Market Data 
A former Meta employee has accused the company of knowingly allowing children onto its virtual reality platform, Horizon Worlds, despite safety risks and potential violations of federal law.
Kelly Stonelake, who worked for the company for nearly 15 years and led product marketing for Horizon Worlds until early 2024, submitted a sworn statement as part of a complaint filed Thursday with the Federal Trade Commission. Fairplay, a nonprofit focused on children’s media and marketing, lodged the complaint.
Stonelake, who said she was laid off by Meta in January 2024 after being on medical leave for about a year, filed a lawsuit against her former employer in February for sexual harassment, sexual discrimination, and retaliation. Meta then filed a motion to dismiss last month.
Fairplay alleges that Meta violated the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA) by permitting children under 13 to access Horizon Worlds using adult accounts — a loophole it said would enable the company to collect personal data from minors without parental consent. The nonprofit is calling for the FTC to investigate Meta.
“We’re committed to providing safe, age-appropriate experiences on our platform,” Meta spokesperson Ryan Daniels told Business Insider. “Parents are required to manage accounts for pre-teens 10-12 on Quest, and grant permission for them to access Horizon Worlds.”
He added, “We offer reporting tools so anyone can report suspected underage accounts to us, and if we become aware of a pre-teen using an account meant for someone 13 or older, we’ll take steps to ensure they’re in the right experience. This includes requiring proof of age, switching to a parent-managed account, or deleting the account altogether.”
In a press release accompanying the FTC complaint, Stonelake said Meta had “extensive knowledge” that minors were accessing Horizon Worlds by logging into accounts registered for adults.
“Throughout my experience, the emphasis at Horizon was consistently on user growth, with safety considerations managed by leadership like liabilities to be minimized,” Stonelake said in her statement.
She added, “Horizon Worlds was initially presented as a platform fostering inclusion and belonging, exemplified by hero scenarios like providing a safe space for marginalized individuals. In reality, it became a breeding ground for unchecked racism, sexual harassment, bullying, and child endangerment.”
Stonelake provided several examples of Meta executives having knowledge of underage users on the platform. Stonelake said an employee posted on Meta’s internal forum, Workplace, in 2022 about his experience on Horizon Worlds. According to the statement, the employee said young users directed racial slurs at him and noted that children under the age of 13 were present in the virtual spaces. Stonelake claims some Meta executives discussed the post.
She also claims that some executives were testing Horizon Worlds in 2022 but struggled to communicate because “very young” children’s voices were “screaming at us from behind adult accounts.”
Stonelake also alleges that there was a “general directive to avoid documenting discussions related to the presence of teens and children (users under 13) on the platform” due to potential legal ramifications. Stonelake said that raising concerns internally later led to exclusion from decision-making spaces.
Fairplay’s investigation
Fairplay said its nine-month investigation into Horizon Worlds found that children under 13 regularly accessed the platform using standard adult accounts, enabling Meta to collect sensitive data from them — possibly in violation of federal law. The nonprofit’s researchers documented the presence of children in nearly every virtual experience they visited, analyzed reviews from Meta’s app store, and said they observed Meta’s employees — called “community guides” — engaging with underage users in Horizon Worlds without intervening.
From July 2024 to March 2025, Fairplay said its researchers used Meta Quest 2 and Quest 3 headsets to explore some of the most popular games and spaces in Horizon Worlds. In total, they said they visited 12 different experiences at least twice each. During those 26 visits, the researchers said they encountered 512 users, 170 of whom (about 33%) they identified as clearly under 13 based on their voices and behavior.
Fairplay said it took steps to ensure accuracy by having multiple researchers independently review recordings and only counting users they could definitively identify as children. Because many users don’t speak in voice chat, Fairplay said its figures represent the minimum number of children present.
Fairplay said it found children were using standard adult accounts, which lack parental consent requirements and COPPA-compliant safeguards, in 24 out of the 26 visits. Fairplay said it found at least one child under the age of 13 in 10 out of 12 games and experiences visited in the investigation. In certain games, they said the presence of underage users was overwhelming: at least 52% of users in the space “VR Classroom” were identified as children, and in one session, 20 out of 27 participants had “obvious child voices.”
Although Meta introduced supervised child accounts in November 2024, Fairplay said that children continued to use adult accounts to circumvent safety restrictions, which could be done by entering a false birthdate. After the policy change, Fairplay said it returned to Horizon Worlds in February 2025 and found that 42% of users in four popular experiences were still children.
Fairplay’s investigation also raised concerns about Meta’s awareness of the issue. During visits to “Horizon Central,” researchers said they encountered Meta’s community guides who interacted directly with children using standard accounts and, in some cases, acknowledged their age.
Despite having the authority to remove users or alert safety specialists, Fairplay said the community guides it observed did not remove any children or appear to escalate the issue.
In addition to its in-world research, Fairplay reviewed all 626 verified user reviews of Horizon Worlds published in Meta’s app store between July and December 2024. Nearly one in five of those explicitly mentioned the presence of children, Fairplay said, with some describing the platform as a “daycare” or a “nursery.”
Mounting metaverse pressure
Meta’s expansion of Horizon Worlds to include younger users came at a moment of mounting pressure for the company’s metaverse ambitions to show results.
In a November internal memo viewed by BI, Meta’s chief technology officer, Andrew Bosworth, called 2025 the “most critical” year yet to prove the metaverse was either a visionary feat or a “legendary misadventure.”
Meta needed “to drive sales, retention, and engagement across the board but especially in MR,” he wrote, referring to mixed reality. “And Horizon Worlds on mobile absolutely has to break out for our long term plans to have a chance.”
Internal metrics previously reported by The Wall Street Journal showed that Horizon’s monthly active users dropped from 300,000 in early 2022 to around 200,000 later that year. Meta subsequently began lowering the age threshold, first opening Horizon Worlds to teens aged 13 and up in 2023, then adding supervised child accounts for users as young as 10 in late 2024.
Samantha Ryan, Meta’s VP of metaverse content, echoed this shift in a February blog post. “We’re seeing growth of young users in Horizon Worlds,” she wrote, adding that it “signals a growing opportunity for new business models,” including free-to-play experiences with in-game purchases.
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