Facebook and Instagram are steering children toward explicit content — even in cases when no interest is expressed — and allowing child predators to find and contact minors, New Mexico Attorney General Raúl Torrez said in a announcement this week revealing a lawsuit against Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta.
“Our investigation into Meta’s social media platforms demonstrates that they are not safe spaces for children but rather prime locations for predators to trade child pornography and solicit minors for sex,” AG Torrez said, announcing the lawsuit.
“As a career prosecutor who specialized in internet crimes against children, I am committed to using every available tool to put an end to these horrific practices and I will hold companies — and their executives — accountable whenever they put profits ahead of children’s safety,” the AG added.
Torrez went on to explain that his office has been conducting an undercover investigation of Meta’s platforms over the past few months, creating decoy accounts of children 14-years and younger, discovering that Zuckerberg’s platforms have done the following:
- Proactively served and directed the underage users a stream of egregious, sexually explicit images — even when the child has expressed no interest in this content
- Enabled dozens of adults to find, contact, and press children into providing sexually explicit pictures of themselves or participate in pornographic videos.
- Recommended that the children join unmoderated Facebook groups devoted to facilitating commercial sex.
- Allowed Facebook and Instagram users to find, share, and sell an enormous volume of child pornography.
- Allowed a fictitious mother to offer her 13-year-old daughter for sale to sex traffickers and to create a professional page to allow her daughter to share revenue from advertising.
“Mr. Zuckerberg and other Meta executives are aware of the serious harm their products can pose to young users, and yet they have failed to make sufficient changes to their platforms that would prevent the sexual exploitation of children,” Torrez said.
“Despite repeated assurances to Congress and the public that they can be trusted to police themselves, it is clear that Meta’s executives continue to prioritize engagement and ad revenue over the safety of the most vulnerable members of our society,” he added.
The New Mexico Attorney General’s complaint therefore alleges that Meta fails to remove Child Sexual Abuse Material (CSAM) across its platforms and enables adults to find, contact, and solicit underage users to produce illicit pornographic imagery and participate in commercial sex.
The suit also details how Zuckerberg’s company harms children and teenagers through the addictive design of its platform, which the complaint alleges degrades users’ mental health, their sense of self-worth, and their physical safety.
The AG even claims that certain child exploitative content is more than ten times more prevalent on Facebook and Instagram than it is on Pornhub and the porn subscription site OnlyFans.
Torrez’s office added that it has omitted many images its investigators found on Meta’s platforms from the complaint, as they were considered too graphic and disturbing.
The AG’s office is also encouraging parents and children who have grappled with sexual exploitation enabled by social media platforms — as well as those who have experienced addiction, depression, eating disorders or other self-harm or mental health issues because of their use of social media — to come forward and share their experiences with Torrez’s office.
You can follow Alana Mastrangelo on Facebook and X/Twitter at @ARmastrangelo, and on Instagram.