Draft:Kelly Stonelake

• Comment: I feel like this is a case of WP:BLP1E as all of the sources were published on or after 2025, when she filed a lawsuit and almost all of them are focused on that. If there are any available sources published before the lawsuit, then this might be eligible to be accepted. JuniperChill (talk) 14:38, 9 June 2026 (UTC)

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Kelly Stonelake is a former technology executive and online child-safety advocate. She worked at Facebook, later renamed Meta Platforms, from 2009 to 2024, rising to director and holding product-marketing leadership roles in the company's developer-platform and Reality Labs organizations.

In 2025, she filed an employment-discrimination lawsuit against Meta and submitted a sworn statement supporting a request that the Federal Trade Commission investigate alleged child-privacy and safety violations involving Horizon Worlds.

Career at Facebook and Meta

Stonelake joined Facebook in early 2009, when the company had several hundred employees. She worked from its Palo Alto, California, office on products and programs intended to help businesses use Facebook. She transferred to the company's Seattle office in 2012 and reached the rank of director in 2017.

Stonelake worked in product marketing for Facebook's Developer Platform and on data-protection and compliance initiatives adopted following the Facebook–Cambridge Analytica data scandal and a Federal Trade Commission privacy settlement. She joined Meta's Reality Labs organization and led product-marketing work for Horizon Worlds, including work associated with planned expansion to teenage users and mobile devices. She ended her employment at Meta in January 2024.

Lawsuit against Meta

On February 3, 2025, Stonelake filed a lawsuit against Meta in King County Superior Court in Washington. The complaint alleged sex discrimination and a hostile work environment.. Stonelake said that Meta failed to respond appropriately after she reported sexual harassment and assault, denied her promotions while promoting male colleagues, and retaliated against her after she raised concerns about Horizon Worlds and the treatment of women who reported product-safety problems. Meta declined to comment on the allegations, citing the pending litigation.

Meta removed the case to the United States District Court for the Western District of Washington and sought its dismissal, arguing that Stonelake had not stated viable claims and that several allegations fell outside the applicable limitation period.

In August 2025, Judge Barbara Jacobs Rothstein granted Meta's motion in part and denied it in part. Portions of Stonelake's claims concerning failure to promote and sexual harassment were allowed to proceed, while other claims, including wrongful discharge and retaliation under Washington's Silence No More Act, were dismissed. The court denied Stonelake's request to reconsider the dismissal of those claims in October 2025.

Child-safety advocacy

In April 2025, the children's media advocacy organization Fairplay submitted a request asking the Federal Trade Commission to investigate whether Meta violated the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act by allowing children younger than 13 to use Horizon Worlds through accounts registered to older users and by collecting data without parental consent. Stonelake supported the request with a statement alleging that Meta executives knew underage children were accessing the platform through standard accounts and that employees had been discouraged from documenting their presence.

Stonelake described an October 2022 test of Horizon Worlds in which senior Reality Labs executives were reportedly unable to hear one another because of voices that sounded like young children. According to her account, later executive tests were moved to closed virtual spaces to avoid the interruptions.

Meta told Business Insider that it required parents to manage accounts for users aged 10 to 12, offered tools for reporting suspected underage accounts, and could require age verification, convert an account to a parent-managed account, or delete it. In response to a later Washington Post investigation into allegations that Meta restricted child-safety research, the company denied suppressing research and said it had developed parental-supervision measures and age-appropriate protections.