New Mexico lawsuit claims Meta is enabling child exploitation on its platforms

New Mexico lawsuit claims Meta is enabling child exploitation on its platforms،

Meta faces civil child safety suit as New Mexico investigators say it fails to protect minors' Instagram and Facebook accounts. New Mexico Attorney General Raul Torrez and his office led the investigation. In it, Facebook and Instagram test accounts of four fictional children were created to determine whether Meta's algorithms intentionally pushed explicit content to these accounts. The New Mexico civil lawsuit is another child exploitation case the company is involved in, following lawsuits filed by more than 40 states in October. In these documents, it was claimed that Meta deliberately designed its platforms with features that could cause minors to become addicted to social media use.

Torrez claimed that investigators focused on child exploitation and human trafficking after concluding that Meta failed to provide adequate measures to protect children's profiles from exploitation by predatory adults online . The civil lawsuit also draws on data from numerous recent criminal cases in which predators used Facebook or Instagram accounts to actively groom children.

When creating the four fictitious accounts, investigators provided adult birthdates for all individuals, just as many children tend to lie about their ages on social media. AI-generated photos were also used, showing images of minors rather than adults. Shortly after these accounts were created, the lawsuit says, Meta's algorithms began feeding them sexual content. Just two days after a 13-year-old girl created a fictitious account, Meta's algorithms suggested she follow another account that was actively posting adult content on Facebook.

According to the lawsuit, accounts that show interest in sexual content are very quickly approached by predatory individuals. Somewhat alarmingly, one of the test accounts joined a job search group in New Mexico.

A young girl's fake account was quickly contacted by a member of the group who offered her a price if she would indulge in a pornographic video. Some of these “recruitment” attempts were so troubling, Torrez said, that his office referred them for possible prosecution.

In a statement to Wall Street JournalTorrez further adds:

The functionality of the platform itself is not designed to prevent this connection between predators and likely victims.

Meta states that it works to prevent predatory adults from contacting minors on its platforms. However, the civil lawsuit claims that all of the test accounts were flooded with requests from adults who engaged in more than just unwelcome compliments.