Families demand action from Meta over children’s deaths linked to platform harm

“Meta profits, kids pay the price,” was the message delivered by dozens of grieving families at the doors of Meta’s Manhattan office on Thursday.

Forty-five families traveled from across the U.S. and as far as the United Kingdom to hold a vigil outside the East Village headquarters of Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram. Holding photos of their children, they spoke about lives lost to cyberbullying, sextortion scams, and suicide-glorifying content—calling on Meta to take immediate action to protect children on its platforms.

On a pile of rose bouquets, the families and demonstrators placed an open letter addressed to Mark Zuckerberg. Signed by more than 11,000 individuals and 18 safety organizations, the letter urges Meta to “end the algorithmic promotion of dangerous content to children under 18, including explicit and sexualizing content, racism and hate speech, content promoting disordered eating or self-harm, dangerous viral challenges, and content promoting drugs and alcohol.”

The letter also calls for concrete steps to “prevent nefarious actors including sexual predators, sextortionists, and drug dealers from finding, meeting, and grooming children and teens across all Meta platforms,” along with faster, more transparent responses to reports of harmful content or behavior.

The vigil was organized by Heat Initiative, ParentsTogether Action, and Design It for Us. Among those in attendance was Tammy Rodriguez, a mother from Connecticut, whose 11-year-old daughter died by suicide after becoming addicted to Instagram and later being groomed by men on another platform. In an effort to understand her daughter’s experience, Rodriguez created a fake Instagram account as a 12-year-old. “Within weeks the whole algorithm changed, I would never have received that on my own, just suicide content, self-harm content,” Rodriguez said, per ABC 7.

Mary Rodee, another mother who lost her 15-year-old son in 2021, shared that he was coerced into sending intimate photos by a sextortion scammer on Facebook. “My kid is dead. I have nothing else to lose,” Rodee said at the vigil, according to Bloomberg. “Like so many other families, I’ve been trying to meet with Mark Zuckerberg for years on this issue, but he refuses. We’re all here to show that we’re willing to do whatever it takes.”

“We know parents are concerned about their teens’ having unsafe or inappropriate experiences online,” a Meta spokesperson told Fast Company. “It’s why we significantly changed the Instagram experience for teens with Teen Accounts, which were designed to address parents’ top concerns. Teen Accounts have built-in protections that limit who can contact teens and the content they see, and 94% of parents say these are helpful. We’ve also developed safety features to help prevent abuse, like warning teens when they’re chatting to someone in another country, and recently worked with Childhelp to launch a first-of-its kind online safety curriculum, helping middle schoolers recognize potential online harm and know where to go for help.”

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