A lawsuit filed by the state of New Mexico against Facebook parent company Meta Platforms and its CEO claims that both Facebook and Instagram recommend sexual content to underage users and promote young users' accounts to alleged child predators.
According to the civil lawsuit filed in a New Mexico state court, Meta has allowed the social media platforms Facebook and Instagram to become a marketplace for child abusers looking for children to prey on.
The lawsuit also argues that Meta failed to implement protections against usage by children younger than 13 and has targeted the age-related vulnerabilities of children to increase the company's advertising revenue.
Additionally, the suit argues that Chairman and CEO Mark Zuckerberg is personally responsible for product decisions that aggravated risks to young users of Meta’s platforms.
The New Mexico attorney general’s office filed the suit after it conducted an investigation that included setting up several test accounts on Instagram and Facebook intending to make other users believe that the account owners are either teenagers or preteens.
While creating the fake accounts, investigators used artificial intelligence-generated photographs of the young and fictional account holders. The suit claims that Meta’s algorithms recommended sexual content to those accounts and that they were flooded with explicit messages and sexual propositions from other users.
The account for "Issa Bee," where investigators posted photos that made it seem like the owner was a 13-year-old girl from Albuquerque, New Mexico, attracted thousands of adult followers who bombarded her account with invitations to join private chat groups and sex content featuring both children and adults, revealed the suit.
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On Facebook Messenger, the account’s chats received many unwanted images and videos of genitalia, which the account received at least three to four times per week, read the complaint.
The company didn’t immediately provide comment on the allegations in the lawsuit, but it said in a statement that it allegedly "works diligently to protect young users."
According to Facebook's statement, the company uses sophisticated technology, works with child safety experts, reports content to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children and shares "information and tools with other companies and law enforcement, including state attorneys general, to help root out predators."
Meta claims it is focused on ensuring child safety
Meta claims that it prioritizes child safety and that it invests in safety staff. In a 2021 Facebook post, Zuckerberg wrote that it is important to him that everything the company is creating is "safe and good for kids."
In June, Meta established a task force to deal with child-safety problems on its platforms following the publication of an article in The Wall Street Journal (WSJ) that revealed how Instagram’s algorithms connected and promoted a vast network of accounts that were linked to the commission and purchase of underage-sex content.
Additional WSJ articles revealed that Meta is having a hard time addressing various problems on Instagram and Facebook, where groups trading child-sex content have at least hundreds of thousands of users. Meta claimed that it has taken measures to resolve those issues, including removing more than 16,000 Facebook Groups and expanding an enforcement algorithm that identifies accounts that behave suspiciously toward children or act in other ways that suggest interest in child exploitation.
The New Mexico complaint cited the WSJ's reporting this year about Facebook and Instagram’s tendency to recommend sexualized content involving children and said that this is "consistent with the troubling results found by the Attorney General."
The complaint follows a group of coordinated suits by 41 other states and the District of Columbia filed in October in federal and state courts claiming Meta has intentionally designed its products with addictive features that harm young users. The suits also alleged the company misled the public about the dangers of its social media platforms for young people. (Related: Stanford researchers: Twitter FAILED to prevent dozens of child abuse images from spreading online.)
Meta disputed those claims, instead claiming that it works to support young users on its platforms.
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More related stories:
Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta struggling to remove child sexual abuse materials from Facebook and Instagram.
TikTok becoming a platform for child sexual exploitation.
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