New Mexico vs. Facebook – Pizza
In a chilling revelation, New Mexico authorities have uncovered a series of communications among sex predators operating within the state, utilizing the seemingly innocuous term “PIZZA” as a code word to obscure their illicit activities.
The Gateway Pundit reported that the New Mexico Democrat Attorney General Raúl Torrez took decisive action against tech giant Meta Platforms, Inc., its CEO Mark Zuckerberg, and associated entities, including Instagram, LLC, and Facebook Holdings, LLC.
Read the New Mexico Court Filing
Below is the Court’s Filing Documents introduction:
I. INTRODUCTION
- Meta and its CEO tell the public that Meta’s social media platforms are safe and
good for kids. The reality is far different. Meta knowingly exposes children to the twin dangers of
sexual exploitation and mental health harm. Meta’s conduct has turned New Mexico children who
are on its platforms into victims. Meta’s motive for doing so is profit. This action seeks to make
social media safer for New Mexico’s children by holding Meta accountable for conduct that
violates the New Mexico Unfair Practices Act and creates a public nuisance. - 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. - Simultaneously with its knowing failure to curb the sexual exploitation of children
on its platforms, Meta targeted the age-based vulnerabilities of children by adopting algorithms
and platform designs that are addictive to young users. Meta knowingly sought to maximize teen
engagement on its platforms. It chose to implement features such as engagement-based feeds,
infinite scroll, push notifications, ephemeral content, and auto play video designed to increase the
amount of time young users spend on its platforms while inhibiting the ability of those users to
self-regulate. Meta’s platforms are the social media equivalent of an addictive drug from which
young users cannot break free. Meta knew that these design features fostered addiction, anxiety,
depression, self-harm, and suicide among teens and preteens. But Meta and its CEO rejected
repeated internal proposals, and external pressures, to implement protections against youth mental
health harm. Further, Meta selected a metric by which it measures conduct violative of its
Community Standards policies that it knows to grossly underreport harmful material on its
platforms, and Meta uses this metric to make misrepresentations about the safety of its platforms
for young users. - 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 monetizing, in
the form of targeted advertising, the data that Meta gathers about its young users and their usage.
Meta’s “targeted” advertising program allows advertisers to direct advertisements to consumers
more precisely than would otherwise be possible using traditional media. This arrangement has
proved particularly lucrative for Meta. The company reported more than $116 billion in revenue
in 2022, and $117 billion the year before. As Meta’s financials confirm, all or substantially all of
this revenue is attributable to advertising and enhanced by its user-data-driven ability to target
advertising. - Meta’s platforms must maintain massive user bases in order to generate its target
revenue. Meta must not only attract new users year over year, but it must ensure that existing users
remain on its platforms. If users leave Facebook or Instagram, if new users refuse to join altogether,
or if these users spend less time on its platforms, Meta’s revenues will suffer as it would have less
private data, and fewer users, to sell. As Meta warns investors in its annual SEC filings, “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.” - Meta’s business model of profit over child safety and business practices of
misrepresenting the amount of dangerous material and conduct to which its platforms expose
children violates New Mexico law. Meta should be held accountable for the harms it has inflicted
on New Mexico’s children and be required to make its platforms as safe for children as the law
requires.