In a ruling last week, a judge ordered Meta – the company that owns Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp – to pay New Mexico an additional $567 million. That brings the total to $942 million the company is to pay New Mexico for exposing children to sexual exploitation and lying to parents and policymakers about the dangers of its platforms. In addition to the financial award, the Court also ordered extensive reforms to all of Meta’s products.
KUNM spoke with Zach St. Louis, reporter and producer for the KCRW podcast “Question Everything” about the New Mexico sting operation that prompted the ruling.
KUNM: I think it's good to start with your reporter's warning that we heard at the beginning of the podcast. Let's hear that.
ROBYN SEMIEN: To understand how this victory came about, you got to go down into the guts of the topic: child sexual exploitation and assault. I promise no graphic descriptions of the images that accompany this work. Still, for the topic alone, this is a warning.
KUNM: How did we get to this place where Meta--the owner of Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp--is exposing children to sexual exploitation and lying to parents and policymakers about the dangers of its platforms?
ZACH ST. LOUIS: Yeah. So the voice you just heard was Robyn Semien, my colleague on “Question Everything,” and she and I spoke to officers in the New Mexico Department of Justice. There's a division called ICAC, which stands for the Internet Crimes Against Children Division. There are ICAC units in Department of Justices and states around the country, and they all work together. And we heard from them directly that on Meta's platform -- specifically on Instagram and Facebook--they track a lot of predators who contact children in various ways on those apps to get them to send nude photos, to send nude photos of themselves to the kids, to get kids to meet up with them in person, and these apps have become places where kids are connected with groomers and connected with predators in really high rates in the past. And that is what formed the basis of the attorney general's lawsuit.
KUNM: It seems that this is an example of tech giants being so big that when they're doing something that we don't want them to do, or in this case, things that are, if not illegal, then enabling illegal activity, that there's no apparent recourse.
ST. LOUIS: Yeah, I think that's exactly right. And you know, we spoke to the Attorney General of New Mexico as well, Attorney General Torres, and he said as much that he would like to see legislation get passed in the New Mexico State House. He would like to see legislation get passed in states around the country.
KUNM:So, what did New Mexico decide to do when they found themselves in the position that so many other individuals and institutions have found themselves in that they just feel like there's no way that they can get these tech giants to even engage?
ST. LOUIS: Yeah. So this was a big project that Raúl Torrez, the Attorney General, wanted to take on pretty soon after he assumed office. And his response was to try and prove that Meta's apps were responsible for connecting kids to predators. And the way that they did that was by organizing these undercover operations, where they basically created accounts of fake children in New Mexico. You had a normal profile of a seventh-grade girl posting photos of, you know, their travel softball league and photos of losing a baby tooth, and used those accounts to show just how many inbound requests they got from unconnected adults--largely men from around the world--asking to engage in conversations with these children, and they used that evidence as the basis for this lawsuit.
KUNM: Let's hear a clip from the podcast.
ROBYN SEMIEN: [Undercover officers] registered her on Facebook as an adult, because registering her as 13 would have restricted the account. He wanted her profile visible to everyone. To set her birthday, all he had to do was type in a date. On Facebook, there's no formal age verification. Age verification is one of the main things New Mexico wants Meta to change, since right now it's just the honor system, and kids can easily get around it.
KUNM: So, Zach, you described how the posts were quite innocuous, nevertheless attracted quite a few sexual predators.
ST. LOUIS: Yeah, I mean, these accounts were getting inbound requests from unconnected adults asking them to send nude photos, sometimes receiving nude photos themselves, saying, you know, “Would you be my sugar baby? I'll give you X amount of money per week to do that.” And that was happening over and over and over again. One account in particular was account of a little girl named Isabee — that's the profile name that they gave her — was receiving hundreds of friend requests a day from unconnected men. And the account eventually maxed out the number of friends it was allowed to have, and it was in the thousands.
RAÚL TORREZ: This is the moment where I was like, “Oh, wow, her growth was so rapid in terms of followers and friend requests and things like that. There's a flood of inbound friend requests, mostly from men, unknown men.”
ST. LOUIS: So what he did was kind of -- Raúl Torrez -- he led the charge of methodically running these undercover operations that are run routinely by his office, but usually with for the purposes of tracking down and arresting one particular predator. He had the idea of “What if we gathered a bunch of this evidence about some of these accounts to show that it's not just the predators that we're going after, but to show that Meta's platforms are actually enabling this as a way to go after the platform itself?”
KUNM: So what was the state of New Mexico's initial response?
ST. LOUIS: They reported the account to Meta. And Meta said that they found no issues with the accounts, and the accounts of the predators were allowed to stay operational, basically. But what they did do is shut down New Mexico's officers’ undercover accounts, because those undercover accounts are against Meta's policy. They don't allow law enforcement to operate undercover accounts on their platforms, and so those accounts were shut down by the company.
ROBYN SEMIEN: What's more, Meta started recommending reels of explicit content of teen girls, and then AG Torres explained Facebook starts sending her information…
TORREZ: …About how she could continue to grow her following and monetize the account…. A normal human being would have looked at those pictures and thought, “Huh, why would a 12-year-old girl showing images of losing a baby tooth and being on a travel volleyball team suddenly have a massive increase in the number of followers? What in What is What is going on, right?” Like that that was the first moment for me when it crossed from, “I think there might be an issue here” to, “Oh, there is a very, very serious problem inside of this company and on these platforms.”
KUNM: So that's what prompted the lawsuit.
ST. LOUIS: Yes.
KUNM: Is there any way in which this particular suit was different from some previous lawsuits filed against Meta about explicit content and that sort of misuse of the platform?
ST. LOUIS: So basically, lawsuits like this one, they have trouble going forward because the tech companies are generally protected from any of the content that's posted on the websites by their users. So like if you or I post something on each other's Facebook or Instagram, the company isn't responsible for that. You and I are responsible for that only, and that's how the law protects these companies. So, in this case, what they tried to something different. They tried a different legal strategy and to say that it's not about the content that's the problem. It's not what people are posting. It is the way that the platforms are algorithmically connecting adults to kids. It is in the design of the product. That's the problem. And by doing that, they're allowed to bring Meta to court, and that's what sets the trial apart.
KUNM: So that was in 2023. It's been 3 years. In the meantime, they were continuing the sting operation. There was another fake account that was set up, I believe Daisy.
ST. LOUIS: Daisy Roenhorse, yeah.
KUNM: Let's play a clip from that part of the podcast.
ROBYN SEMIEN: Daisy was a 13-year-old girl living in New Mexico. To make the account look more real, fake account Daisy had a fake mother who had her own account.
RAÚL TORREZ: And within, I think, a couple of months, we had enough information and enough communication from potentially hands-on offenders that we set up a sting operation in Gallup, New Mexico, at a motel there. We had three individuals show up thinking that they were going to have sex with an underage girl, and they were arrested and taken into custody. But what we then figured out, and this was the really shocking part, two of the three people that we took into custody had already been flagged inside of Meta as having previously inappropriate contact with kids, and they were still on the platform.
ROBYN SEMIEN: One of these men had been flagged 22 times by Meta's own tool for detecting bullying and harassment. And in addition to trying to have sex with Daisy Roenhorse, a supposed minor, had made a death threat to her. But at the time of his arrest, his account was still live. One of the other men convicted in connection with Daisy Roenhorse was a twice-convicted sex offender who'd been banned by Meta back in 2021, but who was back online again, detected and flagged by Meta as a threat. His account also was still active at the time of his arrest.
KUNM: And so that led to the ruling along with, as you describe, the algorithmic aspect where the platform's structure and design was not just making these types of interactions possible, but in fact making them more likely.
ST. LOUIS: Yeah, that's exactly right, and that is exactly what the state of New Mexico alleged in their complaint.
KUNM: So like, where are we standing right now, and what's next?
ST. LOUIS: What's next in the short term is that Meta has said that they're going to appeal, and so that appeals process has to play out. So it's going to go to an appellate court, another judge is going to have to weigh in to see if this judge's order can hold up. And if that all happens, and another judge says that, “Yes, this is okay what this judge has ordered,” then at that point this order will go into effect, and Meta will have to pay the money that they have to pay and start making the changes in New Mexico that the judge has ordered.
KUNM: It seems like for the New Mexico Attorney General, there's still quite a few questions. Let's hear a clip on that.
RAÚL TORREZ: If we get the judge to order them to do what we've asked and build a safer product, and they build a safer product in New Mexico and they turn that on, what are they going to say in the other 49 states? What are they going to say to every other country in the world? If they can build it here, there will be enormous pressure for them to turn on the New Mexico solution globally. So we're always back with them -- this is not an ethical decision, it is not a moral decision -- they don't want to build it because it will cost them money.
ST. LOUIS: I mean, I think that sums it up really well. You know, this New Mexico case, it's the first one, but there are 41 other states that have very similar lawsuits pending against Meta right now. There's one being heard in Tennessee at this moment. And so what the attorney general is saying is, “We're first and, yes, New Mexico might be a small place, and they think they can stand up to us. But when the all the dominoes start to fall, it's going to be a state after state after state. At a certain point, it's going to really impact Meta's bottom line, and they're going to have to make some really serious changes if they want to keep operating legally in this country.”
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