The overwhelming majority of state governments in the United States believe that Meta Platforms has created a online marketplace for child predators to flourish, and on Tuesday New Mexico joined the court battle against the company.
New Mexico Attorney General Raúl Torrez filed a lawsuit Tuesday night alleging that "Meta had allowed Facebook and Instagram to become a marketplace for predators in search of children upon whom to prey."
Out of interest of increasing its ad revenue, Meta has failed to keep children below the age of 13 off of its platform and CEO Mark Zuckerberg is personally responsible for the failure of his company to fix the issue, according to the lawsuit that was viewed by the Wall Street Journal.
The decision to file the lawsuit came after the AGs office set up test accounts on IG and FB purporting to be teenagers or preteens, even using AI-generated photographs of children as part of the ruse.
The investigation found that Meta's algorithms recommended sexual content to those accounts and before long the accounts were receiving sexually explicit direct messages and sexual propositions from other users.
One underage account created by investigators seemed to be particularly popular with the child predators on the platform, attracting thousands of followers who wanted the fictitious child to join private chat groups with sexual content featuring children and adults, according to the lawsuit.
Another fake Facebook account that purported to be a 13-year-old-girl received recommendations to follow an account with 119,000 followers that openly posts adult pornography on the platform within two days of being created.
Meta Platforms did not immediately return a request for comment, but the company has said in the past that it takes the issue seriously, and that it uses "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," to fight the problem.
In June, the company established a task force to battle the issue.
But evidence is mounting that Meta's efforts to keep child predators off the platform are failing.
In October, a group of 41 Attorneys General filed a complaint claiming that Meta has intentionally built a platform that endangers child users with addictive features.
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