The Instagram Groomer Scandal That Nobody Cared About

 The Instagram Groomer Scandal That Nobody Cared About

How a 2019 internal Meta document exposed catastrophic child-safety failures, resurfaced in a 2025 antitrust trial, and then vanished from public outrageIn May 2025, during the closing weeks of the Federal Trade Commission’s long-running monopolization lawsuit against Meta Platforms, government lawyers introduced a document that should have detonated across every news cycle in America.The document was a June 2019 internal Meta presentation titled “Inappropriate Interactions with Children on Instagram.” Among its findings:

• Instagram’s recommendation engine was suggesting that accounts Meta itself had flagged as “groomers” (i.e., adults exhibiting predatory behavior toward children) follow minor users.
• Fully 27% of the accounts recommended to these groomer profiles belonged to children.
• Over a single three-month period in 2019, more than two million minor-held accounts were pushed to predatory adults by Instagram’s own algorithms.

For context, the baseline rate at which Instagram recommended minors to ordinary adult users was 7%. Groomers were being served child accounts at almost four times the normal rate.This was not a leak from an outside researcher or a whistle-blower. This was Meta’s own safety and integrity team reporting the numbers to senior executives — including, presumably, Mark Zuckerberg — six full years before the document saw daylight in court.Yet the revelation barely registered. A handful of technology and legal outlets (Bloomberg, The Verge, TechCrunch, The Washington Post) ran straightforward accounts. Cable news ignored it almost entirely. There were no emergency congressional hearings, no viral parent outrage on TikTok, no advertiser boycott. Even accounts that normally amplify QAnon-style “elite pedophile ring” narratives stayed strangely quiet.Two weeks later, on May 20, 2025, U.S. District Judge James E. Boasberg ruled comprehensively in Meta’s favor and dismissed the FTC’s case. The groomer document was mentioned only in passing in his 97-page opinion, and then only to note that child-safety issues were outside the scope of an antitrust lawsuit.The scandal that should have ended careers evaporated in plain sight. How did we get here?1. The 2019 numbers in detailThe internal slides (first reported by Bloomberg and later corroborated by court filings) are stomach-churning when you read the raw data:

• Meta’s systems had already identified thousands of accounts as “groomers” based on behavioral signals (repeatedly attempting to contact minors, being mass-blocked or reported by teens, etc.).
• When these groomer accounts opened Instagram, the “People You May Know” and follow-suggestion surfaces fed them child accounts at a wildly disproportionate rate.
• 2,043,816 unique minor accounts were recommended to groomers in just 90 days.
• 500,000+ minors received follow requests from accounts that Meta’s own safety classifiers believed were predatory.

To be clear: Meta knew in real time that its core growth engine — the same recommendation algorithm that decides which accounts you see and which see you — was functioning as a predator-discovery tool. The company’s eventual fixes (restricting teen accounts to private-by-default in September 2024, rolling out “suspicious adult” blocks in 2021–2023, and adding parental consent requirements for under-16 setting changes) came years after the scale of the problem was documented internally.2. Why the 2025 courtroom moment fell flatThe FTC introduced the groomer document not because the antitrust trial was suddenly about child safety — it wasn’t — but to bolster a narrower argument: that Meta systematically under-invested in Instagram’s safety and integrity teams after acquiring the app in 2012, choosing instead to starve resources and prioritize growth and ad revenue.Testimony from Instagram co-founder Kevin Systrom, former integrity VP Guy Rosen, and internal emails painted a consistent picture:

• Instagram’s child-safety and anti-abuse teams were kept deliberately small.
• In 2018–2019, Rosen repeatedly warned Zuckerberg that Instagram was “behind” Facebook on integrity issues and needed aggressive investment.
• Zuckerberg’s response, according to Rosen’s contemporaneous emails, was that Instagram had “another year or two” before it needed to catch up, and that resource allocation was “deliberate.”

The FTC’s theory: by refusing to fund adequate safety infrastructure, Meta preserved its monopoly — competitors who might have invested more heavily in trust and safety never got the oxygen to challenge Instagram’s dominance.Judge Boasberg was visibly uninterested. When FTC lawyers lingered on the groomer statistics, he interrupted: “Let’s move along.” In his final opinion he wrote that however “disturbing” the 2019 findings were, they were “years-old” and irrelevant to whether Meta possesses monopoly power in 2025.3. The broader collapse of public outrageSeveral converging factors explain why one of the worst corporate child-endangerment scandals in American history produced almost no sustained fury:a) Scandal fatigue and the Epstein paradox
By 2025 the American public had lived through Cambridge Analytica, Christchurch live-streaming, Myanmar genocide facilitation, Teen Vogue mental-health contagion stories, and endless whistle-blower dumps. Another document showing that a tech platform harmed children felt like old news. Paradoxically, the Epstein files and elite child-trafficking conspiracies had so thoroughly colonized the discourse that a concrete, documented, mass-scale failure by a household-name company seemed… mundane.b) The TikTok distraction
Meta successfully reframed the entire antitrust case around short-form video competition. Once Judge Boasberg accepted that Instagram Reels and TikTok are “reasonably interchangeable” in the eyes of users and advertisers, the 2019 groomer algorithm became ancient history — something that happened in a different market, on a different app, in a different era.c) Political realignment
The trial ended just as the second Trump administration was taking shape. Trump’s highly public dinner with Zuckerberg in September 2025 and his simultaneous push to preempt all state-level AI regulation (a massive favor to Meta, OpenAI, Google, and the rest of Big Tech) shifted elite attention away from historical sins and toward future deregulatory bonanzas.d) Judicial normalization of harm
Boasberg’s opinion contains a remarkable passage defending algorithmic video feeds over traditional social networking:

“They can sift through millions of videos and find the perfect one for her — and it is more likely to interest her than a humdrum update from a friend she knew in high school.”

In a single sentence the court ratified the transformation of Instagram from a tool for human connection into a slot machine — and declared the trade-off not merely acceptable but superior.4. The real story the trial accidentally toldThe FTC lost on the law, but the evidence it put into the public record is devastating:

• Meta documented, in 2019, that its recommendation engine was a predator-facilitation tool at industrial scale.
• Senior executives, including the CEO, were informed.
• The company consciously decided that fixing the problem was less urgent than continued hyper-growth.
• Six years later the primary “fix” remains opt-in teen accounts that still allow 16- and 17-year-olds to switch themselves to public with no oversight.

Meanwhile, Instagram continues to be the app where the overwhelming majority of in-person child sexual abuse material (CSAM) grooming begins, according to law-enforcement agencies and the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children (NCMEC). A 2024 NCMEC report found that 78% of minor victims who were groomed online leading to offline contact were first approached on Instagram — far ahead of Snapchat (12%) or any other platform.5. Where we are now (November 2025)Meta’s stock is near all-time highs. Instagram Reels ad revenue is growing 40%+ year-over-year. Teen daily active usage is at record levels. The company is aggressively integrating generative AI tools (Imagine, AI Studio, Llama-powered chatbots) that will make discovering and contacting strangers — including minors — even easier.Legislative efforts to impose genuine age verification, default private teen accounts with mandatory parental opt-in, or liability for algorithmic amplification of CSAM have all stalled. The most recent serious proposal — the Kids Off Social Media Act (S.3314) — died in committee in September 2025 after intense lobbying from Meta, Snap, and TikTok.And the 2019 groomer document? It is now just another unsealed exhibit in a dismissed case, gathering dust in the PACER database.The quiet burial of what should have been an era-defining scandal is, in its own way, the perfect epitaph for the Big Tech antitrust era that began with such hope in 2020 and ended, five years later, with a shrug.We learned everything we needed to know about how these platforms actually work — and then collectively decided we no longer had the political or cultural energy to do anything about it.