Meta has faced hard questions in court about why it took so long to add basic protections for teens on its platform. New testimony shows that company leaders knew about the risks years earlier. The deposition paints a picture of slow action and painful trade-offs between privacy and safety.
Delay in Protections
A federal lawsuit is probing whether major social apps made design choices that increase young people’s screen time and harm their well-being. The case includes claims against several companies and is unfolding in the Northern District of California. Prosecutors asked Apple-style questions about internal emails and product road maps. The recent unsealed deposition focused on when the company first saw evidence that teens were exposed to sexual images in private messages.
Officials who run the platform were shown an email thread from 2018. The memo used blunt language to describe how private messages could be misused. Company witnesses agreed that the note described real dangers. The company did not launch an automatic blurring feature for explicit images in direct messages until April 2024. That gap led prosecutors to ask why the work took so long.
Court Deposition Details
Adam Mosseri was deposed and pressed about the timeline and the decisions. He acknowledged that adults can send explicit images in direct messages and that such harm is a concern. He also said the company tried to balance privacy and safety when shaping product choices.
The deposition included a thread that mentioned the risks in stark terms. Guy Rosen was one of the executives in the conversation. The exchange showed the company had internal awareness of the problem long before it shipped a fix.
The court record also reports new survey figures. The statistics are a cause of concern as to the level of exposure among the young teens. Almost every fifth user between the ages of 13 and 15 years reported viewing nudity or sexual material on the site that they did not desire to see. Other survey results showed that some young users had recently encountered posts about self-harm on the service. These statistics were cited during the deposition to show harm and risk.
Prosecutors asked why the company did not warn parents earlier that private messaging is not monitored in the way that public content is. The company defended its choices and pointed to a series of safety tools and research it has done over many years. Meta offered a public statement noting work on teen protections and other policy changes. That statement was repeated in court filings and in public commentary.
What the Filings Show
The court papers and testimony make a few points clear. First, the company’s leaders saw evidence of the harms years before a product change. Second, product work moved slowly. Third, the company framed some decisions as trade-offs between user privacy and content safety. The record now sits before judges and lawyers whose task is to decide whether the company acted responsibly and whether its choices caused harm.