Almost every day of my life it seems I have some new reason to think I'm the best dad in the world for keeping my kids off of Facebook and Instagram — and today is another one of those days.
Investigators in New Mexico created a fake account for a seventh-grade girl named "Issa Bee," complete with AI-generated photos of her. Issa quickly attracted "thousands of adult followers who deluged her with both invitations to join private chat groups and sex content featuring both children and adults," according to the Wall Street Journal.
With allegedly no effective safeguards in place to prevent child exploitation, this week New Mexico Attorney General Raul Torrez filed suit against Meta — the parent company of both social media platforms — alleging that the company "has allowed Facebook and Instagram to become a marketplace for predators in search of children upon whom to prey."
The suit also holds founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg "personally responsible" for the decisions that created platforms that have "enabled dozens of adults to find, contact, and press children into providing sexually explicit pictures of themselves or participate in pornographic video."
Among other, equally lurid offenses, including allowing "users to find, share, and sell an enormous volume of child pornography," and serving "underage users a stream of egregious, sexually explicit images — even when the child has expressed no interest in this content."
Meta has developed platforms where children are allowed to opt out of porn. So that's nice, I guess. The part where it appears not to work is maybe not so nice.
Torrez's lawsuit joins a long list of other states fighting similar legal battles against Meta for enabling child predators — 32 states now that New Mexico is on board.
The company released a statement Tuesday that didn't address the New Mexico lawsuit directly while claiming that Meta does what it can to protect young users. "We use sophisticated technology," the statement says, "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, including state attorneys general, to help root out predators."
Uh-huh.
The New Mexico suit quotes a 2017 statement by Facebook founding president Sean Parker:
The thought process that went into building these applications, Facebook being the first of them, ... was all about: 'How do we consume as much of your time and conscious attention as possible?'" "And that means that we need to sort of give you a little dopamine hit every once in a while, because someone liked or commented on a photo or a post or whatever. And that's going to get you to contribute more content, and that's going to get you ... more likes and comments." "It's a social-validation feedback loop ... exactly the kind of thing that a hacker like myself would come up with, because you're exploiting a vulnerability in human psychology. ""The inventors, creators — it's me, it's Mark [Zuckerberg], it's Kevin Systrom on Instagram, it's all of these people — understood this consciously. And we did it anyway.
Teens are most susceptible to those vulnerabilities, as Meta's research showed.
"And we did it anyway," Parker said.
There is, of course, an easy way or two to protect kids from the predators who have made Meta their playground. Parents could use the safety controls on their kids' smartphones to prevent them from installing any social media apps. Meta could refuse to allow children on its platforms. But too many parents are willing to give in to their kids' demands for their own "Instas," perhaps unaware of the platform's issues with child predation.
And Meta willingly giving up young users? A lifelong habit of sharing nearly everything on Meta's data-hoovering servers doesn't establish itself, you know. Zuckerberg's attitude seems to be, "Get'em while they're young."
Which, when you think about it, is itself a kind of child predation.
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