New Mexico’s Attorney General Raúl Torrez sued Facebook and Instagram owner Meta in December, saying the company failed to protect young users from exposure to child sexual abuse material and allowed adults to solicit explicit imagery from them.
“While the company continues to downplay the illegal and harmful activity children are exposed to on its platforms, Meta’s internal data and presentations show the problem is severe and pervasive,” Torrez said.
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, along with the CEOs of Snap, Discord, TikTok and X, formerly Twitter, are scheduled to testify before the U.S. Senate on child safety at the end of January.
megopie ( @megopie@beehaw.org ) 10•7 months agoFacebook has done so much terrible shit by refusing to moderate properly, multiple fucking genocides are on their hands, and yet this is what gets them in court? Fucking… this?
Nah, kids shouldn’t be on these platforms nearly as young as they are, kids being on these platforms are not the reason these sights need to moderate better, adults being jackasses are the reason these sites need to be moderated better.
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SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — Newly unredacted documents from New Mexico’s lawsuit against Meta underscore the company’s “historical reluctance” to keep children safe on its platforms, the complaint says.
New Mexico’s Attorney General Raúl Torrez sued Facebook and Instagram owner Meta in December, saying the company failed to protect young users from exposure to child sexual abuse material and allowed adults to solicit explicit imagery from them.
In a July 2020 document titled “Child Safety — State of Play (7/20),” Meta listed “immediate product vulnerabilities” that could harm children, including the difficulty reporting disappearing videos and confirmed that safeguards available on Facebook were not always present on Instagram.
The report’s author called the reasoning “less than compelling” and said Meta sacrificed children’s safety for a “big growth bet.” In March 2021, though, Instagram announced it was restricting people over 19 from messaging minors.
Meta said it uses sophisticated technology, hires child safety experts, reports content to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, and shares information and tools with other companies and law enforcement, including state attorneys general, to help root out predators.
New Mexico’s complaint follows the lawsuit filed in October by 33 states that claim Meta is harming young people and contributing to the youth mental health crisis by knowingly and deliberately designing features on Instagram and Facebook that addict children to its platforms.
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