CV NEWS FEED // The state of New Mexico announced a lawsuit against Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta Platforms, alleging that its subsidiaries Facebook and Instagram are “prime locations” for child sex traffickers.
“Meta and [Zuckerberg] tell the public that Meta’s social media platforms are safe and good for kids,” read the complaint filed Wednesday by Democratic Attorney General Raúl Torrez:
The reality is far different. Meta knowingly exposes children to the twin dangers of sexual exploitation and mental health harm.
Meta’s conduct has turned New Mexico children who are on its platforms into victims. Meta’s motive for doing so is profit. This action seeks to make social media safer for New Mexico’s children by holding Meta accountable for conduct that violates the New Mexico Unfair Practices Act and creates a public nuisance.
Meta’s platforms Facebook and Instagram are a breeding ground for predators who target children for human trafficking, the distribution of sexual images, grooming, and solicitation. Teens and preteens can easily register for unrestricted accounts because of a lack of age verification. When they do, Meta directs harmful and inappropriate material at them. It allows unconnected adults to have unfettered access to them, which those adults use for grooming and solicitation.
And Meta’s platforms do this even though Meta has the capability of both determining that these users are minors and providing warnings or other protections against material that is not only harmful to minors but poses substantial dangers of solicitation and trafficking.
“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 in a Wednesday press release:
As a career prosecutor who specialized in internet crimes against children, I am committed to using every available tool to put an end to these horrific practices and I will hold companies — and their executives — accountable whenever they put profits ahead of children’s safety.
>> STATES SUE META CLAIMING IT HARMS YOUTH MENTAL HEALTH <<
In the same press release, Torrez’s office noted that its “investigators found that certain child exploitative content is over ten times more prevalent on Facebook and Instagram than it is on Pornhub and OnlyFans.”
The Wall Street Journal (WSJ) reported that the “office filed the suit after it ran an investigation that included setting up test accounts on Instagram and Facebook purporting to other users to be those of teenagers or preteens, including artificial-intelligence generated photographs of the fictional account-holding children.”
“The suit says that Meta’s algorithms recommended sexual content to those accounts and that they were inundated with explicit messages and sexual propositions from other users,” WSJ continued.
New Mexico is not the first state to sue the technology conglomerate in the last month. In late October, a bipartisan group of 33 other state attorneys general filed a civil lawsuit against Meta alleging its platforms pervasively “altered the psychological and social realities of a generation of young Americans.”
“Its motive is profit, and in seeking to maximize its financial gains, Meta has repeatedly misled the public about the substantial dangers of its Social Media Platforms,” the attorneys general claimed.
“[Meta] has concealed the ways in which these Platforms exploit and manipulate its most vulnerable consumers: teenagers and children,” they went on to write. “And it has ignored the sweeping damage these Platforms have caused to the mental and physical health of our nation’s youth.”
>> LEFT-WING GROUP GAMED ALGORITHMS ON X <<
Despite these two pending suits, almost all of Meta’s major advertisers have remained on its platforms. This includes Disney, a corporation that has long portrayed itself as family-friendly.
By contrast, Disney joined many other brands in removing all its ads from Elon Musk’s X (formerly known as Twitter), the main competitor to Meta’s social networks. The entertainment and media giant based its decision on a biased report from the left-wing activist group Media Matters that alleged X placed ads “next to content with white nationalist hashtags.”
However, these claims were debunked by analyses that showed the leftist group may have deliberately “gamed” X’s algorithms in a malicious attempt to derail the platform, which following Musk’s purchase has consistently defended the free speech rights of conservative and centrist Americans.
Many observers have speculated whether Media Matters can be held liable for fraud for their actions.
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In a Thursday X post, conservative commentator Collin Rugg singled out Disney CEO Bob Iger.
“Hey @RobertIger & other advertisers,” he wrote. “Will you be suspending advertising on Facebook & Instagram like you did with X?”
“Disney is currently running ~300 ads for Disneyland and Disney World on Meta,” Rugg continued, providing screenshots of examples.
“I’ll answer the question above,” he added. “No, advertisers will not suspend advertising because they’re lying hacks.”
After news of the New Mexico lawsuit broke, Musk himself called out the apparent double standard.
“Why no advertiser boycott, Bob Eiger [sic]?” he wrote on his own platform. “You are endorsing this material!”
