Facebook gave child porn traffickers a free pass—misgendering caught an immediate ban: report

Unsealed court filings have revealed that Meta gave a pass to accounts that regularly were engaged in "trafficking humans for sex." However, at the same time, the platform would often implement immediate bans when users "misgendered" someone on the platform.

Elon Musk said in a post to X that on Instagram as well as Facebook, "misgendering a trans person resulted in an immediate ban, but trafficking child prostitution allowed 17 strikes!"

According to a report from TIME citing the court documents, the company had a policy that allowed for "17" strikes on an account that reportedly engaged in the “trafficking of humans for sex."

“You could incur 16 violations for prostitution and sexual solicitation, and upon the 17th violation, your account would be suspended," Instagram's former head of safety Vaishnavi Jayakumar testified in court documents unsealed on Friday. She added, "By any measure across the industry, [it was] a very, very high strike threshold."

A brief was filed by plaintiffs in the Northern District of California, which alleged that Meta has been aware of serious harms the platform risks for younger users, but has downplayed those risks at the same time as the platform was engaged in politically correct shadow bans and removing content for such things as using male pronouns for a man identifying as a woman. The brief stated that Meta was aware that millions of adult strangers were contacting children on the platform, and that while child sex abuse content was frequently detected, it was rarely removed. 

One of the leading attorneys in the case against Meta stated, per court documents, “Meta has designed social media products and platforms that it is aware are addictive to kids, and they’re aware that those addictions lead to a whole host of serious mental health issues."

“Like tobacco, this is a situation where there are dangerous products that were marketed to kids,” Warren adds. “They did it anyway, because more usage meant more profits for the company," attorney Previn Warren added.

More than 1,800 plaintiffs in the case—including children and parents, schools, state attorneys general, and others—have brought the lawsuit against Meta as well as the parent companies behind TikTok, Snapchat, and YouTube. The plaintiffs alleged that the companies “relentlessly pursued a strategy of growth at all costs, recklessly ignoring the impact of their products on children’s mental and physical health."

The unsealed details surrounding Meta is just a portion of the sizeable lawsuit against the various companies.