Meta's Fake Teen Factory

Generative AI 101 · Jul 13, 2026 · 7m

Meta paid contractors to pose as children, flood rival chatbots with prompts about suicide, eating disorders, and abuse, then log every response in spreadsheets. The company calls it "industry-standard safety benchmarking," but the operation had no consent, no disclosure, and no shared findings: the four things that make red teaming legitimate. Host Emily Laird walks through the Wired investigation, the 45,000-prompt testing rounds, and the court testimony showing what Meta knew about its own failure rates while it was busy documenting everyone else's. This is the difference between a shield…