As technology advances and expands, it is our duty to hold social media giants accountable when their platforms dangerously place profits over protections. After an extensive, undercover investigation, our office revealed that Meta platforms have:
- Proactively served and directed the underage users a stream of egregious, sexually explicit images — even when the child has expressed no interest in this content
- Enabled dozens of adults to find, contact, and press children into providing sexually explicit pictures of themselves or participate in pornographic videos.
- Recommended that the children join unmoderated Facebook groups devoted to facilitating commercial sex.
- Allowed Facebook and Instagram users to find, share, and sell an enormous volume of child pornography.
- Allowed a fictitious mother to offer her 13-year-old daughter for sale to sex traffickers and to create a professional page to allow her daughter to share revenue from advertising.
From this investigation, we filed a lawsuit on December 7, 2023, that highlights how Meta failed to remove Child Sexual Abuse Material across its platforms and enables adults to find, contact, and solicit underage users to produce illicit pornographic imagery and participate in commercial sex.
While we litigate this important case, we urge parents, teachers and kids to visit our Internet Protection & Safety page, where we list resources to help activate privacy settings, report a crime, and submit a negative experience you may have had on one of these platforms.
