(Ken Silva, Headline USA) New Mexico Attorney General Raúl Torrez sued Meta and its CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, last week for allowing sexual abuse, online solicitation and human trafficking on Facebook and Instagram.
Torrez said last week that his lawsuit comes after he carried out an undercover investigation of Meta’s platforms, creating decoy accounts of children 14-years and younger.
According to Torrez, his investigation discovered that Facebook and Instagram have “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.”
Further, the platforms allegedly have allowed dozens of adults to find, contact, and press children into providing sexually explicit pictures. On Facebook, children have even been recommended to join groups devoted to facilitating commercial sex, according to the attorney general.
In one instance, the AG’s undercover investigation found that Meta “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,” Torrez added.
All in all, “the Office’s investigators found that certain child exploitative content is over ten times more prevalent on Facebook and Instagram than it is on Pornhub and OnlyFans,” Torrez said.
Torrez warned some images collected in his investigation were too disgusting to include in the lawsuit.
His Dec. 5 lawsuit seeks up to a $5,000 fine for every violation of the Unfair Practices Act, which prohibits “unconscionable trade practices in the conduct of any trade or commerce.”
The lawsuit comes after numerous reports about Meta allowing child sex-trafficking on its platforms.
In June, The Wall Street Journal published a 2,700-word article about how Instagram’s algorithms allegedly promote child pornography and connect pedophiles with each other. Following that report, Meta set up a child safety task force.
But on Dec. 1, the Journal published a follow-up article about how the pedophile problems on Instagram persist.
“The company has taken down hashtags related to pedophilia, but its systems sometimes recommend new ones with minor variations,” the latest Journal article stated. “Even when Meta is alerted to problem accounts and user groups, it has been spotty in removing them.”
Ken Silva is a staff writer at Headline USA. Follow him at twitter.com/jd_cashless.
