A Meta engineering manager tasked with building "digital experiences for kids" admitted on camera to grooming and sexting someone he believed was a 13-year-old girl — and Sen. Chuck Grassley is demanding Mark Zuckerberg explain how a predator landed a job with access to children's products in the first place.
Josh Felker, 44, was arrested July 15 after the Predator Poachers Long Island caught him in an undercover sting. In a now-viral video, Felker confessed to sexting the fictitious teen and said he wished he could be the girl's father. He has been placed on leave from Meta. A company spokesperson told the New York Post, "This employee is no longer with the company and we are cooperating with law enforcement in its investigation."
The real scandal isn't one degenerate — it's the system that hired him and the platform that shields itself from scrutiny. Felker didn't work in some back office. He built products aimed directly at children, with the kind of internal access that should terrify any parent. Grassley wants to know whether Felker had access to non-public user data or internal systems tied to minors' personal accounts, and whether Meta has ever knowingly kept registered sex offenders on its payroll.
"The foxes must not be allowed to guard the hen house," Grassley wrote in a scathing letter to Zuckerberg on Wednesday, giving Meta until Aug. 12 to answer eight pointed questions. He's also demanding a full accounting of every internal complaint, arrest, and allegation of sexual misconduct toward minors by Meta employees over the past decade, plus details on the company's background screening for hires who work on children's products.
This is Grassley's fourth letter to Zuckerberg on child safety in just over a year — and he's out of patience. "To date, Meta has failed to fully and completely respond to my questions and document requests," the Iowa Republican wrote. The previous letters covered whistleblower claims that Meta targeted ads at teens based on their emotional states (April 2025), reports of bullying and sexual harassment on its Horizon Worlds platform (September 2025), and allegations the company misrepresented mental health risks and sexual exploitation running rampant on its platforms (also September 2025).
So while Meta's trust and safety teams have spent years throttling Americans for wrongthink, the company apparently couldn't be bothered to vet the people building its kid-facing products. Grassley chairs the Senate Judiciary Committee and serves as Senate president pro tempore — meaning this isn't some backbench grandstanding. But the question remains: four letters over a year, zero full responses. Congress has had ample opportunity to impose real consequences. Instead, we get letters.
The bipartisan record here is damning. Both parties have held hearings, grilled tech executives, and delivered stern words — then done nothing structural to break up the gatekeeping power that lets companies like Meta simultaneously censor political speech and fumble child safety. Grassley's questions are the right ones. Whether they produce accountability or just another round of Capitol theater depends entirely on whether anyone in Washington is willing to follow through.
