Sex trafficking on Meta platforms was both difficult to report and widely tolerated, according to a court filing unsealed Friday. In a plaintiffs’ brief filed as part of a major lawsuit against four social media companies, Instagram’s former head of safety and well-being Vaishnavi Jayakumar testified that when she joined Meta in 2020 she was shocked to learn that the company had a “17x” strike policy for accounts 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,” Jayakumar reportedly testified, adding that “by any measure across the industry, [it was] a very, very high strike threshold.” The plaintiffs claim that this testimony is corroborated by internal company documentation.
The brief, filed by plaintiffs in the Northern District of California, alleges that Meta was aware of serious harms on its platform and engaged in a broad pattern of deceit to downplay risks to young users. According to the brief, Meta was aware that millions of adult strangers were contacting minors on its sites; that its products exacerbated mental health issues in teens; and that content related to eating disorders, suicide, and child sexual abuse was frequently detected, yet rarely removed. According to the brief, the company failed to disclose these harms to the public or to Congress, and refused to implement safety fixes that could have protected young users.
“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,” says Previn Warren, the co-lead attorney for the plaintiffs in the case. “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.”
The following allegations against Meta come from the brief filed in an unprecedented multidistrict litigation. More than 1,800 plaintiffs—including children and parents, school districts, and state attorneys general—have joined together in a suit alleging that the parent companies behind Instagram, TikTok, Snapchat, and YouTube “relentlessly pursued a strategy of growth at all costs, recklessly ignoring the impact of their products on children’s mental and physical health,” according to their master complaint. The newly unsealed allegations about Meta are just one small part of the sprawling suit. (TIME filed a motion to intervene in the case to ensure public access to court records; the motion was denied.)
The plaintiffs’ brief, first reported by TIME, purports to be based on sworn depositions of current and former Meta executives, internal communications, and company research and presentations obtained during the lawsuit’s discovery process. It includes quotes and excerpts from thousands of pages of testimony and internal company documents. TIME was not able to independently view the underlying testimony or research quoted in the brief, since those documents remain under seal.
But the brief still paints a damning picture of the company’s internal research and deliberations about issues that have long plagued its platforms. Plaintiffs claim that since 2017, Meta has aggressively pursued young users, even as its internal research suggested its social media products could be addictive and dangerous to kids. Meta employees proposed multiple ways to mitigate these harms, according to the brief, but were repeatedly blocked by executives who feared that new safety features would hamper teen engagement or user growth.
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Michael Burry Unchained: ‘Big Short’ Attacks Nvidia On Substack
Michael Burry, the investor immortalized in “The Big Short for predicting the 2008 housing crisis, has executed his most significant operational shift in years: he has officially shuttered his hedge fund, Scion Asset Management, to dedicate his full attention to a paid Substack newsletter, “Cassandra Unchained.
For years, Burry’s market pronouncements were limited to cryptic and quickly-deleted social media posts, often leaving investors to frantically decode his warnings.
The move to a subscription-based, long-form platform is a decisive departure, formalizing his role as a public-facing market contrarian.
In the blog’s About section, Burry says it will focus on “stocks, market and economic trends, special situations, and investment manias — with the true stories, hard lessons, and empiric mental models from 25 years of professional portfolio management woven throughout.
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