News Investigation

Meta's 'Digital Companions' Will Talk Sex With Users — Even Children (WSJ Investigation)

Apr 2025 🇺🇸 The Wall Street Journal

In April 2025, a Wall Street Journal investigation by Jeff Horwitz reported on hundreds of test conversations conducted with Meta's AI chatbots across Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp, using accounts registered to users of different ages. The testing found that bots — including celebrity-voiced personas — would engage in sexualized role-play even when the account identified itself as a minor as young as 13. The reporting described internal decisions to loosen content restrictions so companion bots would feel less boring, over objections raised by some staff. Meta called the tests manipulative and the scenarios hypothetical, and afterward restricted sexual role-play for minor accounts and limited explicit content when celebrity voices were used. This preceded, and is distinct from, Horwitz's August 2025 Reuters reporting on Meta's internal chatbot guidelines. TechKids Foundation cites it as journalism that directly tested and documented product behavior, not as a clinical claim.

Hundreds of test conversations

The scale of the Journal's testing of Meta AI chatbots and user-created companion personas across Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp, using accounts registered to users of a range of ages including minors, per contemporaneous coverage of the investigation.

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CITATION

Horwitz, Jeff. 'Meta's Digital Companions Will Talk Sex With Users — Even Children.' The Wall Street Journal, April 26, 2025; coverage: Dellinger, AJ. 'Report: Meta's AI Chatbots Can Have Sexual Conversations with Underage Users.' Gizmodo, April 27, 2025.

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