Lady Freethinker, which holds a voting share in tech giant Meta, has filed a shareholder proposal urging the company to remove rampant animal cruelty from its platforms and to publish a report on its content moderation practices.
According to our report titled Scrolling Through Cruelty, more than 2,300 animal cruelty videos on Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, X, and YouTube garnered over one billion views from May 1 to June 30, 2025.
This material ranged from forced or staged animal fights and fake rescue videos to monkey torture and other violent, graphic, and sexual content.
Examples cited in the report include a snake eating a puppy, a baby monkey being blowtorched, and a cat being crushed under a person’s weight.
LFT investigators found that Facebook hosted 76% of the posts, while Instagram accounted for 4% — both Meta-owned platforms. Additionally, 95% of the monkey torture content appeared on Facebook.
Investigators also discovered that the majority of this content remains online, even after users have reported it.
Meta announced a shift to AI-driven, community guidelines-based moderation last year, but the change has not demonstrably reduced the spread of animal cruelty material, and the effectiveness of these reporting mechanisms remains unclear.
Beyond the harm to animals, allowing this content to proliferate risks psychological harm to young people and may encourage copycat behavior or other violence toward animals and humans.
Through the shareholder proposal, we are calling on Meta to crack down on animal cruelty on Facebook and Instagram and to disclose how its AI-driven moderation systems handle that material.
If you haven’t already, please sign our petition urging Facebook to remove content that glorifies animal suffering and shut down the groups and pages responsible for it.
Also, please report animal cruelty content to the platform where it appears, to the appropriate authorities, and to LFT at our e-tipline: [email protected].
