Facebook, Instagram steer predators to kids, US state says

Facebook and Instagram recommend sexual content to underage users and promote minors’ accounts, the state of New Mexico alleges in a lawsuit.

Meta founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg at Meta headquarters in Menlo Park, California. Picture: AFP

Facebook and Instagram recommend sexual content to underage users and promote minors’ accounts to apparent child predators, the state of New Mexico alleges in a lawsuit against parent company Meta Platforms and its CEO.

The civil lawsuit, filed in New Mexico state court, alleges that “Meta has allowed Facebook and Instagram to become a marketplace for predators in search of children upon whom to prey”.

It also claims that Meta has failed to implement protections against usage by children below the age of 13 and has targeted the age-related vulnerabilities of children in the interest of increasing its advertising revenue. The suit says chief executive Mark Zuckerberg is personally responsible for product decisions that aggravated risks to children on Meta’s platforms.

The New Mexico Attorney-General’s 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.

An account for “Issa Bee”, for which investigators posted photos purporting to be a 13-year-old girl from Albuquerque, attracted thousands of adult followers who deluged her with both invitations to join private chat groups and sex content featuring both children and adults, according to the suit.

On Facebook Messenger, the account’s chats are “filled with pictures and videos of genitalia, including exposed penises, which she received at least 3-4 times per week,” the complaint states.

The company didn’t immediately provide comment on the allegations in the lawsuit, but said in a statement that it works diligently to protect young users.

“We use sophisticated technology, hire child safety experts, report content to the National Centre 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,” the statement said.

Meta has said that child safety is a priority and that it invests heavily in safety staff. “It’s very important to me that everything we build is safe and good for kids,” Mr Zuckerberg wrote in a 2021 Facebook post.

Meta in June established a task force to address child-safety problems on its platforms after an article in The Wall Street Journal revealed that Instagram’s algorithms connected and promoted a vast network of accounts openly devoted to the commission and purchase of underage-sex content.

Additional Journal articles last week showed that Meta is struggling to fix problems on Instagram as well as on Facebook, where Groups devoted to trading child-sex content have amassed hundreds of thousands of users.

The company has said that it has taken measures to address those issues, including removing more than 16,000 Facebook Groups and expanding an enforcement algorithm used to identify accounts that behave suspiciously toward children or act in other ways that suggest an interest in child exploitation.

The New Mexico complaint cites the Journal’s reporting this year about Facebook and Instagram’s persistent tendency to recommend sexualised content involving children, calling the work “consistent with the troubling results found by the Attorney-General”.

The complaint follows a group of co-ordinated suits by 41 other states and the District of Columbia filed in October in federal and state courts claiming Meta has intentionally built its products with addictive features that harm young users and that it misled the public about the dangers of its platforms for young people. Meta disputed those claims, and said it works to support young people on its platforms.

Raul Torrez, New Mexico’s Attorney-General, said his office chose to focus on child exploitation and human trafficking in its suit after concluding that Meta’s platforms have gone beyond merely hosting child sex-abuse content to enabling it.

New Mexico’s suit cites numerous recent criminal cases in New Mexico in which predators have used Facebook and Instagram to groom children, with one perpetrator alone accused of recruiting more than 100 underage victims via Facebook.

Investigators in Mr Torrez’s office established Facebook and Instagram accounts for four fictional children, two boys and two girls. When registering the accounts, they provided Meta’s system with adult birth dates for some of the accounts in order to mimic the behaviour of young users who frequently misstate their ages.

They registered the “Issa Bee” account with a birth date in 2002, for example, but the account presented itself as a child, with posts about losing her last baby tooth and the first day of seventh grade. The account was set up to appear as if it belonged to a child who was possibly being trafficked by her mother, the suit says.

Meta’s algorithms began pushing sex content to the accounts after their creation, the lawsuit says. Within two days of the creation of another account for a purported 13-year-old girl, Meta recommended that it follow an account with 119,000 followers that openly posted adult pornography on Facebook, the suit says.

The purported minor accounts that indicated an interest in sexual content were rapidly approached by predators, New Mexico alleges. Some of the accounts joined teen dating groups on Facebook that required no age verification, and were often administered by adults who solicited the children through private messaging, the complaint says.

Meta has said that it works to prevent malicious adults from contacting children on Facebook and Instagram. New Mexico’s suit says that its child decoy accounts were quickly deluged with follower requests from adults who plied them with not just untoward compliments but child sex imagery, invitations to private Facebook groups and even offers to pay the children for sex.

One of the investigators’ test accounts joined a group for users seeking jobs in New Mexico and was contacted by a member offering her a specific price if she would have sex in a pornographic video, according to the suit. The user told her he accepts participants from the age of 10, it says.

Some of the efforts to recruit the state’s test accounts for prostitution were so explicit and disturbing that the attorney general’s office referred them to law enforcement for potential prosecution, said Torrez, the attorney general.

When the state’s test accounts flagged inappropriate content to Meta using the company’s user-reporting systems -- including what the suit said were images of nude, underage girls shared via a group chat that one account was added to -- the company’s platforms routinely declared that the images were acceptable, the suit alleges.

A former prosecutor of cases focused on internet crimes against children, Torrez alleges that Meta has both hidden the scale of the dangers children face on its platforms and failed to address even obvious sex trafficking.

“The features of the platform itself are not engineered in a way to prevent this matchmaking from likely predators and likely victims,” Torrez said. “I incorrectly assumed, like a lot of parents, that a big, well-funded company like Meta would not have allowed itself to become an alternative venue for that activity.”

The Wall Street Journal