Social networks, hundreds of thousands of children are bullied every day

Social networks hide a lot of traps for users. Minors are the most exposed. Meta estimates that approximately 100,000 children who use Facebook and Instagram experience daily online sexual harassment, including through "images of the genital organs of adults", according to the company's internal documents, The Guardian reports. The court filing made public includes several allegations against the company, based on information received by the New Mexico attorney general's office from Meta employee presentations and communications between employees. The documents describe an incident in 2020 when the 12-year-old daughter of an Apple executive was approached via IG Direct (Instagram direct Messenger), Instagram's messaging product. "This is the kind of thing that annoys Apple to the point of threatening to pull us from the App Store," fumed a Meta employee, according to the documents. A senior Meta employee described how his own daughter was approached via Instagram in testimony before the US Congress late last year. His efforts to resolve the issue were ignored, he said. The filing is the latest in a lawsuit filed by the New Mexico attorney general's office on Dec. 5, which alleges that Meta's social networks have become marketplaces for child predators. Raúl Torrez, the state's attorney general, accused Meta of allowing adults to find, send messages to children and engage in sexual grooming. The company denied the claims in the lawsuit, stating: "They mischaracterize our work using selective quotes and specially selected documents." Meta issued a statement in response: "We want teens to have safe, age-appropriate experiences online, and we have over 30 tools to support them and their parents. We've spent a decade working on these issues and hiring people who have dedicated their careers to keeping young people safe and supporting them online." A 2021 internal presentation on child safety was also mentioned in the lawsuit. One slide stated that Meta is "underestimated in terms of the sexualization of minors on IG, notable in sexualized comments on content posted by minors." The complaint also highlights Meta employees' concerns about children's safety. In an internal Meta chat in July 2020, an employee asked, "What specifically do we do about sexual grooming (something I just heard happens a lot on TikTok)?" According to the complaint, he received an answer: "Somewhere between zero and negligible". The New Mexico lawsuit follows a Guardian investigation in April that uncovered how Meta was failing to report or detect the use of its platforms for child trafficking. The investigation also revealed how Messenger, Facebook's private messaging service, is being used as a platform for traffickers to communicate to buy and sell children.