Meta executives refused to disable the “People You May Know” feature on its Facebook app after an employee suggested that it could lead to Child Exploitation
In 2018, David Erb, who was an engineering manager at “Facebook” at the time, led a team dedicated to identifying unsafe user behavior on the platform.
When the team looked at inappropriate interactions between adults and minors on the app, they discovered that Facebook’s “people you might know” algorithm was the most common way adults on the platform used to find children to target.
“It was a hundred times worse than any of us expected,” Erb told The Wall Street Journal in a recent interview. “There were millions of pedophiles targeting tens of millions of children,”he added.
The newspaper reported that some cases included the request of sensitive photos by adults of teenage girls for money, and threats to leak nude photos of them.
At the same time, meta executives were reportedly in talks at the time about moving to encrypt Facebook messages to “ensure the privacy of user data”.
Accordingly, concerned that encryption plans could make it difficult to detect child exploitation behavior, Erb said his team suggested that Facebook’s “people you might know” feature stop recommending minors to adults. Erb revealed to the newspaper that the executives of “meta” rejected the proposal.
In the end, “meta” decided to proceed with the encryption of “Facebook”messages. In turn, Erb said that he was dismissed from his post and resigned shortly after.
On the other hand, Andy Stone, a spokesman for the “meta”, stated that ERB’s claims are false.
“The truth is that although we have invested for a long time in child safety efforts, in 2018 we began work on restricting recommendations for suspicious adults, and we continued ongoing efforts to remove large groups of offending accounts,”Stone said in an emailed statement.
“Meta” confirmed to the newspaper that the company has removed 160 thousand accounts related to child exploitation since 2020.
At the same time, documents obtained by the “New York Times” claimed that “meta” deliberately has millions of underage users on Instagram.
According to the documents, 33 US states claim that the company routinely continued to collect personal information about children, while under US law it is illegal to collect data from children under the age of 13.
