The major network evening newscasts have failed to report a story that has been reported far and wide elsewhere: the multistate lawsuit against Meta, parent company of both Facebook and Instagram, over complaints that the company failed to protect the privacy of minors thus exposing them to harm.
Instead, the story has been relegated to streaming newscasts. Here’s how ABC covered the story on its streaming service ABC News Live Prime:
REPORTER: Social media giant Meta, owner of Facebook and Instagram, is accused of violating federal laws on children’s privacy. The legal complaint filed by attorneys general in 33 states alleges Instagram coveted and pursued users who were under 13 without parental permission, disabling only a fraction of those underage accounts. In response, Meta tells ABC news, “…we have measures in place to remove these accounts when we identify them. However, verifying the age of people online is a complex industry challenge.”
The underlying facts of the lawsuit are more serious than this scant coverage would suggest, per The New York Times:
The privacy charges in the case center on a 1998 federal law, the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act. That law requires that online services with content aimed at children obtain verifiable permission from a parent before collecting personal details — like names, email addresses or selfies — from users under 13. Fines for violating the law can run to more than $50,000 per violation.
The lawsuit argues that Meta elected not to build systems to effectively detect and exclude such underage users because it viewed children as a crucial demographic — the next generation of users — that the company needed to capture to assure continued growth.
Meta had many indicators of underage users, according to the Wednesday filing. An internal company chart displayed in the unsealed material, for example, showed how Meta tracked the percentage of 11- and 12-year-olds who used Instagram daily, the complaint said.
That’s pretty serious stuff. The willful failure to protect children in order to ensure the next generation’s eyeballs. As we know, children are preyed upon on social media, and bombarded with all kinds of degeneracy.
And it isn’t like the networks didn’t have the time to cover this, even if with the same 30-second brief that ABC mustered for their streaming newscast. ABC and NBC ran human-interest stories on their newscasts, and CBS closed its newscast with a report on the 2024 TSA dog calendar (Norah O’Donnell’s forced dog puns were ruff to watch, too).
I hope to be wrong, but these omissions suggest, at bare minimum, a lack of interest in this story and, at worst, a willful intent to keep this lawsuit away from their viewers.