Not so long ago, Mark Zuckerberg was working in overdrive to convince the world that his company was doing everything it could to protect children. In 2021, he posted a note to his personal Facebook page, writing that he had “spent a lot of time reflecting” on the types of experiences he would want his daughters, then 4 and 5 years old, to have online. “It’s very important to me that everything we build is safe and good for kids,” he wrote, emphasizing that the company absolutely does not “prioritize profit over safety and well-being.” But documents recently viewed by The Atlantic show that behind the scenes, the company now known as Meta was divided on whether protecting kids should take precedence over user growth and engagement. For years, the company only incrementally rolled out restrictive safety features, even as its own staff detailed the risks its platforms posed to children. Take, for example, a technical problem that affected the company’s systems in November 2020. This issue limited Meta’s ability to track bad actors, at …
