By Emily Mangiaracina
New Mexico Attorney General Raúl Torrez concluded that Facebook and Instagram have become ‘prime locations’ for sexual predators to trade child pornography and ‘solicit minors for sex.’
New Mexico’s attorney general filed a lawsuit on Tuesday against Meta Platforms, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, and its CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, for facilitating child sex trafficking as well as the distribution of child sex abuse material.
Attorney General Raúl Torrez, a career prosecutor who has specialized in internet crimes against children, concluded after his office’s months-long investigation that Meta’s social media platforms are “not safe spaces for children, but rather prime locations for predators to trade child pornography and solicit minors for sex.”
The New Mexico Office of the Attorney General found that Meta “directs harmful and inappropriate material” at minors and “allows unconnected adults to have unfettered access to them,” despite the fact that Meta is capable of both identifying these users as minors and “providing warnings or other protections against” the harmful material. Worse, such material “poses substantial dangers of solicitation and trafficking.”
According to the lawsuit, the investigation found that, “[s]pecifically, with accounts clearly belonging to children,” Meta has:
Proactively served and directed them to a stream of egregious, sexually explicit images through recommended users and posts – even where the child has expressed no interest in this content;
Enabled adults to find, message, and groom minors, soliciting them to sell pictures or participate in pornographic videos;
Fostered unmoderated user groups devoted to or facilitating Commercial Sexual Exploitation of Children (CSEC);
Allowed users to search for, like, share, and sell a crushing volume of child sexual abuse material (CSAM);
Allowed, and failed to detect, a fictional mother offering her 13-year old for trafficking, and solicited the 13-year old to create her own professional page and sell advertising.
The lawsuit clarified that Meta’s role in facilitating child sex trafficking and CSAM has not been simply that of a “publisher” but has involved algorithms that “search and disseminate sexually exploitative and explicit materials,” helping to grow a network of social media users seeking to buy and sell the images, as well as the children.
Investigators reported Meta accounts showing sexually explicit depictions of children but found that about half of a sample of the reported content was still available days before they filed a lawsuit. Removed content often reappeared, or Meta recommended “alternative, equally problematic content to users,” the investigators found.
While a search for pornography on Facebook was “blocked and returned no results,” the same search on Instagram returned “numerous” accounts depicting pornography, nudity, pedophilia, and sexual assault.
Remarkably, according to the lawsuit, “certain child exploitative content” is 10 times more common on Facebook and Instagram as compared to the notorious pornographic website PornHub and the “adult content” platform OnlyFans.
The investigators’ findings underscore the growing problem not only of child sex trafficking but of “porn-made pedophiles,” a phenomenon testified to by child protection expert Michael Sheath. These are “people who were not initially attracted to children” but whose brains have been “rewired by compulsive porn consumption to be attracted to children, often because they escalate to increasingly extreme content as their porn addiction progresses,” in the words of Jonathon Van Maren.
The Unherd article “How porn breeds paedophiles” shares what Sheath learned as a probation officer trying to understand male sex offenders.
“Eventually, these men would reveal how they operated. Many of the men talked about mainstream, free and legal porn having been a gateway to the illegal stuff, and some went on to create porn themselves, which, of course, requires children to be abused,” he explained.
The findings of the New Mexico AG’s office have been corroborated by a two-year investigation by The Guardian, which found that Meta is failing to “prevent criminals from using its platforms to buy and sell children for sex,” as minors are being advertised for sex trafficking on Instagram, and Facebook is also being used to facilitate such trafficking.
In fact, according to the Guardian report, several pension and investment funds that own Meta stock sued the company in March for failing to act on “systemic evidence” that its platforms are facilitating sex trafficking and child sexual exploitation.
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