But for Meta employees, this public health concern for youth has been on their radar since at least since 2017, according to reporting from the New York Times, when Instagram’s chief executive Kevin Systrom emailed Zuckerberg requesting more staff, which would work to diminish harm posed on users. In response, Zuckerberg said he would include a plan for Instagram to hire more staff, but said Facebook faced “more extreme issues,” referring at the time to Congressional hearings about disinformation during the 2016 presidential election. 

Systrom emailed Zuckerberg back, saying this request was urgent, as some users were posting dangerous videos, including a boy who shot himself on Instagram Live. It is not clear if Zuckerberg hired more staff to address Systrom’s concern. This comes after 2016 when Zuckerberg focused his efforts on recruiting and engaging more teenagers on both social media platforms. 

Then, in 2019, executive David Ginsberg emailed Mark Zuckerberg requesting that he conduct research and work to reduce the compulsive use and loneliness induced by being on Instagram and Facebook. Ginsberg called for a particular focus on the effects on teenagers and asked for 24 engineers, researchers, and staff to look into it. 

However, Ginsberg’s proposal was shut down a week later by Susan Li that the project wouldn’t be funded due to staffing constraints and Instagram’s head Adam Mosseri also declined to finance the proect.

“A lot of these decisions ultimately landed on Mr. Zuckerberg’s desk,” Raúl Torrez, the attorney general of New Mexico, told the New York Times. “He needs to be asked explicitly, and held to account explicitly, for the decisions that he’s made.”

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Meanwhile, Liz Crenshaw, a spokeswoman for Meta, told the outlet the company has always been committed to ensuring the safety and wellbeing of youth, with the company having developed more than 50 youth safety tools and features, including limiting age-inappropriate content and restricting teenagers under 16 from receiving direct messages from people they didn’t follow.

She said the lawsuits against the company “mischaracterize our work using selective quotes and cherry-picked documents.”