Meta’s AI Flirting Scandal Sparks Outrage and Action

The latest scandal out of Menlo Park is not a glitch. It’s not a misunderstanding. And it’s certainly not an accident. The internal documents from Meta—yes, the same Meta that owns Facebook, Instagram, and now pushes AI into every corner of your digital life—reveal something more calculated. Their chatbots were allowed, under official policy no less, to flirt with children. Describe minors in romantic terms. And do it all under the watchful eye of Meta’s legal, policy, and engineering teams, who apparently signed off on this madness until Reuters started sniffing around.

Only then, when the scent of scandal became too strong to ignore, did Meta do what Big Tech does best: rewrite history. They scrubbed the offending sections, threw out the usual boilerplate about “erroneous examples,” and pretended it never happened. But the paper trail doesn’t lie. This wasn’t a rogue coder. This was systemic—greenlit at the highest levels.

Let’s be clear: this wasn’t about technology moving faster than policy. This was about policy moving exactly fast enough to let Meta test the limits of what it could get away with. The goal? Engagement. The younger the user, the better. Children are a growth market in the digital world, and AI chatbots are just the latest tool in Silicon Valley’s arsenal to keep them online, interacting, and data-generating.

The fact that Meta’s AI guidelines allowed for romantic roleplay with children wasn’t some edge-case oversight. It was a feature, not a bug. You don’t get that kind of language—“a youthful form of art”—unless someone, somewhere, thought it was acceptable. This isn’t just creepy. It’s strategic. The longer the user interacts with the chatbot, the more data Meta collects. And the more data Meta collects, the more money it makes. That’s the cold calculus behind every design decision.

Now Congress is waking up—but only because the story broke wide. Senator Josh Hawley is leading the charge, demanding Meta cough up all internal documents tied to the AI chatbot policies. He’s not alone. There’s bipartisan interest in this mess, a rare moment of political unity fueled not by principle, but by optics. No lawmaker wants to be on the wrong side of a child safety scandal. Especially not in an election cycle.

But don’t confuse hearings and sternly worded letters with real reform. Meta knows how this game works. Stall, obfuscate, make cosmetic changes, and count on Washington’s attention span to fade. It’s worked before. It’ll work again—unless the political incentive structure changes. That means liability. That means regulation with teeth. And even then, don’t hold your breath. With tech lobbyists crawling all over Capitol Hill, real accountability is still a long shot.

In the meantime, the burden shifts—once again—to parents. Watchdog groups can scream all they want, but the only real firewall between your kid and a chatbot trying to roleplay a date is you. Meta won’t stop until it’s forced. And right now, it’s not. The internal culture there doesn’t reward restraint. It rewards growth. And with AI being the new frontier, expect more of these “mistakes” to come to light.

There’s a broader strategic takeaway here: Silicon Valley is no longer content to just connect people. It wants to replace interactions altogether. AI chatbots aren’t about convenience. They’re about control. Control over the conversation, the experience, and ultimately, the mind. The younger the user, the more moldable the behavior. That’s what Meta is betting on. And unless someone closes the gate soon, they’ll win that bet.

So yes, Meta fixed the problem—but only when caught. The real question is: what else are they greenlighting behind closed doors?