New Mexico’s Attorney General, Raúl Torrez, has filed a lawsuit. In the suit, “Torrez claims that 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 preteens 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. Meta’s conduct is not only unacceptable; it is unlawful. This action seeks to force Meta to institute protections for children because it refuses to do so voluntarily.
We know that META can identify and filter, block, shadowban, and cancel anything it chooses, demonstrating a willingness to flag, segregate, quarantine, and even take down content at will. That is part of what is intriguing about the story. Torrez office and New Mexico (NM) Law enforcement have been investigating this for some time and “has asked a judge to prevent Meta from removing evidence of alleged child sexual exploitation from Facebook and Instagram, which it says is related to legal action it is taking against the company.”
Meta has said it can and will do what they should have done to prevent the need for any investigation in the first place, but the NM AG needs the evidence and wants a judge to tell Meta they’d best not delete or destroy it or make it inaccessible.
In the new court papers, Torrez said that one day after his office filed the lawsuit, Meta deactivated the accounts set up and used by investigators.
This was “even though the accounts at issue had operated for months without action by Meta, and even though investigators had previously reported illicit and unlawful content to Meta through its reporting channels”, the document states.
It adds: “Meta’s disabling of these accounts prevents the state from continuing its investigation into Meta’s activities. [The state] no longer had access to data within those accounts.”
We can hear the sound of the pants-zipper being pulled back up, but we do not see it happen and are too late to witness any wrongdoing.
At the same time, the story begs other questions. New Mexico is a blue state. The Governor is very liberal. The AG is a Democrat. Without looking, we can suggest that the public schools are all-in on the gender-grooming project that directs (to borrow from the AG’s lawsuit) “harmful and inappropriate material at them, [and] allows unconnected adults to have unfettered access to them, which those adults use for grooming and solicitation.”
Public schools are the preferred choice of pedophiles, given the unfettered access to victims, with significantly more cases of abuse than any other occupation, with the possible exception of anyone in the Academy of Motion Picture Arts or politics.
The legal definition of grooming in the lawsuit applies to the activity in public schools. Those legally defined as children have access to or are allowed to view explicit material, including images (cartoons count), normalizing the exposure and sexualization, complete with the mental health complications that come from exposing those with little or no concept or capability to conceptualize or understand it.
The usual suspects are operating freely in the state, talking about banned books anyone can order on Amazon right now and have delivered in printed form in a day or two or received electronically in seconds. As far as I can tell, the public school grooming culture is alive and well but not of concern to the Attorney General.
To be clear, what the NM AG is dealing with (in many cases) is pictures of naked minors being sexually exploited en masse and without restriction on META’s platforms, and that needs to be stopped, but then so shouldn’t the significant human and child trafficking that current open-borders policy has facilitated.
In other words, we appreciate the interest – and who doesn’t love to see META sued – but some consistency would be nice.
Stop exploiting children, even when it dovetails with your party’s culture war politics.