In a significant legal move to address online threats to minors, New Mexico’s Democratic Attorney General Raúl Torrez has taken decisive action against tech giant Meta Platforms, Inc., its CEO Mark Zuckerberg, and associated entities, such as Instagram, LLC, and Facebook Holdings, LLC.
The lawsuit, submitted on Thursday, marks a strong initiative to fight the exploitation of children on social media platforms.
“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 said in a statement.
“As a career prosecutor who specialized in internet crimes against children, I am committed to using every available tool to put an end to these horrific practices and I will hold companies — and their executives — accountable whenever they put profits ahead of children’s safety,” he added.
Over the last few months, the New Mexico Attorney General’s Office initiated an undercover operation, portraying individuals under the age of 14 on Meta’s platforms. This covert operation revealed troubling results, uncovering that:
Proactively served and directed the underage users a stream of egregious, sexually explicit images — even when