A former Meta employee accused the company of knowingly authorized children to his virtual reality platform, Horizon Worlds, despite security risks and potential violations of the federal law.
Kelly Stonelake, who worked for the company for almost 15 years and directed product marketing for Horizon Worlds until the beginning of 2024, submitted a statement under an oath as part of a complaint filed Thursday with the Federal Trade Commission. Fairplay, a non -profit organization focused on the media and children’s marketing, filed the complaint.
Stonelake, who said she was dismissed by Meta in January 2024 after being on medical leave for about a year, filed a complaint against her former employer in February for sexual harassment, sex discrimination and reprisals. Meta then submitted a request for rejection last month.
Fairplay alleges that Meta violated the law on the protection of online privacy of children (COPPA) by allowing children under 13 years old to access the horizon worlds using adult accounts – a flaw which, according to him, would allow the company to collect personal data from minors without parental consent. The non -profit organization asks the FTC to study META.
“We are committed to providing safe and adapted experiences on our platform,” Ryan Daniels, Meta spokesperson, Business Insider told. “Parents are required to manage the accounts for pre-adolescents 10-12 at the quest and their authorization to access Horizon Worlds.”
He added: “We offer declaration tools so that anyone can bring us minor accounts suspicious, and if we become aware of a pre-adolescent using a account for a person aged 13 or more, we will take measures to ensure that they are in the right experience.
Kelly Stonelake, former Meta employee, filed a complaint against the company in February. With the kind authorization of Kelly Stonelake
In a press release accompanying the complaint of the FTC, Stonelake said that Meta had “in -depth knowledge” that minors access the horizon worlds by connecting to the accounts recorded to adults.
“Throughout my experience, the emphasis put on horizon was constantly concerned with user growth, with security considerations managed by leadership responsibilities to minimize,” said Stonelake in his declaration.
She added: “Horizon Worlds was initially presented as a platform promoting inclusion and belonging, illustrated by hero scenarios such as providing a safe space for marginalized individuals. In reality, it has become a reproduction ground for uncontrolled racism, sexual harassment, intimidation and endangered of children.”
Stonelake has provided several examples of meta-frames with knowledge of minor users on the platform. Stonelake said that an employee had published on the Meta internal forum, the workplace, in 2022 on his experience on Horizon Worlds. According to the press release, the employee said that young users had led racial insults and noted that children under the age of 13 were present in virtual spaces. Stonelake claims that some meta leaders have discussed the position.
She also claims that some leaders were testing horizon worlds in 2022 but had trouble communicating because the voices of “very young” “children shouted on us behind adult accounts”.
Stonelake also alleges that there was a “general directive to avoid documenting discussions related to the presence of adolescents and children (users under the age of 13) on the platform” due to potential legal ramifications. Stonelake said that the internal concerns increased later to the exclusion of decision -making spaces.
Fairplay’s investigation
Fairplay said its nine-month survey on the Horizon worlds revealed that children under the age of 13 regularly access the platform using standard adult accounts, allowing META to collect sensitive data-perhaps in violation of federal law. The researchers of the non -profit association have documented the presence of children in almost all the virtual experiences they have visited, analyzed the opinions of the Meta App Store and said they observed Meta employees – called “community guides” – engage with minor users in world horizon without intervening.
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From July 2024 to March 2025, Fairplay declared that its researchers used the Meta Quest 2 and Quest 3 helmets to explore some of the most popular games and spaces in the Horizon worlds. In total, they said they had visited 12 different experiences at least twice each. During these 26 visits, the researchers said they had met 512 users, including 170 (around 33%) which they identified as clearly under 13 according to their voice and their behavior.
Fairplay said he has taken measures to guarantee accuracy by asking several researchers to independently examine recordings and to count only users that they could define definitively as a child. Because many users do not speak in vocal chat, Fairplay has said that its figures represent the minimum number of children present.
Fairplay said they had found that the children used standard adult accounts, which lacks parental consent requirements and guarantees in accordance with COPPA, during 24 visits out of 26. Fairplay said that he had found at least one child under the age of 13 on 10 out of 12 games and experiences visited in the survey. In some games, they said that the presence of minor users was overwhelming: at least 52% of users of the “VR Classroom” space were identified as children, and in one session, 20 in 27 participants had “obvious children’s voices”.
Although Meta introduced supervised children’s accounts in November 2024, Fairplay said the children continued to use adult accounts to get around safety restrictions, which could be done by entering a false date of birth. After the change of policy, Fairplay said that he returned to Horizon Worlds in February 2025 and found that 42% of users of four popular experiences were still children.
Fairplay’s investigation has also raised concerns concerning the awareness of the meta to the issue. During visits to “central horizon”, the researchers said they had met Meta community guides who interacted directly with children using standard accounts and, in some cases, recognized their age.
Despite the power to withdraw users or alert security specialists, Fairplay said that the community guides he observed had not withdrawn children or do not seem to degenerate the problem.
In addition to his research in the world, Fairplay reviewed the 626 User journals Verified Horizon worlds published in the Meta App Store between July and December 2024. Almost one in five of the people explicitly mentioned the presence of children, said Fairplay, with some describing the platform as a “daycare” or a “daycare”.
Mountain pressure assembly
Meta’s expansion of the Horizon worlds to include young users took place at a time of increasing pressure for the metaval ambitions of the company to show the results.
In an internal memo in November seen by BI, Meta technology director Andrew Bosworth called 2025 the “most critical” year to date to prove that the metavese was either a visionary feat, or a “legendary mishap”.
Meta needed to “stimulate sales, retention and engagement at all levels, but especially in MR”, he wrote, referring to mixed reality. “And Horizon Worlds On Mobile must absolutely break out for our long -term plans to have a chance.”
The internal metrics previously reported by the Wall Street Journal showed that the monthly active users of the horizon went from 300,000 at the beginning of 2022 to around 200,000 later that year. Meta then started to lower the age threshold, first opening up to teenagers to adolescents aged 13 and over in 2023, then adding supervised children’s accounts for users as young as 10 years at the end of 2024.
Samantha Ryan, Meta-president of Metarse content, echoed this change in a February blog article. “We see the growth of young users in the horizon worlds,” she wrote, adding that he “reports an increasing opportunity for new commercial models”, including free experiences with games in the game.
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