Late last month, 33 states filed a suit against Facebook alleging that the company has purposely engineered its platforms to addict young users. Now, some of the documents in the suit have been unsealed, and they paint a disturbing portrait of Facebook’s carelessness and possible complicity in allowing millions of underage users to create accounts in blatant violation of the company’s own rules.

According to the complaint, Facebook received over 402,000 reports of underage users on Instagram in 2021, but the social media giant only removed less than half of them. The report also said that Facebook at times has a backlog of over 2.5 million underage accounts awaiting action. The suit says that this huge number of underage users is an “open secret” at the company, and that it knowingly allows them.

“Meta knows that what it is doing is bad for kids — period. Thanks to our unredacted federal complaint, it is now there in black and white, and it is damning,” California Attorney General Rob Bonta said.

These are just allegations for now, and the truth will ultimately come out in court. However, Facebook’s position is looking more and more dire by the day.

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