Trial proceedings in New Mexico’s court case against Meta will conclude later this month, with a judge to decide whether the beleaguered social media company violated state law by exposing minors to explicit content, social media addiction and sexual exploitation.
The state’s 228-page complaint, which New Mexico Attorney General Raul Torrez filed in 2023, alleges Meta’s platforms target minors with addictive features and “knowingly expose them to the twin dangers of sexual exploitation and mental health harm.”
If First Judicial District Court Judge Bryan Biedscheid rules in New Mexico’s favor, Meta could face hundreds of millions of dollars in fines for violating state law protecting consumers from unfair and deceptive business practices.
The trial is expected to conclude on March 27.
New Mexico’s case is the first stand-alone state suit against Meta. It includes evidence from a months-long undercover operation in which New Mexico officers posed as children on Facebook and Instagram.
The investigation indicated Meta’s platforms:
- Show underage users sexually explicit content without prompting.
- Allow adult predators to contact children and sexually exploit them.
- Facilitate the spread and exchange of child pornography.
In some cases, the state claims, Facebook recommended children join groups “devoted to facilitating commercial sex.”
In another case, investigators say Meta “allowed a fictitious mother 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.”
“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,” Attorney General Torrez summarized in a press release.
Internal documents from Meta and testimony from former employees bolster New Mexico’s claims. Shortly before the trial began on February 9, the state published several troubling communications from a former Meta employee who worked in child safety.
In a June 2020 email reviewed by the New York Post, the employee revealed sexual predators on Meta platforms target “[approximately] 500k victims per day in English markets only.”
“We expect the true situation is worse,” she confided.
In another email, the employee considered the impact of giving such a large user base access to children.
“I just think nowhere in the history of humanity could you have a secret conversation with 1,000 people,” she wrote. “I’m actually scared of the ramifications here.”
Two-time Meta employee Arturo Béjar testified against his former employer on February 12. Béjar left Meta for the first time in 2015. He returned in 2019 to strengthen Meta platforms’ safety after someone sent his own daughter explicit photos online.
As far as Béjar could tell, Meta wasn’t interested in prioritizing safety.
“So many examples of people with good ideas for good things that would reduce harm within, as it got reviewed and went through the pipeline, would get pushed down,” KOAT quoted Béjar’s testimony.
In 2021, Béjar surveyed more than 237,000 Instagram users between 13 and 15 years old to determine what kinds of harm they faced on social media. One in three reported witnessing cyberbullying. One in 10 said they, themselves, experienced bullying online. One in five reported seeing explicit images.
Though Béjar said he shared his findings with Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg and other top executives, he claimed the company continued to prioritize profit.
“I think they [the executives] really care about making people think that they care, but I think in practice they don’t care,” Béjar mused, per KOAT.
“Caring is the moment you become aware of something, you engage with it, you understand it, you work on it, you do things that make it better.”
Meta, for its part, maintains New Mexico’s undercover investigation was “ethically compromised.” In opening arguments, the company claimed the state “cherry-picked” evidence which doesn’t accurately reflect its safety protocols.
Judge Biedscheid denied Meta’s request to dismiss New Mexico’s case in May 2024. He subsequently denied its pretrial motion to exclude evidence from the state’s undercover investigation.
Meta’s biggest problem is that New Mexico’s allegations echo those from thousands of other lawsuits against the social media company. More than 1,600 civil cases accusing Meta and other social media platforms of harming children — known as the social media addiction lawsuits — are awaiting trial in California state court.
Trial for the first of these cases began in Los Angeles in January.
Dozens more federal cases, including many brought against Meta by state governments, will make their way into courtrooms starting this summer.
Instagram, in particular, has long been linked to sextortion and inappropriate content. Predators met their victims on Instagram in nearly half (45%) of all the sextortion reports filed with the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children between August 2020 and August 2023.
Of the scammers who threated to share explicit photos of minors, 60% threatened to do so on Instagram.
In January 2024, Meta announced all teen accounts would begin automatically filtering out inappropriate content. Journalists from The Wall Street Journal soon discovered the feature didn’t work.
“Instagram regularly recommends sexual videos to accounts for teenagers that appear interested in racy content, and does so within minutes of when they first log in,” the outlet wrote, continuing:
Regardless of whether New Mexico triumphs against Meta in court, evidence from the state’s case clearly illustrates why minors should not be allowed on Instagram and Facebook unsupervised.
The Daily Citizen will continue covering America’s legal reckoning with social media and the harm it causes children.
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