Facebook, Instagram promote minors’ accounts to child predators, New Mexico alleges in lawsuit

New Mexico Attorney General Raúl Torrez (D) is suing Meta and CEO Mark Zuckerberg over allegations the company’s platforms — Facebook and Instagram — promoted underage accounts to purported child predators.

The state attorney general’s office says its undercover investigation found Meta allowed its platforms to “become a marketplace for predators in search of children upon whom they prey.” The investigation involved creating decoy accounts pretending to be children 14 years and younger.

The lawsuit, filed on Tuesday in New Mexico state court, alleges Meta’s algorithms showed underage users “egregious, sexually explicit images” even if the child showed no interest and allowed dozens of adults to find and push children into giving sexually explicit pictures of themselves or participate in pornographic videos.

Meta is also accused of recommending children join unmoderated Facebook groups related to commercial sex and enabling users to find, share and sell child pornography.

The suit was first reported by The Wall Street Journal.

“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,” Torrez said, adding he will hold companies and executives accountable when they “put profits ahead of children’s safety.”

In one case study, investigators created a fake profile for a fictional “bad mother” to a 13-year-old named “Issa Bee.” Within days, the mother’s account had the max amount of Facebook friends, over 3,000 followers and several comments showing love and interest for her daughter, who was visibly under-age in photos, prosecutors said.

Prosecutors said an account for Issa Bee was then added to a chat group that featured pornographic videos and naked photos of underage girls. She reported the account numerous times, but it remained active, and Facebook allegedly advised her to leave the group.

Torrez claimed Zuckerberg and other Meta executives are aware of the harm of their products to minors but have failed to make changes to prevent future sexual exploitation of children.

In response to the suit, Meta said child exploitation is a “horrific crime” and laid out the steps it takes to identify and combat child predators on its platforms.

“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. In one month alone, we disabled more than half a million accounts for violating our child safety policies,” a spokesperson for Meta wrote in a statement to The Hill.

The spokesperson added Facebook and Instagram have sent more than 7.6 million “cybertip reports” for child sexual exploration to the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children in Q3 of this year.

This week’s lawsuit comes less than two months after Meta was hit with several state-led ones accusing it of designing and deploying features on its platforms that are harmful to the mental health of young users.