The New York Times (NYT) and The Wall Street Journal (WSJ) revealed previously redacted details Saturday of a US multi-state lawsuit against Facebook parent company Meta, alleging that Meta purposefully designed its social media platforms to be attractive to children and collected children’s personal data despite the company’s guidelines barring young children from joining its platforms.
The original lawsuit, filed in October, was heavily redacted and alleged that Meta engineered its social media platforms to maximize the number of youth users and the amount of time those youth users spent on the site in order to collect and sell their information for profit. The lawsuit also alleged that Meta went out of its way to hide studies and reports on the long and short-term consequences of extended social media usage on young users. The lawsuit claimed this violates the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Rule, promulgated by the Federal Trade Commission (FTC),