Predators, Perverts, Paedophiles: And all that Sleaze on Social Media
- 2 days ago
- 8 min read
Shaken and Stirred: Two recent verdicts in New Mexico and Los Angeles exposes the sleazy side of social media: Why would sections of social media encourage, or turn a blind eye to pornographic content being selectively distributed on the platform, or to children interacting with adult predators and, paedophiles?
By Ajith Pillai in Chennai
This March, not April, has been the cruellest month for Meta, Google, and other social media platforms. Two verdicts—one in New Mexico on March 24 against Meta, and another in Los Angeles on March 25 against both Meta and YouTube (owned by Google)—have left Mark Zuckerberg & Co. shaken and stirred.
In New Mexico, a jury found that Meta violated state law by misleading users about the safety of Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp, and by enabling child exploitation on these platforms. The state attorney general had filed the lawsuit against the company, and the court ordered Meta to pay $375 million in civil penalties.
A day after the New Mexico verdict, a Los Angeles jury found Meta and Google guilty of “intentionally designing” their platforms to be addictive, causing harm to 20-year-old Kaley’s mental health since childhood. The jury ordered Meta to pay $4.2 million and Google $1.8 million in damages to Kaley.
The damages and penalties imposed are hardly a concern for these cash-rich companies. The market capitalisation of Google and its parent company, Alphabet, is estimated at roughly $1.97 trillion to $2.25 trillion, while Meta is valued at about $1.38 trillion to $1.83 trillion.
However, what is worrying for Meta, Google, and other companies in the social media space is the following:
Both verdicts effectively circumvented Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act of 1996, the American law that protects Facebook and other online platforms from liability for content posted by users.
Instead of focusing on user-generated content, both cases scrutinised the design and architecture of the platforms themselves—specifically, how these designs facilitate misuse by users, including the sexual exploitation of underage children. The plaintiffs also argued that the algorithms used by these platforms do not adequately protect children from predatory and perverted adults and may even encourage such activity by connecting children to them.
With 1,600 cases currently pending against Meta in U.S. courts, including 40 brought by state attorneys general, there are growing fears of litigious days ahead for social media companies.
To stay focused, this report will concentrate on the New Mexico case, which illustrates how Facebook and Instagram operate in certain circumstances. The redacted version of the petition filed by state attorney general Raul Torrez neatly captures the broader contours of the investigators’ conclusions.
To quote: “Meta’s platforms Facebook and Instagram are a breeding ground for predators who target children for human trafficking, the distribution of sexual images, grooming, and solicitation. Teens and pre-teens can easily register for unrestricted accounts because of a lack of age verification. When they do, Meta directs harmful and inappropriate material at them. It allows unconnected adults to have unfettered access to them, which those adults use for grooming and solicitation…
“And Meta’s platforms do this even though Meta has the capability of both determining that these users are minors, and providing warnings or other protections against material that is not only harmful to minors, but poses substantial dangers of solicitation and trafficking. For years, Meta has been on notice from both external and internal sources of the sexual exploitation dangers its platforms present for children, but has nonetheless failed to stem the tide of damaging sexual material and sexual propositions delivered to children. In short, Meta has allowed Facebook and Instagram to become a marketplace for predators in search of children upon whom to prey.”
Why would Facebook encourage, or turn a blind eye to, pornographic content being selectively distributed on the platform, or to children interacting with adult predators?
The answer lies in user numbers and the amount of time they spend on the platform. The more users Facebook has, and the longer they remain engaged, the higher its advertising revenue.
Much like a TV channel, the more viewers it has and the longer they stay tuned during prime time, the more attractive it becomes for advertisers. Meta and its platforms—including Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, Messenger, and Threads—reportedly have 3.5 billion daily users. Increasing these numbers and keeping users engaged for as long as possible remains the company’s primary goal.
To add new users, reportedly, and as is apparent by the above cases, Meta has been targeting teenagers.
With no credible age screening system, kids can sign up. Having a younger user base attracts advertising targeted at youth for clothing, video games, colas and soft drinks.
Also, paedophiles engaging with kids are also potential users who will engage with the platform for longer periods of time.
Interestingly, an internal audit at Meta, cited by the Atlantic Monthly, found that in June 2023, on a single day, 238,000 messages were sent from adults to teenagers they weren’t already connected to on the platform. So, engagement improves with children in the mix.
The New Mexico petition underlines this: “Meta profits from its exposure of young users to harmful material and its refusal to implement design features that would protect children from sexual exploitation and mental health harm. It does so not by charging children for accessing its platforms, but, instead, by monetising, in the form of targeted advertising, the data that Meta gathers about its young users and their usage.”
The petition cites Meta’s annual report to illustrate how determined the company is to attract new users and keep existing users engaged: “If we fail to retain existing users or add new users, or, if our users decrease their level of engagement with our products, our revenue, financial results, and business may be significantly harmed.”
Among the targeted group of new users are children who are impulsive, curious about sex, and seeking social affirmation, connection, rewards, and appreciation. Consequently, the algorithms are designed to push content that keeps them engaged and hooked.
It must be noted that not everyone on social media has sexual content pushed at them. An underage child interested in sports, music, or cinema will largely be served content that reflects those interests.
However, the fact that Raul Torrez found in internal Meta documents that half a million children in the English-speaking market receive inappropriate sexual content every day is telling.
Moreover, 27 per cent of the followers of ‘groomers’ (adults who befriend and seduce children) recommended by the algorithm, were children.
But why should teenagers turn to Meta’s platforms for explicit content when so many free porn sites exist?
Perhaps because it feels easier—and less suspicious—to spend time on a platform their parents use than to visit a site explicitly devoted to adult content.
An investigation by law-enforcement officials in New Mexico, cited in the petition, details how Meta—through Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp—has facilitated human trafficking and the distribution of Child Sexual Abuse Material (CSAM), particularly via accounts belonging to children, and allowed CSAM to proliferate across its platforms. The investigation highlights that:
Meta has proactively served and directed children to a stream of egregious, sexually explicit images through recommended users and posts—even when the child has expressed no interest in such content.
It has enabled adults to find, message, and groom minors, soliciting them to sell pictures or participate in pornographic videos.
It has fostered un-moderated user groups devoted to, or facilitating, the Commercial Sexual Exploitation of Children (CSEC).
It has allowed users to search for, like, share, and sell a massive volume of CSAM.
According to the petition, “Meta’s conduct is not that of a publisher, simply presenting content created by others. Instead, Meta’s algorithms operate to “search and disseminate” sexually exploitative and explicit materials and to create its own social network of users looking to buy and sell the images and the children who are its casualties and its currency.”
Investigators found numerous Instagram accounts offering links to purchase or trade child pornography or child sex, with instructions to move the conversations offline—typically to WhatsApp or Telegram (both platforms that are fully encrypted)—to complete the transactions.
A search for “All New Kids Links Available” on Instagram, for example, yielded dozens of options for CSAM.
Notably, “cheese pizza” is used as a code term for child pornography. Thus, a typical example would be an account such as “cheesepizza_link988” posting the message “ALL NEW KIDS LINKS AVAILABLE.”
(Significantly, the term, ‘pizza’, according to media reports, has allegedly been used several times in the Epstein Files.)
Facebook and Instagram accounts are also known to advertise and facilitate the operation of commercial sex enterprises, offering pornography or advertising video call services. Some of these find mention in the petition—paidtree_VIDEO CALL SERVICE; mallu_kerala_girl videocall_: free_vide_call_service1902 SAXI FUCKING SONAM.
As part of their investigations, officers in New Mexico created a Facebook profile for “Rosalind Cereceres,” a 40-year-old fictional “bad mother” to a 13-year-old chat persona, Issa Bee. The profile suggested that the mother, allegedly from Colombia, wished to traffic her daughter, whose picture was also posted.
Within three days of establishing the profile, Cereceres’ account reached Facebook’s maximum limit of 5,000 friends and attracted more than 3,000 followers. The messages sent to and from this fictitious account are detailed in the petition. In total, the investigators studied six fictional examples.
Meta’s response to these fictional examples has been that they were ethically compromised and that this was not the experience of actual users. However, Attorney General Raul Torrez responded to this in an interview with John Ward on his podcast ‘The Rip Current’.
Said Torrez: “The response from Meta is not dissimilar to the kind of response I have had as a prosecutor. Whenever bad guys are caught, the tried-and-true method is to blame law enforcement. So, when Meta raised questions about our investigation, we decided to do a proper criminal investigation and ended up with three men who thought they were communicating with children and showed up at a hotel to try to have sex with those children and found themselves in handcuffs. So, we did not do anything that is not done in an undercover investigation except that we highlighted the fact that this product facilitated this connection…”
Meta has said it will appeal the New Mexico verdict. If it does not get relief, the company—and other social media platforms—could be overwhelmed by legal cases that might cripple their operations.
Ajith Pillai has done a series of well-researched articles on AI and its repercussion, positive and negative, in independentink.in
Readers can access these articles in the links below.
Ajith Pillai is member, Editorial College, senior editor and writer, independentink.in. A seasoned journalist working in the profession for 40 years, he has reported out of Delhi, Mumbai, Chennai, Andhra Pradesh and Kashmir on a broad spectrum of events related to politics, crime, conflict and social change. He has worked with leading publications, including The Sunday Observer, Indian Post, Pioneer, The Week and India Today, where he headed the Chennai bureau. He was part of the team led by Editor Vinod Mehta that launched Outlook magazine and headed its current affairs section till 2012. Under his watch, Outlook broke several stories that attracted national attention and questioned the government of the day. He has written two books—'Off the Record: Untold Stories from a Reporter’s Diary,’ and a novel, ‘Junkland Journeys’. He is currently working on ‘Obedient Editor’, a satirical novel on the life and times of a ‘compromised’ journalist.