Mark Zuckerberg stood before Congress earlier this year and apologized to grieving parents.
He swore Meta was doing everything possible to protect children online.
But Mark Zuckerberg got caught hiding this disgusting secret that will have parents seeing red.
Court documents blow the lid off Meta's child safety lies
Newly unsealed court filings just exposed what Mark Zuckerberg really knew about child exploitation on Instagram and Facebook.
And the details are stomach-churning.
Court documents filed Friday in the Northern District of California reveal Instagram had a "17-strike" policy for accounts engaged in sex trafficking.¹
Vaishnavi Jayakumar, Instagram's former head of safety and well-being, testified she was shocked when she learned about the policy after joining Meta in 2020.
"You could incur 16 violations for prostitution and sexual solicitation, and upon the 17th violation, your account would be suspended," Jayakumar said.²
She called it "a very, very high strike threshold" compared to industry standards.
Meanwhile, Meta would ban accounts immediately for posting spam or intellectual property violations.
But sex traffickers got 16 free passes.
The court filings are part of a massive lawsuit involving more than 1,800 plaintiffs including children, parents, school districts, and 42 state attorneys general suing Meta, TikTok, Snapchat, and YouTube for putting profits over child safety.
Meta knew Instagram was dangerous for kids and buried the research
Meta's own internal research found that teenagers who stopped using Instagram and Facebook for just one week showed lower rates of anxiety, depression, and loneliness.³
The company designed a "deactivation study" in late 2019 to test this. When the results came back bad, Meta killed the study and buried the findings.
One Meta employee warned this decision could backfire spectacularly.
"If the results are bad and we don't publish and they leak, is it going to look like tobacco companies doing research and knowing cigs were bad and then keeping that info to themselves?" the employee wrote.⁴
That's exactly what happened.
In December 2020, the Senate Judiciary Committee asked Meta in writing whether increased Instagram use among teenage girls correlated with increased depression and anxiety.
Meta's answer was one word: "No."⁵
They lied to Congress while sitting on research that proved the opposite.
Court documents reveal Meta's safety team repeatedly recommended making all teen accounts private by default to protect kids from adult strangers.
Meta's growth team studied the proposal and determined it would cost the company 1.5 million monthly active teens per year.⁶ So executives killed it.
Meta knew that making teen accounts private would eliminate 5.4 million unwanted interactions between adults and children every single day. They chose growth metrics over protecting kids from predators.
By 2022, an internal audit found Instagram was recommending 1.4 million potentially inappropriate adults to teenage users in a single day.⁷
Meta tracked "IIC" internally—their acronym for "inappropriate interactions with children." The company knew exactly what was happening and didn't care enough to fix it.
Meta's employees called Instagram a drug but executives wanted kids hooked
"Oh my gosh yall IG is a drug," one user-experience researcher allegedly wrote. "We're basically pushers."⁸
Meta doesn't study "addiction"—they study "problematic use." In 2018, researchers surveyed 20,000 Facebook users and found 58% showed some level of problematic use.⁹
But when Meta published the findings publicly, they only mentioned the 3.1% with "severe" problematic use. The other 55% with mild to moderate addiction just disappeared from the report.
Safety researchers proposed features to reduce addiction—like "quiet mode." Meta shelved it because executives worried it would hurt engagement metrics.¹⁰
One researcher recommended Meta inform the public: "Because our product exploits weaknesses in the human psychology to promote product engagement and time spent, we need to alert people to the effect that the product has on their brain."¹¹
Meta refused. They couldn't risk parents learning what Instagram was doing to their kids' developing brains.
Zuckerberg's apology was theater
Remember when Zuckerberg stood up at that January 2024 Senate hearing and apologized to parents whose children died?
Senator Josh Hawley pressed him: "Would you like now to apologize to the victims who have been harmed by your product?"
Zuckerberg stood, turned around, and faced the parents holding photos of their dead children. "I'm sorry for everything you have all been through," he said. "No one should have to go through the things that your families have suffered."¹²
It was all an act.
Because while Zuckerberg was apologizing in public, Meta was fighting tooth and nail to keep these court documents sealed.
They didn't want anyone to know about the 17-strike policy for sex traffickers.
They didn't want Congress to see the research they buried about Instagram causing depression in teens.
They didn't want parents to learn about the 1.4 million inappropriate adults their algorithm recommended to children every single day.
Brian Boland, Meta's former vice president of partnerships who worked at the company for 11 years, testified about the company's real priorities.
"My feeling then and my feeling now is that they don't meaningfully care about user safety. It's not something that they spend a lot of time on. And I really think they don't care."¹³
Meta aggressively targeted young users because Zuckerberg made it a "top goal" to acquire teen users.
Internal documents from 2024 stated that "acquiring new teen users is mission critical to the success of Instagram."¹⁴
They pushed notifications to students during school hours—what employees called "school blasts."
One employee captured Meta's real strategy: "One of the things we need to optimize for is sneaking a look at your phone under your desk in the middle of Chemistry."¹⁵
That's who Mark Zuckerberg really is—not the apologetic CEO standing before grieving parents, but the billionaire who built an empire by getting kids addicted to apps that he knew were destroying their mental health and exposing them to predators, all because it made him richer.
¹ Charlotte Alter, "Court Filings Allege Meta Downplayed Risks to Children and Misled the Public," TIME, November 22, 2025.
² Ibid.
³ Ibid.
⁴ Ibid.
⁵ Ibid.
⁶ Ibid.
⁷ Ibid.
⁸ Ibid.
⁹ Ibid.
¹⁰ Ibid.
¹¹ Ibid.
¹² Scott Wong, "Mark Zuckerberg apologizes to parents at Senate child safety hearing," NBC News, January 31, 2024.
¹³ Alter, TIME.
¹⁴ Ibid.
¹⁵ Ibid.
