Meta researcher warned of 500K child exploitation cases daily on Facebook and Instagram platforms
A researcher for Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, warned executives at the tech giant that there may be upward of 500,000 cases of sexual exploitation of minors per day on the social media platforms.
Meta will be in court Monday as opening arguments begin in a case brought by New Mexico Attorney General Raul Torrez against the social media company, which he has accused of exposing children to "sexual exploitation and mental health harm" through interactions on the platform.
In a court filing obtained by FOX Business, attorneys for the state of New Mexico noted that Malia Andrus, who worked in child safety roles at Meta from 2017 to 2024, said in an internal email included in court filings that sexually inappropriate messages were sent to "~500k victims per DAY in English markets only."
"We expect the true situation is worse," Andrus added in an email from June 2020 included in the court records. The emails were first reported by the New York Post.
Andrus said that the large number of users on the Facebook and Instagram platforms give predators the ability to target children to an extent that wasn't possible prior to the advent of social media.
"I just think, nowhere in the history of humanity could you have a secret conversation with 1000 people," Andrus wrote. "I'm actually scared of the ramifications here."
She also noted issues with age verification on the platform, writing in an email that it's a "chicken and egg problem: our proactive detection and metrics use age-gating, so if the age prediction is wrong, we don't find them. However, our investigators have given feedback that almost every time they encounter an age liar on IG (in a child safety context) the age prediction is incorrect (aligns with the age they falsely claim to be.)"
"The number discussed in this 2020 email exchange does not refer to individual victims or incidents of child exploitation," a Meta spokesperson told FOX Business. "The measurement technology we used at the time used an overly wide and cautious set of criteria, and as a result counted many benign interactions. This number significantly reduced after we refined and improved our measurement technology."
Meta's spokesperson added, "Since 2020, we’ve introduced a range of new measures to help reduce potential grooming and inappropriate interactions with children - including preventing adults from starting private chats with teens they’re not connected to, and using improved behavioral signals to identify potentially suspicious actors and preventing them from finding and following teens."
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The company said that it takes a "comprehensive approach to ensuring teens have age-appropriate experiences on Meta platforms. This includes, for example, using technology to estimate someone's age based on their activity, allowing people to report accounts they think may be underage."
"If we think someone may be misrepresenting their age or they are trying to change their age in a way that will impact the protections we enable, providing the option to use facial age estimation technology from Yoti or providing an ID," Meta added. "These steps help us provide teens with safer experiences online, like the automatic protections offered by Instagram Teen Accounts."
The New Mexico case is just one of those facing Meta, which is also facing a case in California state court that begins Monday regarding whether Instagram harmed a woman's mental health, fueling her depression and suicidal health.
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg is expected to testify during the California trial, which the judge aims to conclude by the end of March.
The case was also brought against Alphabet's Google, which is the parent company of YouTube.
Google spokesperson José Castañeda told FOX Business that the allegations against YouTube are "simply not true."
"Providing young people with a safer, healthier experience has always been core to our work," he said.
Other social media platforms, including TikTok and Snap, were originally part of the suit, though they settled with the plaintiff before the trial.
Lawyers for the woman who brought the suit, a 20-year-old identified as K.G.M., aim to show that the social media companies were negligent in designing the apps and failed to warn the public about the risk. The jury may consider awarding her damages for pain and suffering and could also impose punitive damages.
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The companies plan to point to other factors in the young woman's life as driving her mental health issues, while also outlining their work to protect young people on the platform and distancing themselves from users who upload harmful content.
Reuters contributed to this report.