Big Tech companies have allegedly failed to adequately address child sexual abuse material — and encouraged children younger than 13 to use their platforms, according to court filings in a US lawsuit against Meta, Google, TikTok and Snapchat.

The most detailed allegations in the court filings are reserved for Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram. Some of the more egregious allegations against Meta include requiring a user to be caught 17 times attempting to traffic people for sex before removing that user from the platform, intentionally designing its youth safety features to be ineffective, recognizing that optimizing engagement from its teen users meant serving up teen users more harmful content and continuing to do so anyway, and stalling internal efforts to cut back on child predators from contacting children due to user growth concerns.

None of the allegations levelled against Meta are surprising and are in fact completely in line with what we know from previous Meta whistleblowers and investigative journalism from outlets like the Wall Street Journal.

In 2021, 

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