Meta downplayed rampant spread of self-harm images among teen Instagram users: lawsuit

Meta drastically downplayed the degree to which teens were being shown alarming pictures and videos on Instagram that depicted self-harm – even as the tech giant’s own research showed the problem was far more prevalent than publicly known, according to allegations in newly revealed court papers. The latest allegations surfaced late last week in an unredacted version of a bombshell lawsuit filed in October by 33 states, including New York – and they cite Meta’s claim in 2021 that “less than 0.05% of views were of content that violated our standards against Suicide & Self-Injury.” Meta — whose billionaire chief executive Mark Zuckerberg faces a possible grilling on Capitol Hill early next year over Instagram and child safety — made the bold statistical claim in its “Community Standards Enforcement Report” for the third quarter of 2021. However, a “contemporaneous” internal Meta survey that same year found that “6.7% of surveyed Instagram users had seen self-harm content within the last seven days,” according to the suit. The number purportedly jumped to 8.4% for users aged 13 to 15. “In other words, while a reader of the CSER Reports could reasonably understand that self-harm content on Instagram is rarely encountered by users—far
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