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.
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.