On Tuesday, the FTC unanimously banned the social messaging app NGL from hosting minors as part of a $5 million settlement. The first-of-its-kind ban comes after revelations that the company actively marketed the app to children with bait-and-switch tactics, false claims about AI moderation and the targeting of “popular” kids (like cheerleaders) to try to lure others onto the predatory hellscape.
“NGL marketed its app to kids and teens despite knowing that it was exposing them to cyberbullying and harassment,” FTC Chair Lina Khan wrote in an agency press release. “In light of NGL’s reckless disregard for kids’ safety, the FTC’s order would ban NGL from marketing or offering its app to those under 18. We will keep cracking down on businesses that unlawfully exploit kids for profit.”
The FTC and the Los Angeles DA’s office worked together on the complaint, which paints a picture of an exploitative business that prioritized building its social graph above honoring even the most fundamental of ethics. (Sound familiar?) Although NGL is still a relatively niche app with nowhere near the popularity of Instagram, TikTok and other first-tier platforms, it has “exploded” in popularity, according to The Washington Post. In 2022, it briefly became the most downloaded app on the iOS App Store.
The company markets the app as a place to message anonymously with unknown friends and contacts from other social channels. That alone sounds like a recipe for disaster. But the FTC says the company made it much worse with false claims of using “world class AI content moderation” with “deep learning and pattern matching algorithms” to prevent cyberbullying and other concerning behavior. It also sent fake, computer-generated messages — which users believed were from their real friends — with provocative prompts like “Are you straight?” and “I know what you did.”
In addition, the company’s predatory business practices also allegedly included bait-and-switch upsell tactics, which promised to reveal the identity of anonymous “friends” (which may have been fake) if they paid up to $10 weekly for a premium subscription. After paying, the service would only supply useless “hints” like the message’s timestamp, the sender’s general location and whether they used an iPhone or Android phone. It would also turn on recurring, hard-to-cancel charges that users didn’t expect.
Even worse, Joao Figueiredo, one of the company’s…