Meta exec Adam Mosseri wanted to ‘upsell’ Instagram to children under 13: lawsuit

Instagram’s boss once floated a plan to “upsell” the social-media app to children under 13 — a reckless move to enlarge its base of pre-teen users as Meta struggled to police an influx of underage accounts, according to newly revealed allegations in an explosive lawsuit.

Instagram head Adam Mosseri allegedly concocted the plan in response to a massive “backlog” of some 700,000 accounts potentially belonging to users under age 13 that required review in late 2020, according to newly unredacted portions of New Mexico Attorney General Raul Torrez’s lawsuit against Meta.

The amended complaint claims that Meta — angling to boost user growth and advertising dollars despite concerns about child safety — had established an “underage enforcement war room” to address the profit hurdle.

Instagram was “not only aware that users under 13 were lying about their age to gain access to the platform, but that Meta executives believed the answer to this solution was to ‘upsell’ the service as opposed to instituting stricter registration procedures,” according to the suit.

Filed in December, the suit alleges that top boss Mark Zuckerberg and other Meta executives prioritized profits even as kids were exposed to sex predators and disturbing content.

“Faced with this backlog, Instagram head Adam Mosseri proposed creating a new type of family-centered account in Instagram would permit Meta to ‘upsell Instagram to children under 13, and broadly have a more compelling story on how we responsibly manage the fact that there are those under 13 who register for Instagram accounts,’” the lawsuit alleges.