According to the New Mexico lawsuit, Snapchat has become a prime platform for online predators who use “sextortion” to trick minors into sending explicit images or videos of themselves and then use the explicit content to blackmail them.
Attorney General Raul Torrez announced Thursday that he had filed legal action against Snapchat's parent company, Snap, following a months-long investigation.
Trez alleged that Snapchat, a photo-sharing app that is hugely popular among teenage and young users and known for its disappearing messages after 24 hours, has policies and design features that make it easy to share and distribute child sexual exploitation material.
“Snap deceives users into thinking that photos and videos sent to its platform will disappear, yet criminals are able to capture this content forever, creating a virtual yearbook of child sexual images that can be traded, sold and stored indefinitely,” Torres said in a statement.
The New Mexico Department of Justice investigation used a decoy Snapchat account posing as a 14-year-old girl named “Heather” who exchanged messages with an account called “child.rape” and other accounts with explicit names.
Investigators also found 10,000 records related to Snapchat and child sexual abuse content on the dark web site, and said Snapchat was “by far the largest source of images and videos of any dark web site investigated.”
The Post has reached out to Snap for comment.
Last December, the state of New Mexico filed a lawsuit against Meta Platforms, alleging that the company's social media networks, Facebook and Instagram, failed to protect underage users from adult sexual content and disturbing messages from alleged child abusers, including “photos and videos of genitalia” and six-figure offers to appear in pornographic films.
State investigators used a similar tactic in their investigation of Meta, creating test accounts for four fictitious children on a social media site owned by Meta using AI-generated photos that purportedly depicted children under the age of 14.
“Meta has allowed Facebook and Instagram to become marketplaces for predators looking to prey on children,” the lawsuit said, accusing the tech giant founded by Mark Zuckerberg of engaging in “unacceptable” and “illegal” conduct.
The company claims it goes to great lengths to protect young users from harm.
“We use advanced technology, employ child safety experts, report content to the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children, and share information and tools with other companies and law enforcement, including state attorneys general, to root out predators,” Mehta said in a statement.
In July, Meta said it had taken down approximately 63,000 Nigerian Instagram accounts that were operating a “sex blackmail” scam targeting primarily adult men and some children in the United States.
Among those 63,000 accounts, Mehta said he had identified a network of 2,500 accounts. The attack was run by a group of 20 people who “primarily targeted adult males in the United States, using fake accounts to hide their identities,” the report said.
Additional reporting by Thomas Barrabi and Taylor Herzlich
