A lawsuit launched today by the New Mexico attorney general claims that Meta Platforms Inc. and Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg failed “to protect children from sexual abuse, online solicitation, and human trafficking.”

The suit comes after a yearlong investigation in which the office of Attorney General Raúl Torrez created profiles on Facebook and Instagram pretending to be teens or pre-teens. Using these accounts, the investigators found that they were bombarded with a “stream of egregious, sexually explicit images” without even having expressed any interest in such content.

They said the accounts enabled adults to get in touch with the children and ask for sexually explicit pictures of them or even ask them to participate in pornographic videos. The children were also recommended to join “Facebook groups devoted to facilitating commercial sex.”

In another test, a fictitious mother offered her 13-year-old daughter to sex traffickers and then was able to create a professional page to allow the daughter to share revenue from advertising. One fake account of a young girl managed to accrue 6,700 followers, mostly adult males, some of whom asked to contact the girl via separate apps such as WhatsApp. The lawsuit states this girl received messages containing “pictures and videos of genitalia, including exposed penises” at least three to four times per week.

“Mr. Zuckerberg and other Meta executives are aware of the serious harm their products can pose to young users, and yet they have failed to make sufficient changes to their platforms that would prevent the sexual exploitation of children,” Torrez said. “Despite repeated assurances to Congress and the public that they can be trusted to police themselves, it is clear that Meta’s executives continue to prioritize engagement and ad revenue over the safety of the most vulnerable members of our society.”

Meta is in a precarious position right now, having just been sued by a bipartisan collection of 42 attorneys general for harms they say Facebook and Instagram perpetrate on the young. This came after years of criticism from various politicians, academics and child protection groups saying the same thing: Meta puts profit before safety.

“Child exploitation is a horrific crime, and online predators are determined criminals,” Meta said in a statement to media. “We use sophisticated technology, hire child safety experts, report content to the National Center 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. In one month alone, we disabled more than half a million accounts for violating our child safety policies.”

Regardless, it seems quite obvious now that it’s only a matter of time until the U.S. cracks down on social media companies just as the U.K. has done with its Online Safety Bill. A bill in the U.S., the “Protecting Kids on Social Media Act,” if passed, would effectively completely change how American kids use social media. But any kind of sweeping legislation has been met with negativity from privacy advocates who believe such laws have less to do with protecting kids than creating digital authoritarian surveillance.

Photo: Sanket Mishra/Unsplash