Meta sued after teen boys' suicides, families claim tech giant ignored 'sextortion' schemes
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Two families filed a wrongful death lawsuit against Meta over their sons’ suicides, arguing that the tech giant failed to add proper safeguards to prevent sextortion schemes targeting teenagers on Instagram.
Tricia Maciejewski, of Pennsylvania, and Rosalind and Mark Downey, of Scotland, filed a lawsuit on Wednesday, saying their sons fell for the same sextortion scheme, in which a stranger messages a teenager on social media pretending to be a romantic interest before soliciting nude photos. The stranger then threatens to share the images with friends and family unless the victim shares more images or sends money.
Meta, which owns Instagram and Facebook, is facing at least four other sextortion-related lawsuits that claim Instagram ignored complaints about the scheme for years.
The families in the latest lawsuit allege their sons' deaths "were the foreseeable result of Meta’s design decisions and repeated refusals to implement affordable, available, and identified safety features due to Meta’s prioritization of engagement over user safety."
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Maciejewski’s 13-year-old son, Levi, died by suicide in 2024, and the Downeys’ 16-year-old son, Murray, took his life in 2023. Both teenage boys were victims to sextortion schemes on Instagram.
The families claim that Meta knew its recommendation system was connecting children with potential predators and that the company failed to adequately address the issue.
The plaintiffs cited a 2022 internal audit that found Instagram’s "Accounts You May Follow" tool suggested 1.4 million accounts to teenage users in a single day that were potentially engaging in inappropriate interactions with minors.
Meta safety researchers recommended in 2019 that the company default all teenage accounts into private settings, but the company declined to do this a year later, according to the lawsuit.
In 2021, Meta announced new restrictions on direct messaging between teenagers and adults that they do not follow, but the lawsuit argues the changes were faulty and only applied to new teenage accounts rather than representing a "true default setting."
The families said Meta did not apply full "private-by-default" settings and other safeguards for teenage accounts until late last year, after the deaths of their children.
"Meta’s secret is out. For years, Meta knew Instagram was a hunting ground for predators, yet chose to protect engagement metrics over children’s lives," Matthew Bergman, founding attorney of the Social Media Victims Law Center, which is representing the families, said in a statement.
"That conscious decision to connect random strangers to children has cost families their sons and daughters, turning Instagram into the epicenter of sextortion‑related youth suicides," he continued. "Had they chosen to follow their own internal recommendations they could have saved countless lives."
The company on Wednesday did not directly address the claims in the lawsuit but stressed that it was working to stop sextortion scammers.
"Sextortion is a horrific crime," a company spokesperson said in a statement. "We support law enforcement to prosecute the criminals behind it, and we continue to fight them on our apps on multiple fronts."
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"We work to prevent accounts showing suspicious behavior from following teens and avoid recommending teens to them," the statement added. "We also take other precautionary steps, like blurring potentially sensitive images sent in DMs and reminding teens of the risks of sharing them, and letting people know when they’re chatting to someone who may be in a different country."
Meta reiterated that it has given teenagers under 16 private accounts at sign-up since 2021, despite the lawsuit arguing that the company did not automatically do so until last year.
Instagram has introduced some changes for teenagers in recent years aimed at curbing sextortion, but the lawsuit argues that the changes came too late and that Instagram should be held responsible for the two teenagers’ suicides.