During the past several months, the New Mexico Attorney General’s Office launched an undercover operation posing as minors under 14 on Meta’s platforms. This sting operation led to disturbing findings, where it was discovered that:
- Proactively served and directed to underage users a stream of egregious, sexually explicit images — even when the child has expressed no interest in this content.
- Enabled dozens of adults to find, contact, and press children into providing sexually explicit pictures of themselves or participate in pornographic videos.
- Recommended that the children join unmoderated Facebook groups devoted to facilitating commercial sex.
- Allowed Facebook and Instagram users to find, share, and sell an enormous volume of child pornography.
- Allowed a fictitious mother to offer her 13-year-old daughter for sale to sex traffickers and to create a professional page to allow her daughter to share revenue from advertising.
The Attorney General’s office has released selectively redacted graphic content from their investigation, showing only those parts necessary to convey the seriousness of the situation while ensuring that the privacy and dignity of victims are fully respected.
Recent findings have exposed a network of Instagram accounts purportedly offering illicit means to acquire or exchange Child Sexual Abuse Material (CSAM) and Child Sexual Exploitation Content (CSEC).
Investigations reveal that these accounts provide instructions to move conversations to offline mediums such as WhatsApp or Telegram, platforms that offer end-to-end encryption and are beyond the reach of routine monitoring.
According to the complaint, “A search for ‘All New Kids Links Available’ on Instagram, for example, yielded dozens of options for CSAM. Notably, ‘cheese pizza,’ with its shared initials, is known to be a proxy for child pornography.”
No comments:
Post a Comment