After seeing how truly terrible social media is for young teen girls — and the level of abuse they endure from strangers who want to groom them and worse — Raul Torrez felt there was only one way to fix things: by dragging executives from Meta into court to hold them accountable.
“There needs to be a reexamination of the algorithmic features that serve predators the kinds of vulnerable children that we know are currently on the platforms,” Torrez, the Attorney General of New Mexico, told me.
Pushed by Torrez, the state of New Mexico is currently in the middle of a courtroom trial that accuses Mark Zuckerberg’s companies — including Instagram, Facebook and What’s App — of exposing kids to the “twin dangers of sexual exploitation and mental health harm” through messages, “sextortion” schemes and human trafficking.
According to explosive documents that were unsealed on the eve of the landmark jury trial, a researcher at Meta warned warned top brass that there could be as many as 500,000 daily instances of online sexual exploitation on the company’s social media platforms.
One ex-Meta executive, Arturo Béjar, caused major waves with his testimony in the case.
“The product is very good at connecting people with interests, and if your interest is little girls, it will be really good at connecting you with little girls,” he testified.
Béjar alleged that his own underage daughter was bombarded by predators sending messages and nude photos.
“I was with her when she created the account,” Béjar said. “I didn’t know that was going to bring predators to her door, people who attacked her to her door, people who would ask her to sell nude photos of herself when she was a teenager to her door.”
Torrez and his team saw first-hand what can happen when they set up a decoy account, posing as a 13-year-old girl. The “teen” was quickly bombarded by explicit photos and propositions from would-be predators.
“What we saw was an explosion — first in the number of adult men following the accounts, but also direct messages that included sexually explicit materials, sexually explicit photographs,” Torrez, a former child abuse prosecutor, told me.
In May 2024, Torrez announced that three predators had been arrested in “Operation MetaPhile.”
They had been traveling to a New Mexico hotel to have sex with who they believed was a 13-year-old girl. All three made contact through Meta platforms, including Instagram, WhatsApp and Facebook.
One man, 52-year-old Fernando Clyde, sent photos of his genitals to the underage account and said he wanted to rape her, make her cry and get her pregnant.
When the decoy sent him a photo of a friend she claimed “just turned 11,” he responded, “Mmmmm. Really.”
Another, Christopher Reynolds, was targeted specifically in the operation after the mother of a real 11-year-old he was contacting reported him to the police.
Reynolds told the decoy that he could get a motel where she was located. “Can we just chill? And it can give us some time to work on our kisses,” he wrote.
All three men were charged with child solicitation by electronic communication, and two with attempted criminal sexual penetration of a minor.
Torrez alleges his undercover operation is proof that Meta is trampling consumer protection laws, and failing to inform customers about harms their product could cause.
“I don’t think that the jury would be convinced at the end of the day that a company with this many resources as they have at their disposal has done nearly enough to stop that harm,” he told me.
Instagram CEO Adam Mosseri took the stand last week in the trial to defend the platform.
“I think we should do what we can,” he said, when asked whether Instagram should make efforts to keep teens safe. “I think that there’s over 2 billion people on Instagram, which means there are millions of teens on Instagram. So when you say everything, I want to be clear that we are a large enough platform that sometimes some things will — so for instance, problematic content will be seen.”
Torrez said he considered the testimony part of a “consistent downplaying of the harms” from executives.
The trial will likely continue for several more weeks before a jury decides whether Meta is liable for harm on its platform.
Meanwhile, a bellwether trial in Los Angeles is currently before a jury, as a 20-year-old California girl, only known as KGM, is suing Meta and Google, alleging their platforms were deliberately designed to addict children.
A spokesperson for Meta said that Torrez is making “sensationalist, irrelevant and distracting arguments by cherry picking select documents,”
“We’re focused on demonstrating our longstanding commitment to supporting young people,” the spokesperson said. “For over a decade, we’ve listened to parents, worked with experts and law enforcement, and conducted in-depth research … to make meaningful changes.”
Torrez said the changes he wants to see Meta make should be doable.
“One of the most critical issues is just [more stringent] age verification,” he said, “so that we have a clear understanding of exactly the age of the users who are in those spaces so the experience that they have can be carefully curated.”
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