It’s easy, with technology, to miss the forest for the trees. Every new AI advance grabs the limelight, and while everyone argues about the latest model, the older, uglier problem keeps festering underneath: large social platforms, used daily by hundreds of millions of teenagers, are still flooded with harmful, violent and risqué content. This is happening while adolescent brains are going through a critical stretch of development.
Event Context
But it fit a pattern people have pointed to before: your content gets used unless you go dig up the setting to opt out.
That warning didn’t slow Instagram down much. Mr. Zuckerberg kept adjusting the algorithmic feed, pushed hard into short-form video, and reworked ad targeting after Apple’s iOS 14 changes cut off a lot of Meta’s tracking data. Then large language models arrived on top of an engagement engine that was already fully built and running.
In that same period, the company filed more than two million CyberTip reports — the confidential referrals sent to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children when exploitation is suspected. Of those, 1.6 million involved shared or re-shared CSAM.
Meta has spent years telling the public that better automation and more advanced models will make its platforms safer. But a detection system only catches what it’s been built to catch. But here, it approved the material before anyone outside the company objected.
This same underlying design logic showed up in March in a U.S. courtroom. A jury found Meta and YouTube negligent in the case of a 20-year-old plaintiff, ruling that both platforms were built to maximise engagement among children with little regard for the consequences.
The jurors awarded $3 million in compensatory damages plus another $3 million in punitive damages, having concluded the companies acted with malice; Meta was assigned 70% of the blame, per media reports. It was the first verdict of its kind, and it came a day after another jury in the U.S., in New Mexico, separately ordered Meta to pay $375 million in civil penalties for enabling child sexual exploitation on its platforms.
Meta has said it is appealing the verdict as it contends that the complainant’s mental health struggles are tied to the content viewed and not the design of the platform.
That line of argument alone will take us back to what whistleblower Fances Haugen argued all along: these platforms were built on purpose to be addictive, tuned for time spent rather than user welfare. She noted that platforms like Instagram are taking refuge under Section 230 of the 1996 Communications Decency Act.
She argued that social media algorithms, and not the user-generated content itself, must be the focus of legal reform — particularly amending Section 230 — as algorithmic recommendation systems have the power to amplify certain set of posts that may never hit a user’s screen otherwise.
The same algorithmic design choice continues to flood a scrolling teenager’s feed, and it’s the same one that let an ad sexualising children slip past automated review and stay live.
Faster, newer AI moderation doesn’t touch the incentive sitting under all of it. AI can flag more, and flag it quicker. But it can’t fix a business built to keep people, kids included, engaged at any cost. Until that changes, the algorithms will keep chasing a mess their own business model keeps making.
Team Analysis
Then, in June 2025, Meta paid $14.3 billion for a 49% stake in Scale AI, a data-labelling and AI-training company, with no voting rights attached. Scale’s co-founder, Alexandr Wang, was brought in to run a new division called Meta Superintelligence Labs. Yann LeCun, who had been Meta’s chief AI scientist for years, left soon after to start something of his own, and the new team’s mandate shifted toward building AI meant to live inside Meta’s own products rather than compete on open leaderboards.
About 30 distinct ads of that kind turned up on the account, plus another 20 for adult pornography. When the outlet first reported one of the ads through Instagram’s own tool, the review team wrote back a day later saying it didn’t violate community standards. Only after a push back did the company pull the ads, suspend the accounts, and call what happened a “horrific crime.” India’s IT ministry then summoned Meta to explain how any of it got approved in the first place.
