Matching Teens to "Groomers" Was Once Part of This Company's Business

A major antitrust trial takes an "ancillary" detour to a chilling tour of online life

A month ago, on April 14th, one of the largest antitrust trials in recent memory commenced in the Washington, D.C. courtroom of District Chief Justice James Boasberg, now famous for finding the Trump administration in contempt for violating court orders on deportations. Federal Trade Commission v. Meta Platforms, Inc. has nothing to with immigration, instead asking a novel question: did Mark Zuckerberg’s Facebook/Meta operation acquire WhatsApp and Instagram for legitimate reasons, or to quash competition in search of social media monopoly?

If that question doesn’t interest you, you’d likely have been dozing when last week, on the 14th trial day, Meta Chief Information Security Officer Guy Rosen took the stand. Rosen was called by the FTC to answer questions about whether or not Facebook invested adequate resources in Instagram after its 2012 acquisition for $1 billion. In 2019, Rosen reportedly believed IG was “understaffed as an app-surface when compared to Facebook” and sought 149 more employees to handle various issues. One notable one was raised by Rosen to IG head Adam Mosseri in an email on May 16, 2018:

Harmful Behavior… e.g., grooming especially — this really worries me given we’re finding a lot of, umm, opportunity on FB, and given IG’s younger audience I bet we’ll find we have work to do there…

Email, Guy Rosen to Adam Mosseri, May 16, 2018

Say what? “Grooming… really worries me given we’re finding a lot of, um, opportunity on FB” is not a common line in a legal exhibit. Brendan Benedict, who’s covering the trial for Matt Stoller’s aptly-named and excellent Substack “Big Tech on Trial,” wrote down another reply from Rosen to the company’s head of Data Analytics: “You are correct, there is a growing realization this is underfunded. This was deliberate — I explicitly had the convo with Mark at HC planning and he thought IG has another year or two to catch up. I think we are not sure that is the case anymore.” Another email read, “IG hasn’t done much on harmful content.”

The idea that FB/IG had “work to do” on “grooming,” and that certain kinds of underfunding were “deliberate,” became more explicit when an exhibit was introduced, an internal study from the next year, 2019, titled “Inappropriate Interactions with Children on Instagram.”

To be clear from the start, the mere fact that FB/IG conducted this study showed executives were concerned about the problem, and understood there was “work to do there.” However, the study suggested not only that there was a longstanding problem with “groomers” meeting minors on IG, but that the company’s algorithms were accelerating those interactions. One slide dropped four consecutive unsettling bullet points:

• Overall IG: 7% of all follow recommendations to adults were minors

• Groomers: 27% of all follow recommendations to

  groomers were minors

• We are recommending nearly 4X as many minors to groomers (nearly 2 million minors in the last 3 months)

• 22% of those recommendations resulted in a follow request

You can do the math yourself, but 22% of 2 million minors receiving follow requests from “groomers” over a 3-month period is not a small number. Perhaps more unsettling was a slide reading, “We may be facilitating possible groomers finding young people,” adding, “IG recommended a minor… to an account engaged in groomer-esque behavior.” Additionally, there was a flow chart demonstrating the process: