Instagram head Adam Mosseri was grilled over a six-year gap between knowing about teen safety risks and actually doing something about them. Court documents unsealed this week reveal internal emails from 2018 showing Meta executives discussing dangers teens faced in Instagram DMs—yet the company didn't roll out its nudity filter for minors until 2024. The disclosure is the latest blow to Meta's already battered reputation on child safety, adding fuel to the multistate lawsuit accusing the social media giant of knowingly harming young users.
Instagram is under fire again, but this time the evidence comes from its own executives. Newly unsealed court documents reveal that Adam Mosseri, who's led Instagram since 2018, was confronted about email chains showing the company understood the dangers teens faced in direct messages years before implementing protective measures. The smoking gun? Internal discussions from 2018 explicitly flagging safety concerns around unsolicited explicit content sent to minors through Instagram's messaging system.
Yet Meta didn't launch its nudity blur feature—designed to automatically filter sexually explicit images in DMs for users under 18—until early 2024. That's a six-year window where the company apparently knew about the problem but chose not to deploy a solution. The delay is now central to a sprawling legal battle involving dozens of state attorneys general who claim Meta deliberately designed its platforms to hook young users while ignoring the documented harms.
The court filing doesn't just expose the timeline. It reveals a pattern of internal handwringing without meaningful action. Email threads obtained through discovery show Instagram employees and executives discussing various approaches to teen safety in DMs, debating technical feasibility and potential user pushback. But year after year, the feature remained on the roadmap without shipping. Critics argue this wasn't about technical challenges—it was about priorities. Every safety feature that limits messaging or content delivery potentially impacts engagement metrics, and engagement is what drives ad revenue.
