Meta & Children's Online SafetyAAM — Adult Age Misrepresentation
Adults posing as teens. Established as a violation type but, as of the source document, without proactive enforcement: "we currently do not enforce proactively on age lying."
MDL 3047 & Related Litigation
Glossary
Internal Meta terminology, acronyms, and euphemisms surfaced across the archive. Read each entry for its published definition and source context.
150 of 150 terms
A
Account SERP
Account results on search that appear on the Accounts tab. The source document states that while non-recommendable accounts are filtered, recall is only about 38%, leaving more than 60% of them unenforced.
ANSA — Adult Nudity and Sexual Activity
A Meta content policy and classifier category, applied in grades - the internal X-Ray concept list carries both "ANSA violating" and "adult nudity & sexual activity (ANSA) borderline". The source document states that Instagram's Well-being Teen Safety team did not monitor the input signal coverage and volume for age-based filtering of potentially violating ANSA content, so "anomalies of filtering may not be detected".
APAC — Asia-Pacific
The standard business-region grouping, used as EMEA is. In the archive it is the region whose expert consultations on cosmetic-surgery AR effects were sought (#127, #740) and where such filters were most popular (#741).
AR — Augmented Reality
Technology overlaying digital content (e.g. filters, effects) onto a real-world camera view, used extensively across Meta's platforms (e.g. Instagram/Facebook camera filters and effects).
ARPU — average revenue per user
Revenue divided by active users. The source document states that older users have much higher ARPU than younger ones, yet acquiring people young still maximises lifetime value, because "[r]etention overpowers the fact that ARPU is lower for young people."
AYMF — Accounts You May Follow
Instagram's account-recommendation surface, the IG counterpart to Facebook's PYMK. The source document states that on a single sampled day the filtering failed in both directions: 7.2% of accounts flagged as potential IIC violators (about 1.4M of 19M) were recommended to at least one teen, and 4.0% of AYMF recommendations made to those accounts (about 3.4M of 85M) were recommending teen accounts.
AYSF — Accounts You Should Follow
An Instagram account-recommendation surface, parallel to Accounts You May Follow (AYMF). The source document records Adam Mosseri telling colleagues "I don't think we can stop recommending teens to adults through AYSF on Instagram", because doing so would stop "roughly one third of teen follows that come from AYSF" and "we'd be breaking something meaningful" - while allowing the figure may be inflated since "a lot of teens lie about their age".
B
B&H — Bullying and Harassment
One of Meta's content-policy categories and a measured harm. The source document states that bullying-and-harassment prevalence in DMs is "very high (10%) according to the September prototype metric", against 7% of teens reporting they experience bullying on Instagram each week.
BOB
BOB
C
CAU — cares about its users
A tracked brand-perception measure. Over the years covered by the source, fewer teen and non-teen respondents said Instagram is an app that cares about its users, is a place to get support and encouragement, or is a place where they are comfortable being themselves.
CDS — Core Data Science
A central research and data-science organisation. Excerpt #131 lists it among the functions Instagram well-being lacked ("no DE/DS/CDS/Design/PMs focused on well-being"); excerpts #589 and #660 place researchers in it and describe its incentive as "publish an academic paper on this".
CEI — Child Exploitative Imagery
Meta's policy and enforcement category for imagery that sexually exploits children, tracked separately from Minor Sexualization and from Inappropriate Interactions with Children. The source document has executives weighing whether to limit the CEI figure published in the Community Standards Enforcement Report to Facebook only, "to avoid a step-change some time in the future when we lose access to private messaging", at a point when by their own estimate "almost 90%" of egregious CEI content was on Messenger.
CES
CES
COINV
COINV
Content ID
A unique identifier for one piece of content - a post, video or image - and the unit in which internal ranking discussions count what a person consumes. In a January 2024 employee thread on ranking goals: "imagine going out in public and telling people we rank their kid's facebook by what makes them consume the most content IDs lol" - which, a colleague adds, involves "sorting their feed by controversial, eye-popping filth".
Sources
COPPA — Children's Online Privacy Protection Act
U.S. federal statute (15 U.S.C. §§ 6501-6506) restricting the collection of personal information from children under 13 without verifiable parental consent.
CORP — Community Risk Prevention
The team that actions escalated high-risk content. The source document times the removal of a live-streamed murder: reported by users at 09:51 and given a Mark-as-Disturbing interstitial rather than taken down, escalated up to CORP at 11:42, which sought Content Policy input at 12:16 before the video came down at 12:30 - two hours and 58 minutes after it was posted, 1,071 user reports and 32,000 views later.
CSAM — Child Sexual Abuse Material
Standard term for material depicting child sexual abuse, used throughout Meta's internal child safety documentation. Reviewing one financial sextortion case, the source document records that "0% of these IGDM reports against these bad actors were given human review" - one account alone drew 338 reports - "because our ranking system did not rank these jobs high enough for human review".
CSE — Child Sexual Exploitation
A prevalence category on integrity dashboards, distinct from the broader CSEAN policy protocol. An integrity review of IG Live identifies reducing "high Child Sexual Exploitation (CSE) prevalence" as work still ahead.
CSEAN — Child Sexual Exploitation, Abuse and Nudity
Meta's internal policy category and enforcement protocol covering child sexual exploitation, abuse and nudity content. The source document records the protocol being rewritten to fix "enforcement issues identified in the audit", in what the team called "our 'one shot' at improving recall through training and guideline improvements".
CSEC — commercial sexual exploitation of children
The commercial form of child sexual exploitation - "sexual abuse or exploitation of a child for the financial benefit of any person or in exchange for anything of value", as the source complaint defines it. That complaint alleges Meta "[f]ostered unmoderated user groups devoted to or facilitating CSEC", and that it fell to outside investigators to "identify vast networks of CSEC on Meta's platforms".
CSER — Community Standards Enforcement Report
Meta's quarterly public transparency report of enforcement volumes. Internal threads show the argument over what it discloses: whether to release child-safety numbers ahead of "CSER v2" to prevent "the nuance being lost", and whether to limit the child-exploitative-imagery figure reported in it to Facebook only, "to avoid a step-change some time in the future when we lose access to private messaging".
CSN
CSN
CSTF — Child Safety Task Force
The task force Meta stood up in 2023 "as a result of the WSJ inquiry" into child safety on its platforms. Its final leadership update reports that of "the 4 areas the task force identified based on the reporter's initial inquiry (user reports, recidivism, recommendations, and future proofing), we met exit criteria for three of them" - the exception being user reports.
CWB — Central Well-being
Meta's central well-being organisation, distinct from the per-app teams at Instagram and Facebook. The source document records it blocking Instagram's appearance-comparison metric work - "Central Well-being (CWB) believes that the risks associated with continuing this sensitive-topic metric development outweigh the benefits".
D
DAP — Daily Active People
Core Meta engagement metric counting the distinct people active on a platform in a day, reported per app and across the family. The source document lists it among the four teen metrics a "Youth Defense Task Force" was formalised to protect - "teen MAP, DAP, TS and PS" - from "experiments and rollouts across Facebook that negatively affect teen metrics".
DAU — Daily Active Users
Standard engagement metric counting distinct users active in a day, used at Meta alongside DAP, which counts people de-duplicated across accounts and apps. The source document shows it operating as a constraint on a safety change: asked whether to default teen accounts to private, the Policy, Legal, Comms, Privacy and Well-being teams recommended launching, while the Growth team recommended not to, as "not worth US DAU work tradeoff".
DM / DMs — direct message
Private messaging - Instagram Direct and Facebook Messenger - as opposed to the public surfaces of feed, comments, Explore and search. The source document states that "[r]esearch strongly suggests that DM's are the most problematic interaction vector for teenagers on Instagram", and that teens delete about 47% of the DM threads and requests they receive in their first 14 days on the platform within four weeks.
DOB — date of birth
The self-reported birthday on an account, and the pivot of age enforcement. The source document reports "~2k FB accounts per day... making a DOB change where they explicitly check a box confirming they are <13 before saving (but we don't lock them out/checkpoint them - just throw an error)", and calls that "a major COPPA risk for us to keep them active, as it constitutes explicit knowledge of U13".
Sources
E
E2EE — End-to-End Encryption
Encryption where message content is readable only by the sender and recipients, not by the platform itself. The source document records Meta's global head of safety, Antigone Davis, warning as encryption was being planned that "The quality and value of our reports to NCMEC will drop dramatically, rendering them close to useless", and that making Messenger e2ee would be "far, far worse than anything we have seen/gotten a glimpse of on WA".
EIF — Engagement Impact Framework
The framework against which Reels ad-load increases were scored. A Q4 pre-earnings ads update reports the 2024 strategy running at 92% EIF efficiency against an 85% bar, which "will allow us to generate +12% Reels revenue/+0.3% iRev while keeping a high bar on engagement."
EMEA — Europe, the Middle East and Africa
The standard business-region grouping - Europe, the Middle East and Africa - used for Meta teams and operations covering that territory. In the archive it most often denotes the European policy and comms function: an Instagram Teens status update describes the "EMEA team" as "aggressively addressing questions about the age of consent for social media in European member states" after the EU set a parental-consent age, with 2017 to be spent lobbying member states to choose 13.
ENG — engineering headcount
Engineers, counted as a subset of headcount. Used exactly as HC is: "Our ask is for 17 HC (6 ENG) on Blue, and 7 HC (1 ENG) for IG" (#131); "the IG Sharing team are seeking 2 ENG headcount".
F
FBF — Facebook Family
Meta's apps taken collectively — Facebook, Instagram, Messenger and WhatsApp — as opposed to any single app. Metrics are routinely reported both per-app and across the family, e.g. "FBF DAP" or "aggregate total time spent across FB Family".
FCI
FCI
FI
FI
FOA — Family of Apps
Meta's apps as an org structure - the grouping against which research and policy consistency is judged. Excerpt #596: stakeholders "see the lack of a consistent, comprehensive approach to problematic use... across FOA as evidence we prioritize engagement/profits". Excerpt #673 describes research rolling up "into FOA structures" before the post-leak reorganisation.
G
GIFCT — Global Internet Forum to Counter Terrorism
The cross-industry body operating a shared hash database for terrorist content. Named internally alongside NCMEC for child safety and StopNCII.org for adult sexual exploitation as the three arrangements under which Meta receives hashes from an external body for use in its own detection.
GIN — Global Investigations
Internal investigations team; see i3.
GOLO — Global Operations Learning Organization
Internal operations training team responsible for delivering trainings to enforcement/review staff.
GPN — Government, Politics & Non-profits
Meta team handling government/policymaker inquiries and outreach.
GRO — Global Response Operations
Operations team responsible for triaging and escalating high-severity reported content, including live-streamed violent incidents.
GRT — Guided Review Tree
The decision tree a reviewer works through on a reported job, whose labels determine the action taken - including escalation to NCMEC. The source document describes the bottleneck that left: "I have a fancy GRT now that provides enough labels to auto populate a report - that's the tooling gap we have", but "[t]hey have to leave SRT and add info to MRSNCMEC UI to send a report, this adds up to 5 min per job".
GV — Graphic Violence
A content-policy area, listed with Hate and N&P as objectionable content in excerpt.
GVM — Guided Value Model
The automated process for tuning News Feed ranking weights: it halves and doubles the weight on every major relevance term, feeds the result to an algorithm told to optimise for sessions and VPVs, and returns weight changes. An employee cites it as the mechanical answer to Meta's public denial that it tunes for scrolling - "except mechanically we absolutely do through a process called the 'guided value model' (GVM) process".
GYSJ — Groups You Should Join
A Facebook group-recommendation surface. Excerpt #405 pairs it with PYMK as the two surfaces needing "strong discoverability and reachability controls in anticipation of Interop, including further restrictions".
H
H1 / H2 — First Half / Second Half (of the year)
Meta's half-year planning periods. Goals, headcount and roadmaps are set per half, so "H1 goals" or "last half" in these documents refer to a six-month planning cycle rather than a quarter or a fiscal year.
HC — headcount
Standard internal shorthand for staffing/headcount allocation, used interchangeably with "headcount" throughout resourcing and prioritization discussions.
HLM
HLM
HPM
A recurring written status update circulated by a Meta team, sent by email and posted to a subscribable Workplace group. Cadence varies by team — bi-weekly for Feed Ranking, monthly for Instagram Marketing, irregular elsewhere. Each is named for its team: "Instagram Teens HPM", "Integrity HPM", "Feed Ranking HPM". Expansion pending: the acronym is used across the archive but never spelled out.
I
i3 — Integrity Investigations and Intelligence
Internal investigations team focused on identifying and actioning coordinated bad-actor networks, including child safety and sextortion cases, working alongside Law Enforcement Investigations (LEI) and Global Investigations (GIN).
IA — Internal Audit
Meta's internal audit function, which issued rated assurance reports on youth well-being and Reels integrity. Phase 1 of its IG Youth Well-being Assurance Audit was rated "Significant Improvements Needed" with 3 high and 14 medium risk observations; the Instagram Reels Assurance Audit drew an "Orange" rating with 4 high, 20 medium and 3 low.
ICO — Information Commissioner's Office
The UK data-protection regulator, author of the Age Appropriate Design Code. An internal risk assessment rates the opportunity to shape "upcoming IDPC and ICO guidelines" as high, alongside a high rating for the mismatch between Meta's compliance and its current practices.
IDPC — Irish Data Protection Commission
Meta's lead data-protection regulator in the EU, by virtue of its Irish establishment. An escalation over rolling back the protection that stops 18-20-year-olds messaging minors counts, among the costs of doing so, having to brief "regulators like the IDPC, FTC and ICO to flag the change (therefore disclosing the gap)."
IFR
IFR
IG4B — Instagram Ads team
The team owning Instagram's age-gating infrastructure - not because of child safety but because advertisers wanted brand safety. Excerpt #141: "the relevant infra and code are owned by the IG Ads team ('IG4B') as opposed to Well-being. We never used that infra for Integrity. I don't even know how reliable it is."
IGBP
IGBP
IGDM — Instagram Direct
Instagram's private messaging surface, always contrasted with Facebook Messenger. The comparison is the point: roughly 38x as many IIC victims on IGDM as on Messenger, against CEI deletes about 21x lower and IIC auto-enforcement 90x lower on IG (#336); about 200,000 minor victims a day in sex-talk conversations with adults (#328); and no proactive detection for NCII or sextortion running in IGDM at all (#89).
IGRI
IGRI
IGTV — Instagram TV
Instagram's long-form video product, launched 2018. Appears in the archive as a teen-watch-time target - a "Q2 stretch goal" of 2 million hours of teen watch time - and as the surface judged well positioned for children's video.
IGWB — Instagram Well-Being
Instagram's well-being team. Excerpt #55 records that IGWB "even explored private by default for teens but the growth impact was too high". Excerpt has IGWB trading off teen safety or Threads integrity goals for want of headcount; excerpt #141 asks why IGWB never built age-gating infrastructure for integrity purposes.
IGY
IGY
IIC — Inappropriate Interactions with Children
A classifier threshold and content category for interactions between adults and children indicative of grooming or exploitation, referred to internally as "a.k.a. 'grooming'". The source document puts the scale at "~500k victims per DAY in English markets only", three times Messenger's prevalence, while calling it "a preliminary metric" and adding "we expect the true situation is worse".
Inherently non-rec query
A search query category, based on IG's Keyword Recommendations Guidelines, covering terms like "porn," "meth," "self harm," "skinny body," "sex," "horny" - excluded from search recommendations but not fully blocked.
Inherently violating query
A search query category, based on IG's Community Guidelines, that is completely blocked from returning any search results (e.g. "child porn links," "how to kill myself," "pro anorexia").
J
JTBD — Jobs To Be Done
Jobs To Be Done, the product-research framing that asks what task a person is using a product to accomplish rather than what features they use. Appears in requests for analysis of what tweens and early teens are actually doing when they message.
K
KX
KX
L
L28
Engagement measure counting how many of the last 28 days a person used the app. A higher L28 means more frequent return visits; used alongside time spent as a retention/habit indicator.
L90D — last 90 days
A 90-day lookback window. Excerpt #354 uses it to define account eligibility: "a newly created (L90D) Professional Account with >1K followers".
LE — law enforcement
Police and prosecuting authorities, as the recipients of Meta's referrals and the source of legal requests. Excerpt #677 warns that encryption would drastically reduce referrals to LE, with 98% of proactive referrals for one category depending on Messenger content.
LEI — Law Enforcement Investigations
Internal investigations team handling law-enforcement liaison and the strategic network disruptions through which sextortion accounts were actually taken down. The source document credits it, with LEAP and i3, with "high-precision Sigma rules to auto-disable ~262K sextortion accounts based on behaviors & profile picture reuse", in the same workstream that "reported 88 users to NCMEC, & escalated 25 Snapchat usernames to Snap for redress".
LERT — law-enforcement response team
The internal team that contacts local police when a user is in imminent danger. Excerpt #344: "On average, we escalate 3 Live videos a week to our internal LERT team which then contacts local law enforcement authorities because users are in imminent danger from issues ranging from self harm to child exploitation."
LRP — Long Range Plan
The multi-year revenue forecast that ad-load decisions are measured against. Excerpt #603: "We expect to beat original LRP Reels revenue forecasts even though we expect a lower RME goal."
LTR — Long Term Retention
How much of a joining cohort is still active after a long interval, measured as MAP_28 at a given "FB age". Central to the tween-acquisition analyses: people who joined at 11-12 were found to have several times the long-term retention of adult joiners.
LTV — Lifetime Value
The cumulative value, usually expressed as profit, expected from a user over their whole time on the platform. The document that defines it puts a 13-year-old joiner's lifetime value at "roughly $270 per teen" on one page, while an October 2018 market-strategy update says "approximately $350" - a contradiction the archive never reconciles.
M
MaCSA — Malicious Child Safety Actor
A per-account risk score used to identify risky adult actors and filter or limit their recommendation to and interaction with minors, on surfaces including PYMK, AYMF and Search. The thresholds are asymmetric by direction - an adult scoring above 0.3 is filtered out of a minor's recommendations, while a minor is filtered out of that adult's only "except where 2 year age gap", and unconditionally only above 0.6 - and the policy decision document warns that "gaps in MaCSA's recall may lead to Risky Adults <> teen recommendations, generating further external pressure if regulators or reporters find risky recommendations".
Sources
MAD — Mark-as-Disturbing
A content interstitial/warning label applied to graphic but non-violating content.
MAP — Monthly Active People
Core Meta engagement metric counting distinct people active on a platform in a month. Paired with DAP in internal goal-setting; the MAP/DAP ratio is used as a measure of how frequently a monthly user returns.
MAU — Monthly Active Users
Standard industry engagement metric counting distinct users active in a month. Distinct from Meta's own MAP ("Monthly Active People"); MAU appears in the archive mostly for non-Meta platforms and in public-facing figures.
Media SERP
Content results on search that appear on the For You tab - the media half of Instagram's split search results page, and the half the policy work treats as the measure of a query's risk. Rather than judge queries against a fixed keyword list, policy was being updated "to use SERP Media rollup to inform whether a query is considered non-rec", making what this surface actually returns the test of whether a term counts as non-recommendable at all.
MENA — Middle East and North Africa
A business-region grouping. Excerpt records a further round of expert outreach with nine experts from APAC and MENA who "reiterated the dangers these filters have in advancing unrealistic beauty standards".
MSI — Meaningful Social Interactions
Meta's headline engagement metric for person-to-person interaction on Feed and Stories, introduced as a reweighting of News Feed ranking. Reported as year-over-year growth in half-year reviews.
Source
MWB — Mental Well-being
Mental Well-being
MYST
MYST
N
N&P — Nudity & Pornography
A content-policy area. Excerpt lists it among "Objectionable Content Areas (Hate, GV, N&P)", contrasted with Dangerous Content areas such as terrorism, drug sales and human trafficking.
NAC — Negative Appearance Comparison
The measured harm of comparing one's appearance unfavourably with what one sees on the platform. Content is scored for it, so internal documents speak of "high-NAC" content and of NAC prevalence rising with time spent.
NCII — Non-Consensual Intimate Imagery
Intimate imagery obtained and/or shared without the subject's consent, frequently used to sextort victims. Reviewing one sextortion case, the source document notes the account was "striked for bullying and harassment and banked NCII, but these strikes did not enforce on that bad actor in any way".
NCIT
NCIT
NCOSE — National Center on Sexual Exploitation
A US advocacy organisation. Its executive Dawn Hawkins wrote to Meta in March 2019 about "an alarming trend we are seeing where Instagram is used to groom and then to sell minors for sex acts", and again that June - "Sex trafficking on your platform is a common occurrence" - in correspondence that runs to November 2019, largely unanswered.
NF — News Feed
Definition pending.
NFX
NFX
NSC — Negative Social Comparison
A measured well-being harm on Instagram - the negative form of social comparison research found to be strongly associated with higher Like/comment counts on posts seen. Teenage girls were found to be 8x more likely to experience NSC than adult men.
NSSI — non-suicidal self-injury
Self-injury without suicidal intent. An internal mental-health overview records that exposure to NSSI content may increase the risk of engaging in the behaviour, and that consuming it online can trigger offline NSSI - with Instagram judged particularly susceptible because it allows the use of anonymous identities.
NUF — negative user feedback
A negative-feedback signal used to demote content, appearing in probability form. Excerpt #458 describes an integrity org focused on "things like p(NUF) demotions, or cooling down the civic ecosystem, rather than strictly violating OR societal outcomes".
O
OBPS
OBPS
OC/HC
OC/HC
OII — Oxford Internet Institute
The University of Oxford research department proposed as the external partner for Meta-funded well-being research. A September 2021 exchange in Nick Clegg's org weighs doing the external well-being work "with OII", naming a longitudinal correlative study and the millennium cohort studies as the two best places to start.
P
P0 / P1 — Priority tiers (P0 = highest priority, descending through P1, P2, P3)
A priority-tier convention used to rank goals, projects, and tasks by urgency - P0 (highest/must-do) down through P1, P2, and P3 (lower priority) - used pervasively throughout Meta's internal planning and goal-setting documents.
P90 — 90th percentile
Standard statistical shorthand for the 90th percentile - the value below which 90% of a population falls. Used in the archive to describe a heavy-usage person rather than an average one, as when estimating the notification load a change would impose.
PAC — Protect and Care
Meta's user-safety and abuse-prevention organisation, existing separately at each app - an internal quarterly review contrasts "Instagram PAC" with "FB PAC" and describes "the PAC team" as having its own engineers, 22 of them at Instagram in October 2017. No Meta document in this archive expands the acronym; "Protect and Care" is how the plaintiffs' filing in MDL 3047 spells it out.
Sources
PBD — private by default
Defaulting teen accounts to private. Instagram's well-being team "even explored private by default for teens but the growth impact was too high and the decision was to explore more nuanced and less blunt solutions".
PMM — product marketing
Product marketing - Meta's product marketing function, usually paired with comms. It appears in the archive chiefly as a brake on well-being changes, weighing how the removal or unshipping of a feature would land publicly.
POC — point of contact
Point of contact: the person responsible for a piece of work or a decision. Appears throughout the archive as the owner named against a research project, an escalation or a legal review.
PPF
PPF
PREQ
PREQ
PRESC
PRESC
Problematic Use
Defined by Jennifer Guadagno as experiencing both of the following "very often" or "all of the time": (1) lack of control or feelings of guilt over FB use; and (2) negative impact in at least one of productivity, sleep, parenting, or relationships.
PS — Post Sessions
Definition pending.
PXFN
PXFN
PYMK — People You May Know
Facebook's friend-recommendation surface. Appears in the archive chiefly in child-safety contexts, as a vector by which adult accounts are recommended to minors.
Q
QP — Quick Promotion
An in-app promotional prompt. Excerpt #158 weighs defaulting teens into private accounts and then upselling "via opt-in QP" or "opt-out QP", with the risk that "[t]eens may not understand the upsells as new users". Excerpt #166 uses QP to recruit teen brand ambassadors: "QP will direct to a form, where ambassadors need to confirm that they are over the age of 13."
R
RGS — Regulated Goods and Services
A content category covering regulated products - the internal audit cites diet products - for which recommendation filtering is supposed to be applied to teens. Appears in the minor-restricted form.
RIFU — Reels In-Feed Unit
A Reels subsurface, distinct from Reels Tab and from Cover. Each carries a different integrity profile: an internal sizing of Reels integrity challenges assigns regulated goods to the Tab, disturbing content to Cover and sexually suggestive content to RIFU.
RME
RME
RoaR — Recall over all Reports
Meta's "new north star metric for defensible user reporting enforcement", introduced during the 2023 child safety task force. It captures "whether we reviewed a report in the first place and whether a rep is likely to action it correctly", and the source document puts initial results on content RoaR at about 24%.
RTC
RTC
S
SC
Two different referents in this corpus, and context is the only guide. (1) Snapchat. Excerpt #432: "we cannot hope to convert current 13-18 y/o's to Facebook if they already have a different set of primary social apps (in the US these are SC and IG)". (2) Social comparison. Excerpt #503: "the odds for teen girls to do negative SC are 8x" that of men over 25 - the same measure the glossary carries as NSC.
SCC — Sensitive Content Control
A setting that allows users to control how much sensitive content they see on IG. As of the source document, ~54% of teens were in SCC Less, rising to ~95% via Project Nido, with U16 teens hard defaulted into SCC Less and 16-17 y/o teens soft defaulted into SCC Less.
SERP — Search Engine Results Page
Search Engine Results Page - the standard industry term, but on Instagram it does not name one page: results are split between Media SERP on the For You tab and Account SERP on the Accounts tab, with typeahead suggestions ahead of both. Enforcement is specified mechanism by mechanism rather than as a single switch, so "blocked from search" can mean any of four different things.
SESTA-FOSTA — Stop Enabling Sex Traffickers Act / Allow States and Victims to Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act
The paired 2018 US statutes - the Stop Enabling Sex Traffickers Act and the Allow States and Victims to Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act - narrowing Section 230 immunity for content facilitating prostitution and sex trafficking. Cited internally as a source of legal exposure in the prostitution and sexual-solicitation enforcement area.
SEV — Sitewide Emergency Event
Meta's internal incident-management designation for urgent, tracked issues (including child-safety failures), each assigned a severity Level and tracked via a "Set SEV Level" workflow through to mitigation. Used constantly across the archive as internal shorthand for declaring/escalating an emergency (e.g. a "Historical SEVs" tracking table, "SEV Management" as a formal subworkstream).
Sources
SFPLT
SFPLT
SND — Strategic Network Disruption
A coordinated enforcement operation targeting a network of accounts/groups engaged in child safety violations (e.g. CSAM trading), typically resulting in mass account disables and deterrence messaging.
SRT
SRT
SS
SS
SSCM — Sexually Suggestive Content featuring Minors
A labelled content category measured on recommendation surfaces. Found 2-3x more prevalent on Reels home than on Explore, with female and unknown-gender teens producing more of the content so labelled.
SWOP — Severity Weighted Overall Prevalence
SWOP = Prevalence * Severity. A severity-weighted metric for the prevalence of harmful content/experiences.
SWVP — severity-weighted violating prevalence
A severity-weighted prevalence metric. Excerpt #689 identifies Search as "a top pathway contributing to teen SWVP and non-rec prevalence", the basis for an H1 2024 goal to improve enforcement on non-recommendable queries.
T
T1 / T2 — Tier 1 / Tier 2
Severity tiers for inappropriate interactions with children: Tier 2 is online sexual harassment, such as sending photos of adult genitalia to a minor, while Tier 1 is soliciting or real-world harm - soliciting CEI, contact offence, and content sextortion, "the worst of the worst stuff that gives you nightmares". A November 2020 incident thread reports that thousands of minors had been reporting Tier 1 abuse, more than half of it sextortion, and "we haven't done anything".
TMS — Text Matching Service
A keyword/text-matching detection system ("TMS banks") used to proactively detect violating Child Safety keywords and phrases within IG profile elements (name, username, bio).
TRIPS
TRIPS
TS — Time Spent
Core Meta engagement metric measuring the aggregate time people spend on a platform. Reported either as a total — "total teen time spent" was set as an overall company goal — or normalized per active user as TS/DAP, which internal decks treat as the standard measure of "engagement."
TT — TikTok
Competitor shorthand. Excerpt #742 reviews press coverage "with fairly equal balance between us + snap, TT"; excerpt #481 has an employee wanting to show colleagues "what TT already does" while arguing against watering down Take a Break.
Typeahead
Recommended query matches that appear as a user types a search query.
U
U13 — Under-13
Users below the minimum age of 13 set by Meta's terms of service and by COPPA. "U13" denotes both the age cohort and the underage accounts Meta's own documents discuss detecting, removing, or building products for.
U16 / U18 — Under-16 / Under-18
Age cohorts below 16 and below 18, used the way U13 is. Excerpt #671 lists "U13 (under 13) children" and "U18 (under 18) teens" as sensitive research populations; excerpt #130 weighs "some level of default (ie., U16 v U18)"; excerpt #628 cites Utah legislation prohibiting U18 late-night social media use without parental consent.
UAR — Unified Actor Ranker
A value model used to rank push notifications. A Feed Ranking update describes adding a combined time-spent-and-click signal, feed and stories engagement features and more training data to it, for a projected +0.067% gain in global daily active users.
Source
UFAC
UFAC
UnIS
UnIS
USPP — US Public Policy
Meta's US public-policy function. Excerpt #354 has Monika Bickert describing USPP and Product as "quite far apart" on how restrictive teen-recommendation rules should be, and proposing to escalate to Clegg.
UXR — user experience research
User experience research - Meta's user-research function and its practitioners. The term matters in this archive because the function's independence became contested: after the 2021 leaks, researchers working in sensitive spaces were moved out of product pillars to report to central integrity or central impact.
V
VNI / V&I — Violence and Incitement
A Meta content-policy category and one of the three harms found to run at more than twice the average user's prevalence for teens, alongside Bullying and Harassment and Suicide and Self Injury.
VPV / VPVs
VPV / VPVs
Sources
VT — violation type
Meta's internal unit of enforceable policy: a named category of violating behaviour against which detection, enforcement and appeals are built. Establishing a VT and building enforcement for it are separate steps, and the archive shows the gap between them - Adult Age Misrepresentation existed as a VT while, in the same document, "we currently do not enforce proactively on age lying."
W
WAP — Weekly Active People
The weekly member of Meta's people-metric family, alongside DAP and MAP. Excerpt #605 measures a registration change as "-174k WAP@14" and converts the same effect to "18.4M MAP/year", which only works if WAP counts the same way MAP does. DISAMBIGUATION: in excerpts #454 and #515, "the TikTok WAP trend" is the song, cited as an example of a risky trend for teens. Same three letters, unrelated.
WAU — Weekly Active Users
The weekly counterpart to DAU and MAU. Used for Meta's own teen cohorts in the problematic-use work: "18.3% of WAU IG teens (over one week) exhibit behaviors associated with problematic use" (#384), and 20% of global WAU teens averaging a session between midnight and 4am (#574).
X
XFN — Cross-Functional
Internal shorthand for work or review spanning multiple teams or disciplines (e.g. engineering, policy, legal, comms). An "XFN review" is a sign-off gathered across those functions before a launch.
Y
YIP — Youth Industry Practices
A scorecard/framework used internally to track whether Meta is "meeting," "partially meeting," or "leading" on youth safety practices across focus areas (Safety, Age Appropriate Experiences, Supervision, Bullying & Harassment, SSI & ED).
YT — YouTube
Competitor shorthand. Excerpt #556 reports that "Snapchat in particular and YT are gaining share in this segment" while 68% of US teenagers were MAP on Facebook, down from 90% two years earlier.
No matching terms. Try a term, acronym or phrase from a definition.