New Mexico Sues Meta for Enabling Predatory Behavior
By Movieguide® Contributor
New Mexico Attorney General Raúl Torrez filed a complaint against Meta last week, alleging that the company enabled child predators, placing young users at an unacceptable amount of risk.
“Meta’s business model of profit over child safety and business practices of misrepresenting the amount of dangerous material and conduct to which its platforms expose children violates New Mexico law,” the lawsuit says, naming Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg as a defendant. “Meta should be held accountable for the harms it has inflicted on New Mexico’s children.”
To investigate the extent to which children are endangered on Meta’s platforms, the New Mexico Attorney General’s office created Meta accounts posing as minors as young as 12 years old. The investigation found that these accounts were able to access “sexual or self-harm content.”
“After viewing accounts that showed sexually suggestive pictures of girls, Instagram’s algorithms directed investigators to other accounts with images of sexual intercourse and sexualized images of minors,” the complaint says.
The algorithm also helped investigators find potential child sexual abuse material by suggesting terms for them to search that would not be blocked by the sites’ safety features.
The investigation also found how quickly minors could be contacted by predators as photos of young girls produced “a stream of comments from accounts of adult males, often with requests that the girls contact them or send pictures.”
This lawsuit comes on the heels of another major complaint against Meta filed by 41 states for making its technology excessively addictive and detrimental to children’s health.
Meta has responded to these growing concerns, adamantly stating that it goes above and beyond to protect children and make its platforms safe for anyone to use.
“We use sophisticated technology, hire child safety experts, report content to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, and share information and tools with other companies and law enforcement, including state attorneys general, to help root out predators,” said Meta spokesperson Nkechi Nneji.
However, the growing legal concern about children’s safety on Meta’s platforms suggests that the company isn’t doing nearly enough.
Movieguide® previously reported:
A new report finds that Instagram is showing “risqué footage” and “overtly sexual adult videos” to young users.
The Wall Street Journal conducted an experiment, setting up fake accounts that only followed “young gymnasts, cheerleaders and other teen and preteen influencers.”
The experiment was proposed after it was noticed that “the thousands of followers of such young people’s accounts often include large numbers of adult men, and that many of the accounts who followed those children also had demonstrated interest in sex content related to both children and adults,” per WSJ.
Soon after creating the accounts, the Journal found that Instagram pushed “jarring doses of salacious content to those test accounts.”
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