Young teen girls immediately hit with explosion of sexually explicit messages and photos when they sign up for social media

After seeing how truly terrible social media is for young teen girls — and the level of abuse they endure from strangers who want to groom them and worse — Raul Torrez felt there was only one way to fix things: by dragging executives from Meta into court to hold them accountable.“There needs to be a reexamination of the algorithmic features that serve predators the kinds of vulnerable children that we know are currently on the platforms,” Torrez, the Attorney General of New Mexico, told me.Pushed by Torrez, the state of New Mexico is currently in the middle of a courtroom trial that accuses Mark Zuckerberg’s companies — including Instagram, Facebook and What’s App — of exposing kids to the “twin dangers of sexual exploitation and mental health harm” through messages, “sextortion” schemes and human trafficking.According to explosive documents that were unsealed on the eve of the landmark jury trial, a researcher at Meta warned warned top brass that there could be as many as 500,000 daily instances of online sexual exploitation on the company’s social media platforms.One ex-Meta executive, Arturo Béjar, caused major waves with his testimony in the case.“The product is very good at connecting people with interests, and if your interest is little girls, it will be really good at connecting you with little girls,” he testified.Béjar alleged that his own underage daughter was bombarded by predators sending messages and nude photos.“I was with her when she created the account,” Béjar said.

“I didn’t know that was going to bring predators to her door, people who attacked her to her door, people who would ask her to sell nude photos of herself when she was a teenager to her door.”Torrez and his team saw first-hand what can happen when they set up a decoy account, posing as a 13-year-old girl.The “teen” was quickly bombarded by explicit photos and propositions from would-be predators.“What we saw was an explosion — fir...